Poems from Rivard Street
by Benjamin Oldham
All that is left now
is to endure.
In this the only prosperity
is to be found,
though we often
think them opposites,
they are like nested things,
one comes from the other,
one makes another.
Like nested things,
they are sparrows in the branches,
living busy,
living alert,
they are my arm behind your head,
your arm upon my chest,
moving with the rise and fall
of my breath,
moving us to hope
that we will endure
this prosperity.
Thanks for staying
with me all day.
Look how far we made it—
not one of us
came out with the: well,
I should get back,
or the: I think it’s time to
get going.
We were out
for hours,
and didn’t you feel how
the streets swelled
to greet us?
And the shade
stuck with us
like a good friend
holding an umbrella
in the rain.
And we stuck it out,
the random hours
between
things we meant to do,
when it would have been
a great excuse
to get away,
but you stayed, didn’t you?
Now we’re here and
I’ll ask you:
do you want to grab a beer
and sit in the park?
At some point,
not long now,
this whole thing is done.
But if we have
just one beer in the park,
we won’t have to talk
as the shade turns dark
and the streets cool
and settle down,
and we won’t have to worry
how to say goodbye.
No, we know that
what we had is over.
Now we can just
bask
in the final moments
as the trees turn out
into the sky,
and all the sounds
around us seem so far away,
before one of us
will say:
Winter now, and on the street
we see nothing of each other,
suffocating under
scarves and coats
just to throw them off
when we get home,
join the unfolded laundry on the bed
I am going through
with rolled up sleeves,
fistfuls of clothes
we can no longer stand to wear
as if in our undressing
we can strip this burden too,
this boredom,
remember jumping off the dock
at the lake with our jeans on?
Holding hands
in the plunge,
grasping for your arms
in the dark gold glittering water,
touching your bare skin—
your first skin.
Don’t go yet,
kicking up to air again,
to the scarves and coats wet
and laundry melting
on the bed,
I am taking my first breath
here with you.
I only had to tell you this,
the way it only has to rain
when I am finishing
an errand.
If I bid for love—
if that is what I did,
an outer moment only
could intrude
to tell me I'm
in love already.
This is what I cannot do
with you—
if I must be
an outer moment,
I am just another
you will turn away.
And if the bids
I thought you made
were not like mine at all,
and I am not within your mind,
then I could only
make my bid, and go.
If it rains,
I will know.
Of all the nights I used to
leave from your apartment
in the snow,
in the dark and blue,
waiting in the wind that blew
beneath the roofs
of all the nights I used to
look within myself
too much,
too soon, alone
and steal my way back home
to seal myself away
for all the nights I’d
wonder who I was again
or what I stood for,
who I meant to be
when I’d look back
on all the nights I wouldn’t
take them back,
but view, as still and true
above the roofs,
exactly who I was
and who I’d come to be
from all the lonely nights
that came to me—
Somewhere
in this winter
the spirit stirs.
Not a thing that stills
or settles
like the fallen snow
and covered things
below,
the spirit moves,
I’ve seen it flicker
by my window;
and after all this time
I’ve stayed beside
the window
at my bedside,
ready for a sign
of spirit,
lying like a hunting cat
in wait
whose breath and senses slow
and muscles tense
toward a single goal,
I yield at last
and stand
to shake my weak
and tired limbs,
and feel a stirring—
not my own,
I’m sure, unless
I’m only learning
that the spirit stirs
in searching for itself,
and moving me,
as I have moved myself—
Sleeping minds lie
like boulders
in an old forest.
They are bold
to lie among the living
undisturbed by growth,
and bolder still
to lie to us outright
with thoughts
we call our own
the weighted steps
have only planted at our feet.
Who can trust a mind
of boulder fields?
And who can move
the boulders out,
sweep away the glacial debris,
the many heavy tons?
But anyone walking
through an old forest
may notice how a tree
will split a boulder
in its way,
pressing overhead
and over time
until the boulder breaks
and lies there
with a wicked crack
in its former nature,
its two halves struck down
like twin parts of a mind
that, in order
to wake the other,
need to fall silently in a forest
with no one there to hear,
no one there
to put them back to sleep.
Under the first snow,
all the worlds I know
have disappeared.
And buried with them too
are all the worlds
I never knew were possible,
as if the snow
has evened out the chances
of the things to come
when it is gone,
as if the spring
may not return
and what may come instead
is something like
a year of yellow Septembers.
Only when the world
has disappeared
before my eyes
do I begin to think so much
about what was
and what may be.
The same may go for me,
I think,
when I have disappeared
into the snow,
the kind that turns to water
on my cheek
and ice upon my nose—
the same may go for me,
the spring may step aside
to let me have
a year of yellow Septembers.