apex predator

apex predator

How he came upon the wet hollow

of it on the beach,

how the gulls, salvaging, wave smacked,

were still

having their saturated way with it,

lifting a wing to pick and peck

at the cavity.  Nothing there to save,

not a feather or a foot

(not that he could)

Because what’s bald about it is lost

in the salt and flotsam, the clay-gray

foam every December tide’ll toss.  Because combing

brings things like this sometimes:

naked nature with her legs

spread wide to the lidless sky.
And all manner of birds, crabs,

sand fleas meet to take their turn

to crawl or hop into the cupola of its tomb

and bend their head to eat. 

And wouldn’t I,

given the right desire, do

the same?  Scatter the scavengers

to their wait while I thumbed through

the wings, the breast, the horn-hard

rugged beak, almost rigged with teeth?  I’m

not so special, walking away. 

If things were a different, if it were fresh-kill-

random, I’d be cupping my own

prize to dry above my kitchen window,

a wing feather maybe, and grieve

for a mythology

I’ve only ever read about or heard

about, but never once seen,

even when eagles,

in flight right in front of me,  are black and white

simple against the dove colored cliffs.  Such birds build

their nests on faith.   And fall from sometimes.

Straight into the sea, meat and a few

curios for men and me,  

for gulls and fleas, unspeakably at ease.

At Sea in Snow

            

                         For the infinite air is unkind,

            And the sea flint-flakes, black-backed in the regular

                        blow,

            Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;

                        Wiry and white-firey and whirlwind-

                                    swiveled snow

Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

                                                            (13)The Wreck of the Deuchland

                                                            Gerard Manley Hopkins

It’s different, it must be, to see at sea the soft

(yet mosttimes not) long drift (or sometimes not)

of flake on flake on flake, and the way

it accumulates on the deck, the way it’s absolutely

swallowed by the salt-rimmed lips of each low

or high slope wave meeting the dip of the ship: utterly There.  
And then.  Not.

How, now, seeing the pocked sky and the inch high

white on the coats of the crew, they in black boiled wool

coats, pounding the bow to crack the weight of the ice, 
how they disappear in the wind and snow

in their slow clearing of the deck so that they’re in

and out, like the ship in the wind, of the frame: visible                                        absent

visible              absent                          visible

Or they’re a lighthouse beam, whose straight out from shore eye

creates the perfect aperture  -  hole: closure : hole : closure - a code

of what cliff you’re about to break apart run aground on…

but oh if my brother could be here he loved snow he just dug

and tunneled and flung into it when he…

and the pitch shifts and the snow, what drifts past him, his

turn whacking at the deck, what falls into the dark drink, is gone

all gone, as gone as all the boys that day all eight boys

when the eye when the sky when it all everything (after

they died) was snow-falling quiet.

On First Hearing the News

“Have you any news of my boy Jack?”

                                                Rudyard Kipling

On hearing the news who can ask, with grit, for dignity?

Oh but the wrest and bulge in such bellows as lungs

the dependence on the sail on the wrap

the tight right roll and knot when such as this wind

will puncture any all full from mast

to deck.  Best, but how to know when (but when

                                                                        is

                                                                        never

                                                                        on watch)

we’re captain of such wind in our tip and roll,

the rope wound round and through what cousins it

and governs full length across the beam, like some medieval

liturgical Good Friday, what wind and how, what shoals

what open water, what scraped keel, the feel (but the tongue

                                                                        a muscled

                                                                        compass

                                                                        what, dear

                                                                        and who)

Oh, furnace or doldrum, to turn my way in each

when what they speak, what they speak dismantles 

my ever every ease.

Dowsing

Dowsing 

and first you need a live Y of hickory…
and after a time you'll feel your eulogy
in your wet, wet feet       

Never having felt the roots

of his hair he scrapes and pulls and rubs

against the head of each

follicle that falls…  he holds up against

the panegyric glow of the kerosene's  moat,

a broken halo, a jaw on the white

white page, a fox jaw he’d seen once

as a boy, black on white and bright wet

red against the snow and the sprung closed

trap he’d leaned into a day, maybe, before,

to set…and still fire wonderful that coat,

his ungloved hand buried to the pimply skin.

