Henri Fantin-Latour, Fairy of the Alps, c. 1885. The Cleveland Museum of Art.
If in the silence of this winter moon,
snow drifting across its stolid face
then falling silently to cover the weedy yard,
the appearance of a rabbit’s
footprints now and a sparrow
shaking flakes from the sagging bows,
I am the faker of memory: you
in imagined poses
who might be coming, saying
please join me
here where it’s always sunny,
and there is no snow.
Where?
If there are
parts making a whole,
a stunning message,
if we could be speaking, falling
back into some understanding,
then loss becomes gain again
and we could live out our old ages
as they might have been.
Everything is impossible.
My shoes don’t fit.
The dance goes on
without me,
but if when I think of movement,
you are still there,
it is then I leave these memories
and imaginings
of a house stacked up with joy.
Forget it.
All houses enter the earth eventually
as did that infant’s body I once sutured,
the child who drowned,
and the man rising from the walk-way
momentarily
as his heart quit.
But clouds now drift across the moon’s face,
snowing has ceased,
and I am back in this chair at the window
no longer dreaming
of our imagined past,
but seeing now the real one,
you dressed for dancing, singing
all those union songs,
treating the depressed and lonely.
How can I treasure what is gone
but in memory,
not the imagined,
only the real, which is of course
the past and alive only here, somewhere
in this tortured mind.
When it is morning
the Christmas lights are extinguished,
trees become trees again,
the celebrations fade to an ending
and the dead rise up, as you do,
for a while at least.
I must rise also and go out now
into the fallen snow,
my prints larger than the rabbit’s.
My neighbor brushes snow
from his hood and fenders,
a young man jogs
awkwardly by,
birds chirp
in the snow-laden trees.
If I had you only for a fleeting hour,
if I could hold you close in that time
and dismiss all stupid fantasy
even as a real clock is ticking my days away.
If only that.
I head in now to my study
to write all this down.
Out the window and through the yard
tall pines block out the bay,
though in the mind
shore waters
are awash in eel grass.
A white fishing boat rests at anchor
a quarter mile out.
There is no music anywhere,
and even the birds are silent.
If we were flesh and blood, if
on the trampled earth
we stood in my failures
and your accomplishments,
then I would draw the curtain
and forget.
Though I have forged a second union
with a lovely woman and her dog
and feel again some youthfulness,
at least the joys of middle age,
I reckon from an old man’s vision
that almost everything has gone away.
Melancholy fool,
all the ifs turn purple as they wilt.
The window holds the present
and promise of a future,
one that I will play no part in.
If only love possessed a power
that could animate
that past,
and if the music
were more than an echo,
that past more than memory,
there would be singing,
dancing away all hours of forgiveness,
into forgetfulness.
Time has come,
and in that coming
day gives way to night bird’s twitter,
snow is swallowed up in darkness,
and I am once again alone
in memory.
You are the reason I existed.
You are gone
and so am I.
