from The Palace of Boundless Cold

Joseph Donahue

THE PALACE OF BOUNDLESS COLD II

children

Astonished children
slowly approaching a huge
oak the storm tipped
across the street in the night.
They slip past the orange cones.

Small girl, delighting,
calling to her brother from
the crown of the tree
their tricycles left to roll
down the slight slant of the street.

All kids, birds again,
singing out in the flames of
autumn’s downthrown crown.
“Not all forms are forms of death,”
they would seem to be singing.

*

Weeks later, a gleam
of reddish gold, a single
strand of hair catches
the light on the couch where your
tresses fell loose about you.

*

(I concluded, then,
your silence was not an
oversight, that, at
some point, it occurred to you
to give me no further sign.)

*

All is burning now
in the places of past joys.
The playground and creek
where I would take the children
are bursts of flame on the news.

*

all those messages

Your wife made you feel
only lonely, yet you stayed.
You forgot our hours
together, our faces close,
confessing our deepest joys.

My note was playful.
I put all my charm into it,
Still, you don’t write back.
Rains have flooded the garden.
Petals go spiraling off.

As sick as I am
my beauty will not weaken.
Too listless to brush
my hair, I just push it back,
tresses that once dazzled you.

All those messages
sent out in the fever of
my depraved nights,
that would have ruined us both,
did you keep at least a few?

*

snake

Words in black cursive
write themselves across the road.
A snake at mid-day.
An elegant hand renders
an otherworldly update.

This is the moment,
in your many years of life,
a black snake appears.
Others will say: “It’s nothing,
it doesn’t mean anything.”

Such a complex truth
the snake writes on the road,
shaping no letters,
just the black, slanting loops
of the moment of writing.

The snake says just this:
“I have unraveled a thread
in the veil between
two worlds, the visible one,
and the one I return to.”

*

So many, long gone,
are frolicking in a dream.
The shore at evening,
those boulders where the waves break.
The long gone keep arriving.

*

Such beautiful light
after days at the deathbed.
Heading to the cars,
siblings, now fatherless,
each taking out a key.

*

(You will die lonely
having inspired no one
to be with you, then,
or worse, your spouse, who’ll find
some last way to make you feel bad.)

*

Fifty years from now
this will all be a desert.
Now and then, a flood.
You will be forgotten but
your torments will continue.

*

How this came to be
not even the chill wet wind
in which the forest
trembles, has any idea,
coming in gusts from the east.

*

I am fading out.
Habitual gestures are
what I am known by.
I keep my tears to myself.
Sometimes a breeze dries my face.

*

Fire burns unseen
inside the tree: a pillar
of bright combustion,
the core of still living wood.
(Even the roots are burning.)

*

All seems pale today,
as if color had been kept
from returning, from
wherever it goes at night.
As if light is still dreaming.

*

After such singing
no one is ever the same.
Grief and wonder flow
in and through and out of us
long after silence returns.

*

To lose all like that
is so cruel, then to be old,
kneel on a sidewalk,
cry, nowhere to go. Winter
dark, ice gleaming on the streets.

THE PALACE OF BOUNDLESS COLD III

When I was a child
they gave ballet lessons there,
but it cost too much.
That was the first of my dreams
making me ache so, like this.

*

Nights of the full moon
I see how empty my bed.
Sheets glow like a field
of fresh snow, where, if I lie
down, no one will ever find me.

*

So much that mattered
drifts over the horizon
like chunks of Greenland
turning back into water,
the essential element.

*

lying alone

Awake, past midnight.
so much love was mistaken.
Lying here, alone.
The night sky is pale but dense.
Heaven is hidden from me.

Lying here, alone.
The world still claims it’s summer
but winter fills me.
My fields are bare, my woods, dull.
The trees are sealed in ice.

Hungry and asleep
I dream of a feast, and those
much missed are there,
in my head, chatting, laughing,
as I lie alone in the dark.

It was their last night
before catastrophe struck.
Looked back on, all
seems fraught. But that is wrong.
They lay happily entwined.

