This Day

Lawrence Raab

Watching the beautiful
sticks of trees as they click and sway,
the first green unraveling,

it's easy to imagine I might
remember this day forever.
I say it to myself,

never to others, while the poem
made hoping to preserve it
is changed, then changed again

to fit another order
it happens to discover.
At the end I find myself

in a room by a window, or at the edge
of a field, with the same clear
sky above me wherein later

I will imagine clouds, as if
some movement were required. That,
or a different kind of stillness.

So there must also be
a family circled round
the bedside of someone

who is dying. I place
myself among them.
All of us are waiting

for the little we believe we need
to hold on to and repeat.
But this is not my family

although it is you
who are dying, your words
I am again unable to imagine

as everything continues
sliding together in the light,
that day so easily

changed to this one,
the sky that is so blue, and the clouds
that cross my gaze with such terrible speed.

The Rest

Lawrence Raab (1979)

You've tried the rest.
You've waited long enough.
Everything catches up with you.

And you're too old,
or too young.
Or you don't have the money

or you don't have the time.
Maybe you're shy, and maybe
you're just afraid.

How often have you heard it,
have you promised
yourself you'd try

something really different
if you had the chance?
Though you can't help but wonder

if all those people
know what they're doing, now
you're saying it with them:

Eventually everything
catches up with us,
and it starts to show.

We've waited all our lives, or as long
as we can remember, whichever
is long enough.

Miles Davis on Art

Lawrence Raab (2003)

"The only way to make art," Miles Davis
said, "is to forget what is unimportant."
That sounds right, although the opposite
also feels like the truth. Forget
what looks important, hope it shows up

later to surprise you. I understand
he meant you've got to clear
your mind, get rid of everything
that doesn't matter. But how can you tell?
Maybe the barking of a dog at night

is exactly what you need
to think about. "Just play within
the range of the idea,"
Charlie Parker said. The poem
that knows too quickly what's important

will disappoint us. And sometimes
when you talk about art
you mean it, sometimes you're just
fooling around. But once he had the melody
in place, he could leave it behind

and go where he wanted, trusting
the beautiful would come to him, as it may
to a man who's worked hard enough
to be ready for it. And he was,
more often than not. That was what he knew.

For You

Lawrence Raab (1987)
for Judy

I don't want to say anything about
how dark it is right now, how quiet.
Those yellow lanterns among the trees,
cars on the road beyond the forest,
I have nothing to say about them.
And there's half a moon as well
that I don't want to talk about,
like those slow clouds edged
with silver, or the few unassembled stars.
There's more to all of that than this,
of course, and you would know it
better than most, better I mean
than any other, which is only
to say I had always intended
finding you here where I could
tell you exactly what I wanted to say
as if I had nothing to say
to anyone but you.

Vanishing

Lawrence Raab (2000)

First you worry that you'll never get
what you want, later that you'll lose
what you have. In between
for a time you just trusted
the course of your life, assumed
things would fall into place.
Most of them did. But now,
not quite all of a sudden, every new pain
is a sign, then a promise.
Even if you didn't take death seriously
when you were young, you understood
that was the story. Your kids
leave home, your dog sleeps most of the day.
Letters arrive wanting to know
if you've planned for the future.
You walk out on the porch:
there's a field, then a mountain,
so familiar you have to look hard.
The letters say, It's never too late.
All things vanish. You know that.
All the things you love
vanish. Can you love this idea?
Is that the task? you think. To try?

The Pole

Lawrence Raab (2000)

We were back in college, young again.
She was someone I yearned for
throughout the spring
of my senior year. In the dream
it was evening and she was having dinner
with her friends when I appeared
at the door and waved to her
until she came out onto the porch where I
was standing with a long wooden pole,
maybe five or six feet high. I said
I had brought it to her because
I'd heard she was going rock climbing.
Yes, she said, but you don't need
poles to go rock climbing. Which I knew.
From the beginning of the dream I'd been aware
that was the case. Which meant
nothing would happen between us,
although the strangeness of my gesture
didn't seem to trouble her. She smiled at me.
And in the dream I remembered where
the pole had come from. I could see it
leaning against the wall beside the blackboard
of my third or fourth grade classroom,
a long pole with a metal hook on top
used to lower the shades that covered
that room's many tall and empty windows.

American Light

Lawrence Raab (2000)

In those days a traveler prepared himself
to be astonished. There were wonders
in every direction—the mountains stupendous,
the precipices lofty, the waters
profoundly deep. No one settled for anything
less than the sublime. Don't fool yourself.
You also would have cherished the Idea
of Nature, how inside it a better self
lives to repair whatever might befall you—
any calamity, any disgrace.
That is the world without encumberance,
that famous light trembling across it.
Consider the hush of the storm on the far horizon,
that abandoned boat by the shore. And further west—
woods of the dimmest shade, the solitude
utter and unbroken. Now you've climbed
some great cliff. You're feeling
like a new man, overwhelmed
by everything you can see, certain
this world will never fail you.

Vanishing Point

Lawrence Raab (2003)

You're walking down the road
which someone has drawn to illustrate
the idea of perspective, and you are there
to provide a sense of scale.
See how the road narrows in the distance,
becoming a point at which
everything connects, or flies apart.
That's where you're headed.
The rest of the world is a blank page
of open space. Did you really think
you were just out for an aimless stroll?
And those mountains on the horizon:
the longer you look, the more forbidding
they become, bleak and self-important,
like symbols. But of what?
The future, perhaps. Destiny. Or the opposite.
The perpetual present, the foolishness of purpose.
At evening they recede into the sky
as if they had always been the sky.
Is it a relief to know you'll never reach them?
Is there any comfort in believing
you're needed where you are?

The Questions Poems Ask

Lawrence Raab (2000)

Watching a couple of crows
playing around in the woods, swooping
in low after each other, I wonder
if they ever slam into the trees.
There's an answer here, unlike
most questions in poems,
which are left up in the air.
Was it a vision or a waking dream?

You decide, says the poet.
You do some of this work,
but think carefully.
Some people want to believe

poetry is anything
they happen to feel. That way
they're never wrong. Others yearn
for the difficult:

insoluble problems, secret codes
not meant to be broken.
Nobody, they've discovered,
ever means what he says.

But rarely does a crow
hit a tree, though other, clumsier birds
bang into them all the time, and we say
these birds have not adapted well

to the forest environment.
Frequently stunned, they become
easy prey for the wily fox,
who's learned how to listen

for that snapping of branches
and collapsing of wings,
who knows where to go
and what to do when he gets there.