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