Certain things you said,
so close, barely whispering,
in the pillowed dark,
they still thrill me. Though long
alone, I feel you are close.

How desolate now
those once cherished places,
those rocks by the sea
the waves still erupt against,
where a boy and a girl once kissed.

Lying here, alone,
after midnight, looking up
through a small gap in the trees.
For me, no moon will return,
even when shining and full.

Never to see you
after that last night of love
except in my head
where you are, as you were then,
like an amorous shadow.

*

The light seems certain.
But when I look up again,
the glow on the ground
is no longer happening.
The grass sinks into shadow.

*

more mist

A mist in the trees
in shadows, and in sunlight.
Early radiance,
while awakening inside
a house, a spouse is cursing.

What grief can find you?
You are hiding in a mist.
You’re no longer you
amid glowing molecules
that coil, and drift, and dispel.

The air seems chalky.
As in school, the lesson done,
the board is erased.
No one after will ever
know what was once written.

In such mist lovers
might decide to meet, despite
the full light of day.
They might slip out of their bodies
and lie down in the shining.

A mist out of which
the perceptible steps forth.
Much not given the
senses is there as well, so
bright, close to becoming thought.

The first ideas
that ever excited me
somehow have returned,
ready to be thought anew,
at the far end of a mist.

Mist conceals the field.
It cannot be said for sure
if the deer are there.
They could be made of fire,
grazing deep inside the mist.

Through their shining webs
the thoughts of spiders arrive.
The web is what thinks,
after the rain, glittering,
silver, in a silver mist.

Soaked and glowing world,
the sun’s no longer needed.
Secondary light
is rising from the drenched ground,
much as the mystics foresaw.

What is awaited?
Stillness intensifies.
The day may yet rain.
Mist is gathering elsewhere.
These last moments are endless.

*

The mist? Only dust,
freed by a construction site,
drifting through the trees.
Voices, and clattering tools,
tearing, grinding, then silence.

*

Nothing on the screen.
What else do I log on for
but for word from you?
Months since any dirty talk
found its way to your fingers.

*

Weeks now of no word.
The simplest of your whispers,
some barely a gasp,
I hear again, in my mind,
and lie sleepless, and longing.

*

Fire-pit smoke fills
the forest hollows at night,
hangs over the stream,
filters into the houses
and sets off fire alarms.

*

Cardboard and tin cans
absorbing the rain, or, re-
sounding with each drop,
empty trash cans on the curb.
I hear all that time touches.

*

You were years ago,
but I have not forgotten:
Lying side by side,
our whispers lost in the mist
of exuberant rainfall.

*

We never touched.
Talking was all we needed.
Spectacular chat!
You have stepped into death.
I’m alone in this silence.

*

Living in sight of
a mountain might clarify
my loss. A mountain
of snow, bare stone shining bright
above all this misery.

*

These are offerings
to quicken oblivion.
I’m a living shadow
at the altar of full noon,
done with ever having been.

*

ancestors

Mother, nothing more
than a vivid memory.
Father, nothing more
than wind kicking up leaves
or dragging away the house.

Father, nothing more
than a glaze of rainwater.
Mother, nothing more
than silver light rising
from a wet and empty field.

Mother, nothing more
than a chunk of white crystal.
Father, nothing more
than an idle building site:
slabs, beams, rebar, and gravel.

Father, nothing more
than clouds along a cliff-face.
Mother, nothing more
than a pilgrim on a path
that vanishes into mist.

Mother, nothing more
than cloth dipped in crimson.
Father, nothing more than
a decorative feather
in a parking lot briar.

Father, nothing more
than warm welcome in the void.
Mother, nothing more
Than a song before bedtime
after a very long day.

Mother, nothing more
than the least possible light.
Father, nothing more
than last shadows at twilight,
night now free to overwhelm.

Father, nothing more
than wry, affectionate words.
Mother, nothing more
than pathos, hilarity
in a quick-witted aside.

Mother, nothing more
than a brush dipped in ink.
Father, nothing more
than an ink-stroke on a scroll
that depicts a parasol.

