I miss the elms, their "crowns of airy dreams,"
as Virgil calls them, their towering cathedral branching
spread into a ceiling above the lonely sidewalks of Ohio
where the first elm deaths were reported in America.
I miss in particular the perspective looking down
the distances of all those Elm-named streets disappearing
into dusk, the last sun turned the stained blue of church windows.
I miss standing there, letting the welcome dark make me invisible.
I miss the birds starting to sleep, their talking in their songs becoming
silent, then their silence. I even miss not standing there.
And I miss a life of nothing but such moments, as if they'd never
happened and all you had to go on was their memory
and the feeling in the memory forgotten but brought back
again and again because you miss someone you loved forever.
- Stanley Plumly
stanley plumly
In Passing
On the Canadian side, we’re standing far enough away
the Falls look like photography, the roar a radio.
In the real rain, so vertical it fuses with the air,
the boat below us is starting for the caves.
Everyone on deck is dressed in black, braced for weather
and crossing against the current of the river.
They seem lost in the gorge dimensions of the place,
then, in fog, in a moment, gone.
In the Chekhov story,
the lovers live in a cloud, above the sheer witness of a valley.
They call it circumstance. They look up at the open wing
of the sky, or they look down into the future.
Death is a power like any other pull of the earth.
The people in the raingear with the cameras want to see it
from the inside, from behind, from the dark looking into the light.
They want to take its picture, give it size—
how much easier to get lost in the gradations of a large
and yellow leaf drifting its good-bye down one side of the
gorge.
There is almost nothing that does not signal loneliness,
then loveliness, then something connecting all we will become.
All around us the luminous passage of the air,
the flat, wet gold of the leaves. I will never love you
more than at this moment, here in October,
the new rain rising slowly from the river.
- Stanley Plumly
Cancer
Mine, I know, started at a distance
five hundred and twenty light-years away
and fell as stardust into my sleeping mouth,
yesterday, at birth, or that time when I was ten
lying on my back looking up at the cluster
called the Beehive or by its other name
in the constellation Cancer,
the Crab, able to move its nebulae projections
backward and forward, side to side,
in the tumor Hippocrates describes as carcinoma,
from karkinos, the analogue, in order to show
what being cancer looks like.
Star, therefore, to start,
like waking on the best day of your life
to feel this living and immortal thing inside you.
You were in love, you were a saint,
you were going to walk the sunlight blessing water,
you were almost word for word forever.
The crown, the throne, the thorn—
now to see the smoke shining in the mirror,
the long half-dark of dark down the hallway inside it.
Now to see what wasn’t seen before:
the old loved landscape fading from the window,
the druid soul within the dying tree,
the depth of blue coloring the cornflower,
the birthday-ribbon river of a road,
and the young man who resembles you
opening a door in the half-built house
you helped your father build,
saying, in your voice, come forth.
- Stanley Plumly