Selected poems
Dream, on a morning in the sacred month of OctoberFor Father Gabriel Rochelle
In the bardo,
huddled and waiting with others
after our life reviews,
each making ready for
our atonement, you entered
the vestibule to our right
bearing a large wooden cross.
Wordlessly, you spoke to me
to rise, and to follow; whereupon,
we walked into yet
another room — an anteroom,
which led outward, back into
the world, not as we know it, but
yet another world. This is when
the cross came apart
through your own ingenuity, and
broke cleanly through the middle,
lengthwise, to become two crosses,
of which you handed one
half for me to carry, and the other
half you lifted to bear
on your shoulder. Upon awaking,
I am now both cleansed
and challenged, given direction but
needing to reset my compass,
buoyed up but aware of the weight
of the new I will need to carry, as
I find my way from the vivid depths
of the dream on a morning
in the sacred month of October, as I
emerge toward a shimmering
of light breaking through the clouds.
The sunflowers
Their large heads loomed above me,
arrayed with their bright yellow petals.
Row after row of them arranged
in lines to the right side of the house
and adjacent to the garage in the back.
At nine, I looked up at their creaking
stalks on autumn days on my way to
and from school, and looked down
on their ranks from the glassed-in
porch of the second floor railroad flat
my father rented after my mother's
death. I was overcome by their yellow
brilliance and the size of their corollas,
which exceeded the diameter
of a human head. Our landlords were
an elderly Albanian couple who moved
slowly and spoke incoherently, as my
Polish father did, in broken English,
their red and white oilskin tablecloth
always graced with a small white bowl
of sunflower seeds for the enormous
caged parrot, who could swear in
impeccably explicit language. The bird
was menacing but obedient to its owners.
Although any visitor was treated
as a home invader. He would begin
by hissing, then moved into a barrage
of curses. The Albanians winnowed
the seeds from their crop after
deadheading the flowers, their kitchen
table having become a staging area
for putting up kernels. After the harvest,
deep in October, the plots
where the sunflowers loomed became
desolate with dried stalks the wind
blew through, with a sound whose tone
underscored the sereness of autumn.
I looked at the stark rows from
the glassed-in porch upstairs, where
I had been stung by a wasp, which made
my finger throb as if it had been hit
by a hammer, but the memory
of the glory of the sunflowers in bloom
continued to fill me, as do the rays
of sunlight that shone