Cleaning Up: Bedroom

Cleaning Up: Bedroom

            I, who used to be inconsolable (and the world

wild around me)

            can stand here now.

                                                “History”

                                                Jorie Grahm

(you are the brass bobeche at rest

before everything above you is lit

and then when you descend, you let it all

go like any well balanced

candle, without a fuss or a mess)

It’s been twelve years.  No, thirty.  No forty five or six.

It started here.  No, it just ended here.  It began

            before she arrived but she brought some

            of it with her and she became we at one point.  Was it when:

there was no working phone in this place?

the baby was bit in the face

            by the dog and oh…my soul...

my soul was it when my brothers, one who:

lives a year through 

the war only to be killed

                        three weeks on leave at home.  And my other,

                                    brother too, three months after him.  It’s this, those two

car wrecks in the bloody sheets there’s a pack

of smokes under her pillow there’s that drone

of the oxygen machine there’s three pictures of three daughters

            and their arch-bishop oh this is hard this is the hardest

of all: the intimacy of a bedroom is what crushes the shy

yet at some point it all has to

arrive here and has to be swept up or washed

or scrubbed and dumped and what all can’t be managed

beneath these things will either lie down

in the grass like that new fawn or it will

be sliced clean through  with the clam hoe

or be shot straight up shot in the head

or

and this steals her when she swishes the hot water

in the bucket:

ü  someone’s coming

            home

ü  someone’s asking questions

            tomorrow

ü  someone’s sleeping off this poor woman’s dope

and sold the rest

She says:           I’m done here.  I’m done.

She says:           I’ll take these old quilts and housedresses and smokes home.

She says:           I’ll burn what I can’t cut.

She says:           It’s all in her chart, the ER checklist:

                                    overdose

                                    assault

                                    seizure

                                    suicide attempt

Brother, she says, you died first.  It was yesterday.  It was thirty years ago.  It was, second brother, this whole house under the roof of that prom car and you and two other kids died.  It was the first draft of anything—and standing back to see it all gleam see it brand new see it all and then toss the lit match over your shoulder as you turn to walk off when it’s all cleaned away or if there’s that other sort of bravery or resolve or just bone weariness after a night like tonight there’s no turning at all, it’s just a toss, just a watchful eye as the first thing the match lands on decides to lean in to the small flame and catch and pass it on.  The luck of it.  Pass it on and let 'er go.

Cleaning Up What’s PTSD

Cleaning Up What’s PT

                                    SD

I am the one chosen by the lion…

and dragged back from the shining water.

Yanked back to the bushes and torn open, blood

blazing at the throat and breast…

Taken as meat.  Devoured as spirit…

                           “Chosen by the Lion”

                                    Linda Gregg

(it’s just that you’re not shining

when I get here, and it’s this pain

that perches right on the lip

of my temples and laps, it’s own

ignorant ocean)

Saving the bedroom for last she thinks now maybe

she should’ve started there, even with a nose

cauterized by bleach, even furrowed

and crimped fingers apathetic to the boiled-

but-gone-cold-quick water—even, and this

is the worst of it, the car wreck

of a bedroom after the pure surface,

after that long time/first time under is at a blur

a panic really when her head goes cold

in the wind and everything under the chin’s

still a fabulous molasses, a thick dipping,

like that first thumb into the warming dish

with the bit of fried dough and the fresh melting

cow’s butter.  It’s what was on the breakfast

table when the phone rang thirty years ago

and stepping into this, (even after all the rooms

are cleaned) this takes her back... And still a seasoned cop—

or the Tet medic up the street, even, Jesus,

the priest sifting through his breviary:

            Lord + open my lips

            And my mouth…

Her brother told her, before deploying, that Vietnam was, he said:

ü  It’s Mary

ü  and her sworn sisters and a nearly man John

ü  It’s some Roman soldier just off the boat

ü  It’s this corpse and all the linen they could muster

ü  It’s a parting and a going out under a moon after he’s cleaned

ü  and that stone that infamous stone that fucking stone

            that in three days is a pebble a sweet worry in her pocket

            (he brought one back for her in  early ’69 and was dead

              three weeks later...a whole year there and home)           

Oh but those resurrection days have not arrived—oh but such

things as happen in broad daylight oh but the miles

and years between this and those is the submerging and the squeezing out

of water to wash a body clean, or a crime scene

though nobody will call it that for years. 

Cleaning Up: Bathroom...

Cleaning Up: Bathroom

“This is the edge of not running”

                        The Edge of Something

                        Linda Gregg

(and there are clouds

and wide spreading legs

of lightning and you are absent

from all this—absent)

She’d come this far to get this far without stopping

without thinking, without really touching

the swabs of bloody cotton plugging the sink

and then there’s that mate

to the set of teeth, what grinning?

Frowning? in an old margarine

container and flecks (if they were real

teeth that potting soil would be

along the gum-line) but here, listen

even false things tell facts

or if not facts, truths:

ü  left too long the fat

will separate from the fragrance

and the fragrance

from the water

and one wonders

is it still, after all these idle

months, shampoo?