And the cold the stiff cold scorched him—

because he’d expected warm maybe—

a broth or a tea, but she, the swelling belly...

and his awe was driftwood in winter, was crushed

under the cove of his diaphragm,

until the thaw, until some mercy opened his mouth,

the way spring let go or seemed to let go

all at once and that very same caught log

was pulled into the ebb of the tide like all the rest—
because what do you say, standing at the periphery 
of twelve white boxes?

but it wasn’t like that, it was never like that—

dowsing sermon words—eulogy words—it was at first 
the nose of the vixen sniffing the air and coming up

to that moss covered trap and leaning in and snap!

up off the plate, that fast, so what’s sprung

is sprung but the getaway is more marvelous,

is pure grace, is a grin across that golden grass

he wanted to see when he was nine, when that tail,

swallowed by the hillside was just that, not the snow,

not the black goon closed on a nose, a mouth,  a toothed

muzzle, chewing words, and no sound, hell no, not a yip

or a wheeze.

to lift roots and ink and air

To Lift Roots and Ink and Air

“and by twos and threes

the children sank”

                        adult eye-

                        witness

when the drowned are exhumed  

it’s not really called that.  and when the nets

are cast out, and hooks and weights…

when a boat drifts and the oars lift and in the still waters—

or it’s supposed to be still, it’s supposed to be

quiet, even the crows, even those, black flashes

of prophesy scudded to other trees 

when the first boy is brought in by his sister

who right there on the shore needed no

exhumation at all, just a puff maybe, 

of breath, just a gust, the way one would cuff

the face of a panicked mother, cuff-cuff- then a puff

the hot air out, in, in deep

enough to reach that lung, to get it going

again.  it's later, a lot later, she'll remember

the chuff of flight, the shuffle of the air and the weight
of the birch limbs heavy with them, those birds 
and the liquid wing of ink

spilled that last week across the desk, taking the face

and breast of a crow, and even though it was sanded and dried,

and wiped there's a stain, a soak to

the grain, the air wafting in from the open June

window and by Jesus wouldn’t you know it’s still

seems tacky come September when teacher

dabs it—his desk—the first boy—and carries it

to the front of the room and covers it

with her mother’s best white doily

and a scented geranium gurgling red, rescued, 
root-bound in weed and gloom.  Would you look

at it bloom now boys and girls, come take a breath of it.  And the crow fades
beneath the lace, fades and stays mute

until he's exhumed too, lifted to the light
after such heavy, heavy things laid down
on him
 

After, the Beginning Was When the Word Became Void

Before: Creation:         

One:    And light for day against night

Two:    And a firmament against the waters

            And the waters in a ball against a spin to make land dry land

Three:  And grass and seed and trees fruit trees against themselves but within themselves

Four:    And lights against the sky a wide eye sky never closing only turning

            And a quiet eye always sometimes open sometimes not

            And stars         those too                     on the hem of heaven

Five:    And birds  And fish  And whales  Against the wind and water they multiply

Six:      And the cattle creep in the dust         

            And all the beasts creep against the trees

            And the seeds inside the seeds inside the seeds inside the mystery within a firmament

            And least of these                                me                               between beasts and trees

                                                            on my knees bending knees

                                                            sweeping clean the earth

                                                            for my Sweet Pea

            And we creep  we eat weeds   we sweep the sky with our baleen mane, our fractured jaw

After:   New Creation:                                    

Six:      And we creep in the dust and screech like bats against bricks and moonlight

Five:    tight light under the roof of night against all day gone day

Four:    gone out day forever out like the stars too and no way to know our way

Three:  to the gate, after all the grass is pulled away, after all the mud and clay are laid square

            after he’s laid prostrate and I fling my fist-ball of earth in

            reverse reverse to the earth

Two:    to rub my face raw with His curse of it that firmament against the water

One:    that night against light

November 19 and 20

the wind is a mouth a biting mouth a glacial tongue

at the end of your tundra lung.  it is the last cling of the maple

stragglers, flint thin, don’t float, don’t drift, don’t know

where they’ll rot come one spring or another.  though not

declared for another month, it’s winter.  it’s grieving season. 

