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Sydney Lea : Tiny Man
for CSB and JWL
i. Homing to Vermont: Lines Written in Early Spring
The world stays scared to death even here in Zurich,
where I wait for hours to clear security,
and note in a parallel line the tiny man,
scale model, as it were: suspicious tan
and business suit and requisite attaché.
He worries his watch, then furtively adjusts—
as if no one might notice—his male equipment.
The child is father of the man. Our mighty
giant baby son is twenty-two.
Once that baby and one of his cousins walked
our woods-road with us and sang a strange nonce ditty:
Trees have eyes. What did they mean? They grew,
the kids. Grew up. Back then as they chanted their chant,
we all tramped on to the measure of its strains.
The speed of the decades puts my plane’s to shame.
Skunk cabbages shocked that spring along a freshet,
the sighted trees’ pent leaves would burst wide open
within the week. I imagine some crazy person
who dreams just now of my jet burst into flames.
I try to imagine that for the tiny man
all time stopped dead. Ideal—or rather illusion,
frail as warblers among that old spring’s limbs.
What is it, life? For me. For him. For them.
ii. Late Summer, Cedar Waxwings, Northern New Hampshire
I slither the kayak gingerly into the eddy,
snub it against the cutbank, drop an anchor.
Rocking under cottonwood, I spy
on waxwings among high limbs, all nervous, slight,
who flick to the surface for insects, then flick back.
The water drop that’s sliding down my paddle
catches these glimmers of bird, of tree, of clouds
that course overhead. And now it’s as if it holds
in its gleam far more of the world as I have known it
than I’d have dreamed. I want its progress halted.
Only the last of our children is still at home.
That small Swiss passes obliquely through the bubble,
along with weddings, five births, contentments—and heartbreaks:
my father, uncles, one of my brothers. Gone.
The droplet has plashed on the stream, a breeze has come
to shake the foliage. I whisper, Get up and go.
The eddy’s aswirl with foam beneath the trees,
which will watch me, tiny me, as I’m borne downriver.
I wish for no more than surrender to all that is,
having really no choice. How happy I’d feel to banish
my preoccupations, useless as balls on a heifer.
Who used to say that? Uncle? Father? Brother?
iii. Blue Heron, Ozark Autumn
The other brother and I and our old pal Landy
have traveled here for one of our fishing escapes,
where right to the bottom the river is clear as white
grain liquor, the wild trout willing, the countryside
a splendor but for the out-of-scale new houses
crowding the banks, blaspheming. Melancholy
gets to be part of you if you get to be old.
Enough of that, I think, though it still seems true
that everything lovely passes. Or else is ruined.
The others keeps casting while I philosophize,
though I know my use of the term is more than loose.
Maybe true too that “Life’s a bitch and then
you die.” But the notion feels too tawdry, facile.
I ought to be feeling gratitude and grace
and comradeship as I’ve done for a seeming age.
As though to remind me, from a withered riverside maple,
root-killed by excavation, drops the heron,
the tree regarding its languid flap and soar
cross-water, and I the sheer coordination
of its landing there, the shoulders lifting aft
exactly as the great legs swing before
and splayed claws find the gravel-brightened shore.