“For My Husband” – Ellen Bryant Voigt

Is it a dream,
the way we huddle over the board,
our fingers touching on the slick button?
The Ouija stammers under so much doubt,
finally reaches L, then O,
pauses under its lettered heaven,
and as it veers toward loss and the long past
that lodges with us, you press toward love,
and the disk stalls
                                   outside
a cry is loosened from the bay,
but you are looking for two swans
on a glass lake, a decade of roses -
oh my lonely, my precious loaf,
can’t we say outloud the parent word,
longing,
                whose sad head
looms over any choice you make.

“The Medium” – Ellen Bryant Voigt

[...]

 

“I was their tether,
the incompleted dead, the stubborn ones,
who will not forestall my own soul’s slow erasure.

After my bones are put on their shelf
there will come the usual solstice,
not pain but the absence of pain,
terrible, unwarranted.
And then the second death:

a stranger will sleep in this bed without dreams;
will wrap himself against the evening’s chill;
will credit the wind with my whispers;
will straighten the portrait again and again
without revelation;
hearing nothing, believing nothing.”

“A Fugue” – Ellen Bryant Voigt

For Tom Moore, M.D.

1.

The body, a resonant bowl:
the irreducible gist of wood,
that memorized the turns
of increase and relinquishing:
the held silence
where formal music will be quarried
by the cry of the strings,
the cry of the mind,
under the rosined bow.

2.

The deaf listen
with compensatory hands,
touching the instrument.
Musicians also
listen, and speak, with their hands.

Such elemental implements.
The eye trains on a grid of ink,
and the fingers quicken,
habitual, learned,
to recover the arterial melody.

3.

The long habit of living
indisposes us to dying.
In this measured space,
a drastic weeping

______

Music depends
on its own diminishing.
Like the remembered dead
roused from silence
and duplicated, the sound heard
is sound leaving the ear.

______

Medicine too is a temporal art.
Each day, children
are rendered into your keeping.
And so you take up instruments
to make whole, to make live,
what others made.

4. 

Pure science:
the cello in your lap;
the firm misleading bodies
of your own children
in your brother’s room.
His illness is adult, and lethal.
You place the bow
and Beethoven turns again
from the stern physician
to annotate the page:
cantabile -
                  meaning
not birdsong, not windsong,
wind in the flue, bell, branch,
but the human voice,
distinct and perishable.

And you play for him.

“Contra Dante (Kind of)” – Bill Coyle

Forget the beatific vision.
Not that it’s not impressive in its glory
and worthy of a god in God’s position,

but if I make it to Mount Purgatory
(and yes, that’s one big “if,” I realize)
and trudge my way up story after story

I’ll settle in the Earthly Paradise
located at the top, it being more,
well, earthly, which is better in my eyes.

Earthly perfection’s what I’m looking for:
the world I know, more or less as I know it,
prolonged, minus the death and gore

(hard to imagine, maybe, but read the poet
Isaiah on the lion and the lamb).
If I found that, there’s no way I’d outgrow it,

even if I grew holier than I am
(not the I AM, but I as I am now).
Can I be honest? I don’t give a damn

if I miss most of the celestial show
(it will go on like clockwork whether I
am there or not) so long as far below

(which, from where I stand now, is still on high)
I can sit down under an actual tree
on actual grass beneath an actual sky

of blue that as it drops back let me see
the southern constellations overhead.
That would be more than good enough for me,

enough to make me not mind being dead.
And if Beatrice came from above
to take me heaven wards, I’d try instead

to tell her she should be the one to move.
She’d hem, she’d haw, I’d bring her flowers and rhyme,
I’d say, “Stay here with me and be my love,

seeing we now have world enough and time.”

“The Flautist of North Station” – Bill Coyle

The flautist of North Station,
playing “Amazing Grace,”
will get, for compensation,
come quarters in his case

on which, for sympathy,
he’s taped a picture of
his daughters, so that we
may see he plays for love;

may see he plays for free,
while someone in a suit
takes up the melody
our man plays on the flute

and starts to whistle it
as he departs the station,
bound for a world unfit
for any such salvation.

“Anno Domini” – Bill Coyle

“Consider the ravens: for they neither sow
nor reap; which neither have storehouse or barn…
So Jesus, far away and long ago,
instructed his friends in holy unconcern.”

[...]

“and homeless men lie sprawled out under heaven’s
immense capacity for rain and cold.”

From “Abandoned Bridges” – Bill Coyle

“It took you years to love the past…”

From “Living” – Bill Coyle

                                                       … the lights
that glitter on the shore they have left behind
        amount to a new constellation
                born in the lowliest part of heaven.

“Leave Taking” – Bill Coyle

i.m. Sten Söderström

The dead, we say, are departed. They
pass on, they pass away, they leave behind
family, friends, the whole of human kind -
they have go on before. Or so we say.

But could it be the opposite is true?
Now, as I stand here in the graveled drive
at moonrise, unaccountably alive,
I have the sense that it is we, not you,

who are departing, spun at breakneck speed
through space and time, while you stay where you are -
intimate of dark matter and bright star -
and watch the brilliant, faithless world recede.

“The God of This World to His Prophet” – Bill Coyle

Go to the prosperous city
for I have taken pity

on its inhabitants,
who drink and feast and dance

all night in lighted halls
yet know their bacchanals

lead nowhere in the end.
Go to them, now, commend,

to those with ears to hear,
a lifestyle more austere.

Tell all my children tired
of happiness desired

and never had that there
is solace in despair.

Say there is consolation
in ruins and ruination

beneath a harvest moon
that is itself a ruin,

comfort, however cold,
in grievances recalled

beside a fire dying
from lack of love and trying.