in infancy

In Infancy

-- Later on they rise much higher.

And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer

these particular glowing tributes

every evening now throughout the summer.

                                    Elizabeth Bishop

                                    “A Cold Spring”

Her thoughts are drops of rain.  She’ll watch them under

the umbrella of her skull.  They start to laugh in the clouds

of brain, like a discovery of her feet,

her toes, that they move, that she can make them

                                                                                    move.  Each bone

can bow, each can sweetly curtsey, beneath the slowing

mobile of elephants above her crib, each tusk

nub the beginning of trunk probing the shadow

of her heel on hand.  And mother’s kiss is a ripple up the skin into

                                                                                    thought—Body,

brain, don’t worry.  You are such the umbrella.  Each bend

and peak beneath is humility, is cream on her wind-pimpled skin.

Cut the Devil's Throat

Cut the Devil’s Throat

Because the truth: heaven’s wings, it is wings

            I mean to say, or no, not wings,

            but their fragility, their paused buoyancy,

            the hollow of their bonds crucial

            to their gain of flight.

Hear the covey taking off, stunned

            by some foot or finger in the bush,

            flushed (first stalked) by dogs and men

            with guns, their rubber boots a suck

            in the mud.

This flight of fear blots the sun from the whole

            sky…what’s now, floating down

            is a glow of marble rain for all the shit

            that falls on the visor of anyone

            not looking up. 

And any who do fire into the sky of feather

            cloud…thip, thip the bird shot but only

            fowl hear that and not so much hear

            as suck it in like a flat rock thrown high

            over the water

so that it’s entry barely calls out.  Cut

            the devil’s throat.  That’s what they called

            it.  Can you cut the devil’s throat?

            I’m not so good at skipping rocks,

            but I can

throw high enough so that coming back is fast

            and barely a splash.  I always look for stones

            that might, being flat, and round, take out

            the sun in just one throw.  Not ducks

            the way dad would.

I want them, beyond any stone or shot, to float

            in the Irish moss and kelp, I want

            to imagine their paddling feet.  Come

            winter, their sea will shrink.  It’s harder

            to get away.  Jesus,

they say, walked on such water.  Is it possible

            to know if he could float on it too?

            Oblivious to boots and dogs and guns? 

            I wonder, if he were flushed, could he

            push himself

up fast enough to gain the sky the way we’re

            all promised?  Or would he fall too, back

            into it all, feather and bone pulled

            into the breast, descending into the back-

slap, my father and brother on the ground.

            Well done, son, well done.

             

Star Anchor

Star Anchor

This is not my home.  How did I get so far from water?

But on this strange, smooth surface I am making too much

noise.  I wasn’t meant for this…The rain has stopped,

and it is damp, but still not wet enough to please me.

                                    From “Strayed Crab”

                                    Elizabeth Bishop

I’ve kept it all from falling apart, a face on a threaded rod-

five point spread against the thicker brick, flat as

a face-up wheel buried in the river.  You know, really

I’d already covered the crumble, the weight of the walls

falling into one another, as though, when the mill

workers went home and there was only one man to keep it,

and the ghosts of children who’d died there and then to play

there forever,

was a wall bowing to the one in front of it, the way

a gentleman would slip into his waist and wrist with one slick

shift and it would be sky he’d see in the shine

of his shoes, it would be a whole night of drifting and dipping,

his shoulders a shawl for a shadow’d old woman.

I am old too.  I am numerous numb and old.  The hands

that wrought me, the hands that screwed me here are up the grass,

are gone in wars, are shodding a draft horse for the fair,

are nodding at a bottle of memory, are anywhere

but on one of my points—aside from the furnace and the opening

of morning (and because the maples have grown over the receiving

door dock) I see little of light and I....  But I’m holding up.

I am.

Stones Atone, Don't They?

Stones Atone, Don’t They?

But roughly but adequately it can shelter

what’s within (which after all

cannot have been intended to be seen).

It is the beginning of a painting,

a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument,

....  Watch it closely.

