Occasion

Written for Robert and Sarah’s wedding

Love

Love

Only love

All around me I see

Seals

Or Navy Seals?

A new life

The sound of turbines

Churning

Sound of distant ships

Headed which way I wonder?

I thought I knew

What life must hold

So I climbed high

Out of harm’s way

Out of life’s reach

High

Where air grows cold and thin

Then higher

Where atmosphere itself dissolves

To molecules like ping-pong balls

Then

Nothing

Not even dark

Not even silent

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Nothing like a Strauss waltz

Nothing like a rose garden

Frankly, you are being strung along

By mystery who’s hiding in plain view

Two old men in the park for chess

Their eyes meet

A winter supper

Moonlit

Candle in a blackened window

We are met on an extraordinary occasion

We have gathered holding roses

They signify our fallen state

For all our Kennedys have fled

And here in our inheritance

No day has ever been like this

Or will again

Humble

Hearts pounding in pride

We listen for the next suspended echo

Of a bluebird’s song

And somewhere you have never seen

There is a deep freshwater lake

So cold the water almost seems to thicken

We’ve tried to leave the fortune of our world

But gravity of grace has held us home

We couldn’t let us go because it was

Our home

And under that horizon

Below the curve of blue

We find that we have fallen

To great heights

We’ve spared the fatted calf

Cause we’re vegetarians

Who love Marc Chagall

Who’ve thrown away the book of rules

But held one rule asunder

Who’ve recognized this moment as our own

And claimed our place beside us

On this earth

Love

Love

Only love

Love

          MTZ

        7/18/01

In Eldorado

Written to Robert, of Sarah, on their wedding day

There is a vision I have taken from Tobias Wolff

Of a blind man stumbling through the gates of Eldorado

Lost city of gold

Not knowing the place

Angels, they say, send visions of light

That blind the beholder with their beauty

The heart heals in fire

That burns the body to charred disintegrate

I don’t know where I am

Or where I am going

My own heart, that little light,

Burns low and dim these days

Never extinguished – this much I know:

Its fire’s fueled and fed

Its secret source of air –

But bushelled – chained - sequestered

A heart beats still in a subbasement cell

In such a still dark place, I guess,

A heart hears its own beating

As particle after particle of sand

Drop singly through the neck

Far below to the hourglass floor

In this place – it’s here we always meet –

I can go through centuries of neglect

Unheard, unheeded, and unseen

And still end up here

Borges writes of God’s script, forking paths,

Fugues of eternal convergence

But you have glimpsed beyond these cycles now

Beyond breathing in future and heaving out past

Past purgatorious cycles of peace

Punctuated by the purges we call war

All this in a room –

No, smaller than that –

In a shell we recall from some beach

Of whose sand we built castles as kids

We held it to our ears

Heard whispered serpents’ words

These same words haunt us now

Then we set down this shell

Its words had earwigged

In

Hear now in your heart?

Those words weigh heavily wherever harbored

They are the gravity that draws tides anchored

To and fro in endless unresolved exchange

The gravity that finally implodes

They

Are

Irrelevant

Now

You know now here you can’t be harmed

Feel that in your heart

It’s only my imagining

But image what she said, somehow

Somehow had you hear

Had you hear for real

Helped you see for sure and all

Salvation

Is here

And when you stumbled in and didn’t see

Somehow held your hand

And somehow helped to guide your heart

How I cannot say

Perhaps that is irrelevant as well

Or just the private touch

That bonds and binds two hearts

In any case – exists beyond my ken, beyond imagining –

Which must be where the heart begins

And any heart can see

She must have shown you that

And when, so touched, you stumbled in

Somehow you sensed that you were there

She shading Eldorado’s golden glare

You trusted her and saw now

You could see

  MTZ

  8/5/01

The Way Forward

Written on my 48^th birthday, 2010

Are you willing to renounce

All roads

That don’t make you happy

That will never make you happy?

Yes.

Then we’re ready to begin

Anew

With these words

Empty of all ambition

On this threshold of spring

Nearly nine years have passed

Are you willing to remove them?

Yes.

Then embrace your blocks

As blocks to build a brand new love

And life of love

There is nothing catastrophic in this world

That the mere mention of love

Cannot cure

Now

I stand before you here

Embrace this open empty hand

Stand outside this world

You don’t have to know how

The world works beyond your ken

Science has always known

That the world works fine without it

I want the way forward.

  MTZ

  4/9/2010