Two Poems by Joseph Green

Joseph Green

One Night on Bainbridge Island
It Can Be Anything

One Night on Bainbridge Island

After the reception, I fell in with the others
leaving by the gravel path across Bloedel's estate.
It was already dark, but someone asked me if I'd seen
the meditation garden there, the boulders in raked sand.
I said, yes, I thought it looked like a pond
where rocks had been dropped and the ripples caught
before they could spread across the water.

Then everyone was quiet for a while,
and I took their silence to be a reflection
of the image I had made -- perfect
surface held in that passing instant
when its disturbance first begins --
and it pleased me to imagine
I could capture their thoughts like that

until someone else said the sand and boulders filled
the swimming pool where Theodore Roethke died.
The air was cool and still, and I could feel
the gravel crunching beneath my feet
and hear the others' footsteps as they walked.
No one spoke again until we reached the parking lot,
where we said good-bye and got our cars unlocked.

It Can Be Anything

What you see in David Hockney's pools is the water,
rarely the light reflected from it on a window or wall.
Even when light throws a net over it, the reticulated
water moves while the world around it holds still --
a boxy California house; a ridiculous, spindly palm;
a diving board, rigid as a plank under a flat blue sky;
or the painter himself, tilting forward in his peach

blazer and white slacks, his expensive loafers,
stiffly contemplating the man who swims toward him
underwater. Or else there's a splash, the moment
when someone disappears and what you see is
the water leaping as if it were receiving a gift.
I have no idea what Hockney intended.
The problem is always the water

because it can be anything or nothing, like air
contained where he painted it, the abstract
in the concrete, the feeling in the hole
in the ground, the water filling it
the way it surely rises in a grave
after the spectators have all gone away.
Have I ever told you why I left Los Angeles?

Joseph Green lives in Longview, Washington, and teaches at Lower Columbia College. He is the recipient of PEN Northwest's Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency for the year 2000. A collection of his poems, Deluxe Motel, is available from The Signpost Press.