Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

Birthday

My mother calls this morning to wish me a happy birthday.
What am I going to do to mark the occasion? I don't know.

I tell her it's really her day, isn't it? Mine, through no effort
of mine I can remember. It belongs to her, I say, to my father and her

together, driving late at night, late November, driving downtown,
before any freeways, only quiet streets, the first night of my pressing

ambition, through streets dusted with snow, snow that does not accumulate,
but swirls and rises in the high beams, snow playing in the light,

graceful, wispy, elfin, lost snow that takes on my character somehow
as she recalls it for me. Maybe I've adopted its character. She gives me

this Dusting of Snow each year as an image to locate myself.
She knows I will appreciate how she paused over thoughts of me

to observe this snow, coming and going away, lifted lightly into the air
and spun in perpetual snowfalls around the car, down the quiet streets.

So I am: He Who Comes Before Winter. Or: Boy of the Snow 
     Ghosts.
It's good to know your birth image. Otherwise, the world seems

wide and random with nothing there to seize you. Not even mountains.
I am: The One Who Whispers Before the Great Snowstorm.

Or: He Who Speaks a Language Far Away from Spring.
With emergency all around, the snow still rises and falls, breaks

into airy webs, smoky synaptic halos around the old Chevy, around them.
I am Heavy Sky / Light Snow. I know. It's always been this way for me.

Esse

Do you have the sense that if things worked out
the way you want them to, you would still
not be satisfied? Do you think this is the secret

you carry with you like a single amulet in a leather bag?
Why not honor dissatisfaction, construct a memorial
to it among the ruins? You could have your very own

Roman Forum, with the wreckage of the Temple of Venus,
your own lost lives imagined there on the Coliseum floor.
You might recount all those mistaken votes in the Senate.

Who can forget the many assassinations when you
played the parts of both Brutus and Caesar?
Here, in this very place, you first entered the City.

 A group resembling your family waited for you here.
In this place, you spoke eloquently for some cause
you cannot remember now. You've forgotten your words.

Here you christened your children or paused at night
to follow the constellations as they tumbled above you.
You wanted to name each of the heroes and horses.

This magic dust. These complex weeds. Such fateful stones.
You have the sense that the other side of what you know
looks and smells just like this--the warm and jumbled marble,

the scattered limbs, a Greek amphora filled with olive oil.
You were struck in particular by all those troops returning
from their lost wars. Each on their own path up from the sea.

Snow

Since the fall, I have cleared a space for it--
an open field that leads down a slope
to the edge of the woods. The trees there

are waiting for it, to be highlighted in their limbs
by it, to be seen in their present bark.
I am also waiting . . . for that muffled voice

that comes with it, the daylight made exact
by it, while the night is made blue.
All the mountains and valleys that come with it . . .

the pushing and packing and setting aside of it . . .
dry forgiveness and memory without regret of it.
Then, that slackening of its crystals, the collapse,

and the settling--into--something of it.
Now it must be written upon, slept in, tramped
through. Now we are quieted. Now quickened.

Until I stand back from it, holding my blue shovel,
and hear the word--immanent--or the word's effect.
Spoken from the whiteness. With the wind all around.

Tornado over St. Paul, 1893

      -- After a painting by Julius Holm

This painting stopped me years ago as a child.
The quaint skyline of St. Paul. 1893. Laid out
with church spires, domes, warehouses.

Then in the very center and above--that looming, lateral
dense black cloud like a bold parenthesis laid
down on its side, the funnel dangling down--

the cloud drawn as a careful portrait
 of the prize bull with its flat and overwhelming
flanks about to turn northeast toward Wisconsin

where the prevailing winds would send it. I never
saw the premise here--that the compact city
would survive intact. So this is the moment after.

We were never taken up in that great cloud
although we might have been with our dime novels.
All those bills of lading. Our teams of horses.

Now the sun strikes through from the West.
The light changes. So we go on filling the bins.
Emptying them. While a corner of the river glistens there.

William James

Speaking
      on the possibility
            of human immortality
he gently unwound
      two premises--
            A) the death of the brain
                  is the death of the soul; and
            B) there can never be
                  enough rooms in Heaven
                        to accommodate the Chinese
                              let alone us.
With respect to A)--
      he wondered whether
            there are other worlds
                  we cannot see
                        from our platforms.
On B)--
      he determined
            our imaginations can
                  take in the whole world
                        including Heaven
                              and all
                                    its many rooms

Words Can Describe

Did you ever think the astronauts should have done
a better job describing the Moon for the rest of us?

We spent billions of dollars to send them there,
to walk around on that glassy sand in those

synthetic mukluk boots, driving their goofy, lunar
dune buggies, slapping a golf ball 5386 yards

to an endless sand trap. We heard that static through
corridors of space until they had the chance to describe
 
exactly, ROGER, what they saw, AFFIRMATIVE,
and instead we heard: "Words can't describe,"

CHECK, "the stark beauty," A-OKAY,
"of the landscape . . . I mean the moonscape."

They were young. Inarticulate. Absolutely
without words to describe what they saw. But then,

when they watched the Earth Rise from the Moon's
fluorescent horizon, I remember, their words were pure

excitement and Oh, my God and It's so beautiful.
We knew what they meant from our Earth-bound

imaginations. We knew that the rising Earth was
the jewel of our breathing, the swirling of our weather,

a wondrous cat's eye marble rolling across black velvet,
reminding us of our daughters' faces, the freckled

continents, those oceans of blue eyes, the determined set
of our son's jaw in the angle of a peninsula. And that stillness

around the globe like a lake viewed through the pine woods.
They were speechless because they were reminded of everything

they missed. From their tin-foil shed, on the Sea of Tranquility,
first witnessing, ROGER, the beloved's face out there.

Exercise

I used to feel more fit on my typewriter--
all the noise and the abrupt carriage turns.
The slap across the face of it, the jab

of the surprising word and the ringing of the bell
as if the round was finally finished. Now
I can only shadow box here in the dark,

among these stanzas with their corner shelves
and tea sets. There still is graciousness in the pause--
you're tired on the ropes. I move in with my left hook.

Tim Nolan was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1954. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1978 with a B.A. in English. He and his wife Kate moved to New York City in 1978 where he obtained an M.F.A. degree in writing from Columbia University, worked as an archivist at the Whitney Museum, and read the poetry slush pile for Paris Review. He returned to Minnesota in 1985 and received his J.D. degree from William Mitchell College of Law in 1989. He is currently a partner with the Minneapolis law firm, Rider Bennett LLP, where he practices in construction and real estate litigation. His poems have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, Poetry East, and other journals. He recently published an article in the South Dakota Law Review entitled "Poetry and the Practice of Law" which can be found under his name at Rider Bennett's web site (www.riderlaw.com).