ü  the nude spaces in the medicine

cabinet are dust.  what’s missing

was missing when they, whoever

they are, got what they came for

and left her. 

ü  what’s missing  matches

the receipts

            in the kitchen for morphine

            and oxycontin

            and amitriptyline

            and too many others to list

and there’s more, there’s so much

more but there’s two rooms left

to go and it’s late

and she’s made it almost

to the end without once thinking

about who broke

in who broke the dishes who

broke the bones

of the woman’s thin

cheek and eye socket who could make

such a blue, a school ink blue

her grandmother’s blue-black mourning

veil blue, or, last spring, the days

after ringing the new bull calf Hereford

and the blue-black contrast

against his blond

belly and the color, she’ll swear it had one,

of his bawl

in the barn at night and the stall

floor chipped and splintered

when she’d pull the sawdust and hay

away in the morning, the way,

in this bathroom she pulls

things now, with her 

second wind,

out into the middle,

into a pile, big enough for any stall fork

or shovel…

Cleaning Up Kitchens

Cleaning Up Kitchens

The soul makes out of ashes,

out of quicklime and white walls,

a crowd of seraphim singing.

                                    “Sometimes”

                                    Linda Gregg

(the slough of the maple comes alive again

in the hot pit that will make it

ash, ash, ash, and then, sifted, a pearl)

Before the bedroom, because that’s where

her bloody body was goddamnit

strung-out and flopped, matted and pulpy…

before going into it again

and the two rooms already clean

as the day they were made

there’s time, there’s a bit of time

for a quick smoke,

out on the back porch, and so she goes,

stepping over a pile

of sheets she’d found behind

the bathroom door

shitty sheets, and because there are those

three nightgowns spinning themselves out
in the wash

she’ll get that quick smoke

and come back in

and spray the most dangerous stains

and, after half a cup

of bleach, and a whole of Tide,

she’ll wind them careful

as a spool into the drum

and close the lid.

Don’t you wish everything was as easy

as a drum and a wash

a simple way to agitate all the puke

and blood and bits of lip

(though she can’t think about that,

there’s that bed to clean still)

And so, that smoke.  And a way to inhale
and exhale.  To cough.  

Cleaning Up: Room Two

Cleaning Up

                        Through a door

of what had been a house, into the field

of rubble, walks a single lamb, tilting

its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.

                                    “The Lamb”

                                    Linda Gregg

(I think, I think it’s so

that we are our own

Lascaux, inside you know…)

Room Two:

It’s different in the kitchen.  The table

has a crack down the middle, it’s

tipped onto its round lip, is a split

cheek.  But righting its not easy, not by

herself alone, not oak. But soon she sees its just

the absent leaf, when it was taken

out, well the table wasn’t

properly squeezed and it takes two

pressing against their bellies and she,

well you know, she’s just one.  And the old

table, before the fire, could and would

open up like warm spoons in cold

grease—but this one—well—she can

lift it, barely, and sweep at least, under

it, all that potting soil and random

clay shards and more geraniums and

the leaking spit of aloe

tips—the whole kitchen is

broken, all the chairs shoved aside

to make room for the ambulance

gurney whose wheeled

tracks in the sand and soil

lead all the way back

to the bedroom.  It’s not going

the way it ought to.  There’s just

a broom and her long reach.  Pushing

in and under, pulling out:

ü  a pair of wadded

up underpants.  womens.  soiled.

bloodied.

ü  a single row

            of teeth, half a set of dentures.

            soiled.  bloodied.

ü  cigarette bent like a neck

to the chest.

half smoked.

ü  dry, long fallen off the table,

            food. steak maybe.

            too far gone for the dog.

ü  unpaid bills.

ü  moths’ bodies.

ü  a wad of cat sick.

In Fantasia, she thinks, brooms and buckets move

all by themselves.  Mechanical.

The music can’t be won’t be

shut off.  She sifts through piles

of dirt, deciding what goes where

and in what soak.  And outside,

though she can’t know, a doe

noses against the seedling beets

and nibbles

and moves on.

Cleaning Up: Room One

Cleaning Up

There is a hush now while the hills rise…

and God is going to sleep.

                        “Fishing in the Keep of Silence”

                        Linda Gregg

(There’s that word again: Keep.  Castle Keep?  Own?  Put Up?

I saw it yesterday when I was thinking

about you.)

Room One:

Though there are no hills, none

to speak of anyway.  Just the slow

slope up the long dark

driveway and the pause of a car shifted

into park—then the idle

engine—then the quiet

tick of it all

cooling down.  And nobody

is home.  So.

It’s her own

mop and bucket, her own

Pine-Sol and bleach, it’s her own

rag and polish and vacuum.

It’s a couple of trips back and forth and she leaves them

on the porch

because it all starts

at the unlocked door:

ü  the flipped and sand-caked hip-

rubber boots.  And lifting them everything slips

off as though it’s all a table-cloth not

on the table all the way.

