Nocturne 3
(The Visitation)
On the night
of April 15th,
As everybody
knows, that taxing time,
After an
especially grueling day at work,
I dreamt I
was in a hotel room,
Flat on my
back,
Yet oddly,
drifting off to sleep
With the
lights off, and the air conditioner
Purring
hypnotically,
When I heard
what sounded like
My late
wife, softly calling my name.
Fully awake
now
In my dream,
eyes wide open,
I saw a
luminous mist
Drift in
slowly through the curtains,
Coalescing into
a smoky pillar
At the foot
of my bed,
Becoming by
degrees
The beautiful
woman I loved, then lost,
Even more
beautiful now,
The weight
of the world
No longer on
her shoulders,
Smiling like
I never saw her smile,
Wearing a
shimmering seafoam
Long
spectral gown.
She didn’t
slip beneath the covers,
Which she
would’ve done
If still in
the flesh.
Instead, she
sat down on the bed
And all that
night of the dream,
Pleasant, comforting
visitation,
I felt a
palpable physical touch
As she held
my hand.
We used to
vacation in Las Vegas,
And many a
morning I’d wake up early,
And while
she slept
Breathing
placidly,
I’d wander
into the lavish bathroom,
Take my
constitutional,
And then I’d
slip into the bathtub,
Enjoying a
nice long soak,
While I did
a little light reading,
Plato’s
“Republic,”
Boccaccio’s
“The Decameron,”
Or maybe
even the Book of Revelation.
I‘ve never
been what you could call
A connoisseur
of darkness,
And though I’ve
always admired
Wordsworth’s
thrilling pre-dawn
Ascent of
Mount Snowden
In the
climax of his famous Prelude,
I’m not Romantic.
Just give me
a little light
And let me
wake up happy.
Dear God, in
the words
Of that old Kristofferson
song,
Help me make
it through the night.
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Autumn Poem
It’s
November now, that time of your life
When it’s
customary to reflect.
If you’re
anything like me,
You didn’t
do anything right,
Yet somehow,
all that suffering
Incredibly
beside the point,
Everything seemed
to turn out right.
You didn’t
get the girl,
Or so you
thought at the time,
But then you
ended up with the girl
And lived
happily ever after,
Until that
fateful morning
When she
collapsed, clutching her chest,
Alone in the
bedroom.
You thought
it was all over,
That your
life, now that it was autumn,
Would be
like the trees outside your window,
Totally drained
of color.
But please,
take notice,
When the sun
sinks lower in the heaven
And the
leaves do their natural thing,
What they’ve
been designed to do,
Houses and
buildings reemerge.
I can see my
car in the cinder parking lot
On the other
side of the woods,
And the
brook, which I’ve heard
On stormy
afternoons, raging all summer long,
Reappears in
its ceaseless shimmering,
Gently
purling along.
Yes, it was
all worth it,
And yes, you
can see that clearly now.
Life may be
different these days,
But the
water keeps flowing,
And it’s
still the same old stream,
Whether you
can see where it’s going,
Or not.
It may have been made into a documentary.