and grieving you is not wind but glass, armonium or harp, with its

reliable cat-sized paten of water besides.  and each glass

(wine maybe, and brandy) is a different kind of full.  it’s tips

of fingers, it’s lips.  and each are mesmerizing to stand

beside, to wait beside, like the posture and the gait

and the stride of a mother bird feigning

not the noted broken wing but life entirely.  the float

the groan the still vibrating tone of the inside of your throat,

intubation raw, must have been some come-true prophecy

in tissue instead of lace, you know, how the women

from the Old Country could tell your life in the pattern

they tacked to the pillow, each going in and over and under:

a road a boy a forest…I bet you knew your own future

by heart, and like a touched glass, once the vibration is

lit with the tips of wet fingers there’s no stopping.  it’s

a black ice ride.  it’s amitriptyline and morphine.  it’s a bed of stars. 

it’s the way you tip your head back into the dark.  how

it’s all glass.  how it’s flaking lips.  how the chap and chafe

of yours, the raw meat at the side of your mouth,

and your tongue is your only hand left in the world.  and that one

left-alone-leaf after the wind is through.  After the mouth

closes and it’s still there, and will be all winter long.

Icarus

Icarus

As though he’d jumped too far from the swing

high as he could ride

and then

let

go

and it was all a blue blur

it was momentary

it was

fli-

ght

and then

a

tight

jerk

you know

how those certain songbirds

push

and

pause,

push

and pause

so sudden they’re just knives covered in sky

it’s just roof to birch

in one dip

of the tail

and two quick puffs –

                        or like the older boy

behind the shed

smoking

and his fanned

recoil

when he hear’s

his name

but this boy, the red gravel-rash apron his bare chest is, now it’s worse than that swing he fell from last year, that coming down flat or nearly and how some force kept pushing him until his cheeks, his neck and elbows, the obligatory knees—he looked like a bowl of cranberries whose white bottoms haven’t seen enough

                                                sun –

and she’s tweezed each piece of lake stone, bone over bone, out of his cheek and teeth, his groin and backside and she’s – well she’s not going to ask – she wants to see an almost awake boy, face and neck, almost the boy dragged across the bottom in the dark

the way he may have been pulled

across the sky

Icarus

sweet Icarus

just before the world started to melt

at this feet.

Paradox of Aching

Maybe it doesn’t start out that way,

pain with salt, stiff knots in the muscle

of hips, an electric inspection for a berth

it can loiter in to burn a name for itself.

Consider: bark, when stripped, is an idle

dog in the slim shade of a roof at one in the afternoon.

The throb is in the meat, the twitch

when the hand gets magnet close, enough

to suck it down or push it completely

away.  Both with a growl.  Both with teeth.

Shit if you want the pain, get the hell out.

If you don’t, touch the dog.  She’s not

asleep. 

when looking is finding is knowing the end of it all

On Hearing of the Death
of a Girl from Home;  On Hearing
Her Father Was at the Scene

I lick my thumb

and dip it in mould,

I anoint the anointed

leaf-shape.  Mould

blooms and pigments

the back of your hand

like a birthmark—

my umber one

you are stained, stained

to perfection.

                        Seamus Heaney

                        Field Work

when below the cold surface of the early November

bog an infinite stillness is labored and born.

when it is labored and borne by the first hand

to pull your thick matt of hair off your cheek

when that cheek is mother of pearl …

when that burped perfume of the bog…

when the red blueberry leaves…
when mud, nettles and runty stones…

when it’s the first early snow—who’ll know any

liberty from this division's incessant hammer  

when maybe, instead, all of your last breath was looking

for a shape to take

when finding one is your father finding you--a shape only

the dead can take

when your father.

when your father:                                                                     :holds your hand.

           

                                    when that hush-hush surge.

                                    when it slips away.

                                    when everything everything goes and goes, it goes

                                    .