                                    Elizabeth Bishop

                                    “The Monument”

We need them, I suppose, those stones

whose mien we see in the trees from far

off as small cities of sleep,

vaults of profound endings.  Except

she’s not ending at all, or even beginning to,

she’s just going down into it or under,

slipping inside a tiny whirl-

pool and maybe it catches her hair first

and pulls her back, two grasps, the foot

or the face and it’s too late to close

her mouth.  As for me, I’d never imagined

there’d be something like this after

all, the watching her sink gently

at first, then hour after hour until it’s just

a gesture, a wisp of smoke I’d only be

able to hold if I breathed in at the right moment

—but I was

there, I’d been left there almost alone

and she was dead already, even though

she was still breathing, had left

the room and tried to go home

with my father, but he couldn’t carry

her and my brother and my sister he couldn’t

carry all of them, his wife and his mother too

and it makes me debate if such

desertion can be atoned entirely.

Maybe all this time I’d been stupefied

by the whisper of the privacy

curtains, the slow

rise and decline of her breathing, and I

wondered:  what can be built that won’t be entirely

abandoned?  How is penance cut

for the dead in and out of the lean solidity

of a quarry of air?

Slow, Shhh Closing the Door Against the Morning

Slow, Shhh

 Closing the Door Against the Morning

sometimes bookmarks are anything

we can set between the page, nail clippers, a hot cup of coffee,

a clicked open pen, set quick when a door blows slowly closed, 

closed, and creaks the way every haunt but one would want it to,

and getting up from here means losing

                                                                        my place, even though

i’ve saved it, and pulling the mostly shut door all the more shut, because

on the other side my son’s asleep, and his window’s open a bit,

and he wakes easy and too early.  and behind the next door i close,

because the boy’s pulls against the frame with slick silence,

my little girl, who woke

three hours ago to pee, and it’s hers that talks back a bit, hers i turn

the knob to, and i think there’s a certain luxury in the trust of

a closed door when i’m not the one behind it—because i sleep

with mine open,

when i sleep, always have

and think too of the three i’d known of fires we’d had in our old

house and all four of those bedroom doors gaped open and the absolute

slap my mother swung into fire safety’s face as a whole upstairs choked

with smoke.  i’ve never been in a house

that’s safely burning. 

have you?  feel the door, the pull away hot and suddenly all the drama

of shattering the glass with a sheet-covered fist, the sweep of all the jagged edges

and what’s gone through the cotton will be picked out later, all the way

up the arm and to the top of the little finger—

                                                                        see how far a noise

goes?  see how far back getting up to a closed door at 3:30 in the morning

can take a hand opening a book, reading one piece in it, but not,

and going back—through all that smoke—to touch a door that creaks—

it’s cold—go on—it’s cold—open it.

Oh Everywhere, Beneath the Trees

Oh Everywhere, Beneath the Trees

Oh everywhere…between your boughs.

Pity the rising dead who fear the dark.

                        from “Morning Hymn to a Dark Girl”

                                    James Wright

He’s praising her.  That poet.  Don’t you want to be?  Praised?

Isn’t there something of Wright

            in us all—that the holy can take

the pressure

            of a tongue, the hot wind of a lung,

            the pool of more

            than a toe or a whole foot.  More.

            Two legs, a palm on one, a mouth

           

            How far can you go, alone here—

            are you alone?

            aren’t you only…it’s my hand

            glowing coal,

a silk fold over a silk fold.

            I am the whole garment.  Watch me.

            Let me

           drift down easy

committal

Committal

I can imagine men who search the earth

For handy resurrections, overturn

The body of a beetle in its grave.

                                    James Wright

                        from “On the Skeleton of a Hound”

Not even a bone or a favor,

only an empty doorway, a limp

chain—a tuft of fur still

in the blue collar.

I’ve thought about it in other words

but there’s still a slight rattle,

then a gallop when the wind’s

right and the bridge I stand

on begins to sway…it’s too

far to see a bottom, let alone

where he may have buried you—

all the yous—because

when it happens

more than once the names

and the bodies begin to blur,

every breed mixed in a mongrel

brilliance that smells first

before ever seeing, the gun

oil on his hands when he comes

to take everything apart

at the neck, gently so the cold

won't close over the pulse of raw

where the collar rubbed and stuck

and froze after chaffing, a red

so red it looked like a skinned

rabbit to me.  Oh Dog.  You are

a long line of dogs to bury

your nose into the palm of his

hand and imagine, do you? a moon

full enough to raise your neck

to, once you’ve peeled

yourself out of your heavy fur,

once the man, gun down, sinks

his boot into the shovel and digs

the way a boy would dig,

shaking against the pure geometry

of width and length

and the occasional curve

of a root from the nearby birch.