ü  the tipped and broken

geranium leaves and pink

blossoms all chaotic

confetti

ü  broken, but once saved and whole,

clam and mussel

shells, sharp shards and one

or two under her always

ungloved thumb nail (two weeks working

their way out and her friend

will be in rehab then)

ü  the half done load

of whites, really just three

pieces, a full drum

of grey water, greasy, long popped

soap bubbles floating above

the faded flannel (it’s been

a cool June) night-

gowns, hem long walks frayed.

And this all this in the little room just inside

the front door.  It’s dark.  Two hours

to midnight.  The corner of her straw

broom meets the corner

of the baseboard and the door.

They’re old friends.  Or at least there’s that sigh

of knowing when she pulls the handle

toward her,

drawing the dirt to her feet,

making a moat, no drawbridge this time,

wide wide wide for the maiden gone
the maiden still

the maiden the maiden

being sewn and sedated

thirty miles away.

Our Vernix Caesosa: What Keeps Between Us

Our Vernix Caesosa: What Keeps Between Us

                                    after reading Seamus Heaney’s 

                                                  “The Cot”

He uses the word keep like it’s been put up,

it’s been blanched then froze, or boiled and cared

for after their earth’s been split

open again, a dirty 

episiotomy (spell that gently, don’t

hack at it all, clam hoe sunk

row on row into the furrows)

and I have to think of those thick red

rusted fork-tines, fingers shoved

into the dirt up to her handled hip

and grunted on and pulled back, who said

by Jesus going out into reaping

isn’t better than practiced

sex, or putting it all in the first time, coddling

those turnip seeds carrot seeds no bigger

than a baby’s pupil and how conscious

you have to be with the long handled hoe, lifting the sharp

blade the way you might slip under

a broody hen to avoid her beak, her sharp

straight down between the knuckle stab

and congratulate the warm egg, so close

to a new garden’s spring row it’s almost a new-

born, before she’s washed clean of her

vernix, the deep bouquet of the ground

she came out of and nothing interrupts,

nothing’s casual, it will keep it will be kept,

it will, when you hand the land over

to May and wait and tend right on through to

October, the random rains and weeks of brutal

burning sun—oh yes—oh yes, oh yes—come

now, it’s any language’s translation of the Kama

Sutra, chapter this, verse that, look:  Look!:

at the split-heart strawberries in winter.  They’ll be

cream in his mustache and a grin when that pink’s

nearly thawed, all day in the sink

(and the baby’s down for a nap) And it still has

a bit of give, a bit of the firm—yes—oh yes—

they kept.

moon's lower lip

slice of melon—

slice of pie

crust, slice of the bottom

lip curled up, plump,

bright
BITE

I’m sorry how…oh, I don’t mean to start this way…

I’m sorry how…oh, I don’t mean to start this way…

Rainfall past any interrogation.

Questions and answers are not the business of the rain.

                                                            Jane Hirshfield

                                                            It Is Night.  It is Very Dark

I’ll try again.  Ok?  ok. 

ok—listen—awake at 1:am and the rain

is furious in its current

circumstance, like after

a terrible accident’s wild haired

survivor who runs off and isn’t sane anymore, it’s that

sort of rain.  Or how the new spring narcissus

are chopped off by the fat-

pawed clumsy wet dog of night...

…laying there

I hear it all and there’s a soft laugh

and a sideways slip back into the night

and I think of the two hands on his back

and the nonchalant push over-

board and the story

his sternman brought to land is the opposite

of what everybody knows really happened

out there, how the sternman said,

he said:

the warp

curled around his best

friend’s feet

and then everything

boots and all cleared

the gunwale and no amount

of tug or haul would bring him

back

…but see his hands are

clean look.

Not a hash

or a burn

… it’s bullshit.

…see how night clears it 
all away

and the black pavement, this early 

is streetlight is a seasoned cast

iron frying pan on Sunday

after mass, cooling after two

pounds of bacon and a dozen

eggs –

— it’s late.  It's early.  Hey,…

Inspiration

Inspiration

Alive and violated,

They lay on their beds of ice:

Bivalves: the split bulb

and philandering sigh of ocean.

Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

                                                         Seamus Heaney

                                                          "Oysters"

The knife I use to take the skin away

from the old and puckered potatoes was the same

knife he used to shuck clams.  Shock was the word

he said and I didn’t correct him because isn’t it

a shock to them the shoving under the coming

tide in a whole roller full of their tight-lipped

whispering spit, and even oh even more to wait

under the drapes of Spanish moss all day in the back

of his truck while the men grab their night

of twelve packs, grab the ass of their wives and laugh

at their stray dog boy, poor schmuck with his latched prick

but marvel too who all day on the flats felt the heavy

suck of mud on his boots and he can hardly pull

himself free but he’s dug more than all the rest and he’ll go

straight to her with his grip on a helluva good time.

He’s pure inspiration.  They’ll go home and take

all this sand, all these clams and dump them in the sink

these men who want a mess for supper.  Shock a whole

peck.  Freeze what we’re not gonna eat.  I tell you my Sweet,

listen to the way I slip in between the clamped lips

and with one quick flick cross the shell  and loose all that wet

throb and the black sandy cap and the easy way

that same potato knife glides under her all of her, belly

and neck and lift! and sniff! oh but isn’t that

what we all work for?  Isn’t it?