Pumping Station, Fresh Pond

Behind glass, the tall blue pumps

that manhandle city water

look placid as the Buddhas

in the museum’s Temple Room.

I press my face to the window

as if pining to worship objects

far more useful than I am.

The building’s smug with silence.

The stages of preparation—

intake, filtering, ozone

discharge, sediment removal,

pumping to the hilltop reservoir

in Belmont a mile to the west—

occur in confidence like

espionage or adultery,

leaving only the subtlest clues.

I want to ride the water

from here to there and back again,

surfing through the massive pipes

with high-voltage tingling.

But in the sediment pool the scum

of organic waste conceals

water so thickly aerated

it can’t float the human body,

so anyone falling in would sink

instantly as if falling through air.

The orange life preservers

hooked to the railing are useless.

The plate glass clouds with my breath.

I wish I could at least hear

the hum of the pumps, but maybe

like the singing of the sirens                                                

it would foster that restless passion

that settles on any available

object and roosts there, crowing

over self-effaced success.

At the Grave of Edward MacDowell

With evergreen fistfuls of leaves,

mountain laurel vaults the path.

The gloom flatters me and eases

the approach, diffusing shadows

that otherwise might darken

into doubts about his music,

which hardly anyone performs

although a few recordings persist.

This pine-upholstered avenue

barely a hundred feet long

enters a stone-walled square

arched with a trellis. A boulder

bears a plaque, and the graves

of Marian and Edward lie flat

as graves most often do, gazing

up through layers of infinity.

Such an earthy location: stone,

lichen, pine and laurel, the woods

too dense to easily breach.

But beyond the trees the open

smile of the local country club

welcomes golfers whose cursing

dangle in the humid light

like panicles spilling pollen.

This reminds me that we remember

artists for the inflorescence

of their work, not for the shade

they cast on the people they love

and abuse in the name of art.

The flowers of MacDowell’s career

shudder in the breeze and shed

petals onto these lonely graves.     

I’ve come here for silence, not art.

I can’t play an instrument

and can’t hum any melody

written by Edward MacDowell—

although I have to honor him

for the vaulting of his laurel

and the plain little stone bearing

his first and my middle name.

With and Without You on May Day

Last night’s rain inspires the brook

to gush in marbled undertones

alien to its milder moods.

I wish you were with me to cross

the gap freshly opened between

the path and the wooden footbridge

where excess water has sprawled

like a nineteenth-century nude.

You exert more hydraulic force

than this falling water but

sometimes in the presence of birds

and the early spring flowers

you draw yourself like a shade

and crouch in that wordless dark

as if natural gestures frightened you.

As the sum or summaries of all

the books you’ve read, you feel obliged

to culture, inclined to parse

the language of birds, flowers, brooks

as so much eloquence spent

on air, on the empty space

where no one significant cares.

Having safely crossed the brook

I shuffle up the trail to greet

the dead tree that for many years

has presented the gaping look

of a face contorted in screams.

Sometimes we see each other

in that face, sometimes we glimpse

that tree in each other’s expression.                      

The dripping forest exhales

the purest oxygen in colors

that would flatter your complexion.

The brook grumbles downhill

to snuff itself in larger colors

in which one day we’ll acquiesce

with many snuffles of oxygen

we’ll gladly, for a moment, share.