*

Hand, scooping damp earth
in a desert, last of night’s
cool, leaving the air
as the light rises, slowly,
behind a mountain that looks black.

*

I told you things that
no one else will ever know.
Is that why you left?
No need to wait for winter.
The deepest cold drifts through me.

*

Once red leaves, gone.
Your agony is over.
The tree, still half green,
twists in dismay at what time
is about to do to it.

*

In the rotunda
a pianist plays Bach for
the waiting patients.
The notes float up to them
as they await their treatments.

*

what I wanted

I wanted to be
simply there to be kissed,
like a servant called
late at night to the bedroom
when the King is off to war.

I wanted to be,
A full cup at your dry lips,
a delicious sip,
wine drunk in the cool night air
as you think of someone else.

I wanted to be
punished and forgiven,
at your whim, by you,
on a night consecrated
to a lighthearted scandal.

I wanted to be
ashes in your hearth, heaped
after a great blaze,
be a cinder aglow from
the touch of your fingertips.

*

Days are wet and dark.
The moon, having wept all night,
has thrown itself off
the cliff of the horizon
and is drowning in the sun.

*

Flits, fluffs, preens, the wren
opens its wings to the sun,
then seems to cry out.
I wonder, is that song yours,
wherever you now are?

*

That may be a land
of always falling blossoms
and quiet grieving.
But I’m not there. I’m here,
alone at night, sipping wine.

THE PALACE OF BOUNDLESS COLD IV

My soul’s gone ahead,
into those far away hills,
where the moon rises.
But I’m still in a basement,
with only one small window.

*

Never suspected
of any beliefs at all,
a friend, just leaving
on a brutal pilgrimage
of fasting, penance, and prayer.

*

I’m on the zoom screen.
My face is like the face of
an astronaut, caught
outside the capsule. No one
is going to let me in.

*

When I left the world
the last eggplant had ripened
in its small pot on
the sunny end of the porch,
violet, as is deep space.

*

On a huge window
a grasshopper clings in
absolute stillness,
perceiving, as befits him,
space, air, light, heat, and distance.

*

Pure and blue the moon
was there for a full moment
in the glowing rush
above the well of despair
often confused with your house.

*

Close to full the moon
above the oblong of black
known to be a street,
a single star beside it,
less lifeless than you are, now.

*

Nothing much is done
but all now seems different.
Must be the fresh wind.
Must be the disappearance
of the last possible light.

*

Then you spoke your mind
and imperiled your income.
No better off now
than a beggar with a bowl,
saying please, please, forgive me.

*

I would rather be
on a lake, late afternoon,
maybe one other
cabin in sight, on the far
shore, where the sun is failing.

*

Fate put you in this
body and fate will free you,
so you can go back
to just dreaming all the time
where there’s no dream and no you.

*

Korean woman

My perfection had
proved to be debilitating.
I needed time off.
My parents got real worried.
All I did was lie in bed.

Life was doing to
my moods what Japan had done
to Korea, long
ago, in history, and
now, secretly, in my head.

I felt occupied
and kept alive only for
what others could do
to me, and yes, mostly men,
sent here to destroy our world.

I am the palest
Asian girl you’ll ever see.
In another life
I was Scandinavian,
But now I’m just scared, all the time.

*

Having renounced
the senses I, nonetheless,
know they are still there.
Sometimes, by mistake, I still
see, smell, taste, touch, and hear.

*

The doctor gave me
pills but I’m afraid of them.
Old people get them,
those whose hearts have gone wild.
Those who awake bewildered.

*

My basement study
is a grave with a window.
I can look out and
see the life I’m no longer
concerned with understanding.

*

Loved and more than
once but never not un-
happy. Who did I
devastate in some former
life that I’m so lonely now?

*

This memory has
no other place to go, now,
but your head. All those
other minds do not exist,
those there when all that happened.

*

If you don’t sleep well
think of the corpse of Jesus,
his nights in the tomb
draped in rough cloth, motionless,
so tortured, but then at peace.