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Guiding Eyes

                   Corky, a yellow Labrador

It's been five years
Since I was paired with this dog
Who, in fact is more than a dog—
She watches for me.

Our twin minds go walking,
And I suspect as we enter the subway
On Lexington
That we're a kind of centaur—
Or maybe two owls
Riding the shoulders of Minerva.
The traffic squalls and plunges
At Columbus Circle,
Seethes down Broadway,
And we step out
Into the blackness
That alarmed Pascal:
The emptiness
Between stars.

I suppose we're scarcely whole
If I think on it—
We walk on a dead branch,
Two moths still attached,
The inert day poised above us,
The walls of the canyon looming.

Did I think on it?

A blessing opens by degrees
And I must walk
Both bodily and ghostly
Down Fifth Avenue,
Increasing my devotion full much
To the postulate of arrival—
To how I love this inexhaustible dog
Who leads me
Past jackhammers
And the police barriers
Of New York.

All day snow falls
On the disorderly crowds,
It clothes Miss Corky
Until her tawny fur
Carries the milky dirt
Of ocean and stone.

The centaur gathers
What passes from our flesh
Into the heart
Of animal faith.

Meanwhile
She guides me home.

Waiting

Is part of something: a blue door opens,
Portuguese fishermen walk from a coffee shop

In Providence, Rhode Island—or Lisbon—
And head for the pier with buckets.

Part of something, they ride the sea:
The Atlantic, part of something.

Mornings on the coast, houses
In fog on the hills, the paint

Like carnival pastels...People believe
The whole world is part of something.

The phone rings...they give it away.
I spoke last night with a friend...He might

One day become your friend, or sometime,
Far off, a friend to your children—

Part of something.  I told him
About the English poet

Who, deserting God, still loved
With clean irony the churches

On country roads...He'd lean his bike
And go inside—not certain of motive

But to wait, because others had waited
In just that place, sitting through the sunset

Beneath the slender windows.

Essay on November

There is at times a small fire
In the brain, partita for violin,
Brier, black stem,
All burning in the quarter notes.
And the hedgerow
Beyond the barn
Calls its starlings in.
Then frost, sere leaves,
A swollen half-moon
Like a drowsy fingertip
Above the apple trees.

At the Summer House

A curtain falls in the midday heat.
Boats swing around at their moorings.

The rain pours first along the shore,
Then advances on a stand of pines

Where it hisses in dry needles.
Lightning circles the lake all afternoon.

I move through the house
Wanting to be carried like a child

Who needs to see all the rooms
Before he sleeps.  And faces

Recollected—stars
On the retinas—

Shimmer as though I'd rubbed my eyes—
My grandfather rowing on a still day,

His young wife with a broad-brimmed hat.
These are bright now,

And then gone, like minnows
Darting in the shallows.