Salutation

Salutation


But then the best forecasters…
were those people

who managed to shade guesswork

into intuition, a very different order

of information management. 

     Windswept: The Story of Wind

      and Weather

                         Marq de Villiers

You know, all you have to do

is pinch that last capital D

in DEAD, pinch it between

your thumb and first finger

(or if it’s a bandage needs

changing, lift it from the left

foot) squeeze it or pinch it
and watch how it pops

at the belly and now DEAD

isn’t DEAD at all, it’s DEAR,

it’s a letter

you meant to write when

there was time, when symbols

were something else, when roots

licked rain, when the still middle

of a night was bright with light-

                                                ning

before that forecast of rain

they said was coming, the one

you ignored, leaving the laundry

on the line until morning.

On Aging

On Aging

I learned to hear your song

The breathing and the echo;

And when it dropped away,

I thought, for one deaf moment,

That I could never listen

To any other voice

                        from “A Poem for Kathleen Ferrier”

                        James Wright

maybe it’s this: choose who devastates

            you.  nothing random—it can’t be

            just any old animal—but canny,

            curious, a finger-tip ripple

            in flesh, in water, the extreme

            surrender to a dark road

            of an unlit know-where.

            come fully clothed—head/foot

            heavy leather and wool.  choose

            the first zipper or string.  jazz out

            of each layer of skin until

            every blemish rises to wet

lips.   kiss until all the cloth

drops away, skirt and shirt a pull

against the tipped shoe

            of old age.  sway between the wharf

            posts where the planks have

            rotted away.  because if after 

            all these years he’ll touch

            your soft body, soft the way raw

            dough is soft, I tell you, let him,

            let him spend the time looking

            for the mooring, for the moat

            of light at your feet—but listen—

            if you’re going to be devastated

            anyway, because something’s coming any-

            way,  be the one who’s blue

            black sky and somewhat cloud,

            so when you’re finally just skin,

            or moon and skin, he’ll work up

            at the feet first and wait

            for the little rain before he knocks

            on the door to come in—

            

Seeing From Far

Seeing From Far 

Dedicated to Mary Jordan

There are good things in this world.

It is dusk.

It is the good darkness

of a women’s hands that touch loaves.

The spirit of a tree begins to move.

                        James Wright

Maybe because it’s been unsensable

in other years, but this year it seems

the white oak was waiting

to open her canopy.  Each leaf,

curled like a fiddlehead, curtsied

to itself, shy regent of our lawn.  It paused,

a taut line beneath a bobber

of Hairstreak chrysalises, as though

by the thousands caterpillars hatched

on the twigs when we weren’t looking.

In stasis they shouldered the whole

bruising winter, deeper into spring

than all the other trees that went

to leaf and snowed their last

white or pink or lilac snow.  

Through it I’ve watched

the day-moon rise through her bare

arms all winter long, thinking

how simply we lay our faith

down on the ground beneath such a tree

and wait

for the earth or the sky or the wind to say now

it’s okay now to push out against

the hundred hundred knuckles that squeeze

everything in, that fire, eventually

a slow explosion into the very doubt

that makes us want to cut it

all down.  Listen: who, without such oaks

can bear a landscape of twisted limbs

and blue pocked-with-winter sky?  Without

a little conviction of the unfolding 

canopy?

Do you ever feel like you’ve been eaves-

dropping on a timid spring? 

That you’re divining for the all

chrysalises we stand to clap for

once they look up, down at an acorn scattered

ground and begin the long flight

into the green leaves after all that snow?

Oak, you can see from far.

You have taught us to plumb the way

you plumb: light inside the shell, light inside

the kernel, light inside

the effervescent root.

I think you are what we all wait for:

A someone to lean into us

to dig and fix a seed.

Later you’ll return to watch us open

our leafy hands, broad and warm,

the way you taught us, listening

the way you taught us,

sheltering us from the cold crusts

of winter, drying us in the sun

to push us gently

into the cool shade

of an ever-afterwards.