Friday, November 20, 2015

Speculation




Speculation

Chainsaw three minutes
hours later in rain
smell of resin.
                   W. S. Merwin
                   “In the Red Mountains”

If kelp.  If bait.  If boat.
If fiberglass repair.  If swing-sets.  If hours swinging.

If barefoot if new
shoes if a mother if her

mother.  If Hemmingway
If Harper Lee.  If Robert

Frost’s “Home
Burial.  (If his Elliot)  If fever

cooled if unabandoned.
If Listen-

ing.  If sex
waited for you.  If you

wanted it to.  If roast
beef if Sunday love if Jesus if Muhammad If Moses If Buddha If Krishna

If a woman.  If her two hands
if her mouth her throat if before

you were born if the un
aborted one if brother/sister if

aunt or uncle or.  If father.  If it worked.
If hanging yourself.  If blisters from

the rope if they didn’t heal if they did
if you lived if you died

If it wasn’t her in the road if the snow
if the phone if the way

if work if cigarette if fishing if thick
ice if unbroken plans

if lists.  If it was

It wasn’t. 

Eight Years On



Eight Years On

Shutting your eyes from the spectacle you
Saw not darkness but
Nothing

On which doors were opening

                                        W. S. Merwin
                                        "Pieces For Other Lives"

There’s that gap, a secrecy so vast
it's a breach we stand at the edge of

watching, waiting
while our children and mothers
turn away from us
and into it and the space

where the quiet is roused out of God’s loneliness.
This is the cleaving I still feel
today, the way your hand gripped
my hair, a tallis
of consecrated cloth.  
And when it started to tear
the sound was inaudible as a pall
on your urn that whole night
of sitting.

I'd watched you and watched you
as they wheeled you down
the corridor toward I didn’t know where— 

I didn’t know then
if I’d ever see you again—

And the cloth of us
it was curtain
the holy of holies
rent in two.

And in the space between the two pieces
a scream silent as a tulip bulb

in November

Friday, June 12, 2015

Raking




Raking

who reads into distances reads
beyond us, our sleeping children…
                                    Seamus Heaney
                                    “Travel”

Bent like carpenter’s squares
The whole field was stripped, unzipped
One rake pull at a time: swish/tip
Swish/tip the whole morning swish/
Tip through and through.

He’d owned the field and set me
To work at the string, row on row
Around and over stones.  I’m as
Bog-caught as moss.  So it’s elbow
At the knee and it looks all the same blue

In the pail until my two handed carry straightened
Me.  That five gallon bucket slumbered
Every ten steps or so and the winnowing
Machine so so far away and wouldn’t my toe
Knock against that stone and almost,

Almost tumble into the rug of small
Sticks and leaves.  But listen:
Recovery is sometimes as modest as shifting
The weight of the load from one shoulder
To the other.  And because my reach was
Short

The bucket dragged and scuffed
The August-hot leaves, yellows and faint
Greens.  It was routine: fill it, pick it up
And walk aways and put it down and do it all
Heading toward the rows of stacked

Wooden boxes factory stamped.
I’d be paid three dollars
A box.  It was hot.  It was a course of tugged
Twine, tin pie plates tink- tinking on their staves
To shock the crows away.  It was crushed
Cans and sweat in my eyes and men mostly going
Up their row slick as butter, going and going.  I’d pass

My father and my sisters with this bucket.  And
We’d talk, me and this spilling pail: Let’s rest
You and me.  Let’s take it here to sit, let’s… and we
Did.   Head through knees I’d see the thirty six
Teeth of the rake still filled
With leaves, with little sticks, some long blonde

Grass  scrape at my ankle.  I’d see the whole
Field from up there, almost a bowl
Filled with the day’s haul of the small sweet blue

World.   Rakers, it’s a short season.  The winnowing
Machine is low on gas.  At last I pick it all
Up and walk all the way without stopping
This time, without one more sway, without one more
Glance at the crows up top cawing at the sun
Going down.  And without saying a word but

My own name to the man who tips my bucket
Into the mouth of that machine. I watch it all:
The berries falling down, like sky in a box.  The heat
Of the belts and swelter, the choke of exhaust
Coughing out the reign of the field with her leaves

All spring, through the bloom, through the browse
Of bees early on, through summer to now
When it all comes down to packing it
All away.  All that chaff.  All that not needed green
Beneath, green that tomorrow will be a memory, and still
All that blue, blue, all that blue ready, bulging
With sweet fruit, oh yes, ready.


Thursday, June 4, 2015

Visiting Hours




Visiting Hours

Now, high overhead, tiny figures
begin to rappel down the rare
filaments of imagination, along fibers
of the optic nerve and down
into the hippocampus,
into the landscape of days.
                                    Brian Turner
                                    “From the West” : MY LIFE
                                    AS A FOREIGN COUNTRY

Hospital hallways are veins are sharp upper
cuts left right swing shut with the hush that hush
you know that hush that pad against the boot
against the shock on the chin the shock
of the dead nestled finally in their head
in the cavity left behind dry as any aged tree
rot dry as tongues long without water long
without words.  Walking them is really crawling

them even though two feet and not two knees
hit the maintenance police linoleum a wax
mirror a cloud a mirror a cloud those thousands
of feet/knees and its God on call and that shock
on the lip when the first concussion bomb
detonates and look:  who’s lifted with that initial
wave lifted the way water lifts when what’s plunged
into it remembers it has air the whole way down—
and maybe there’s no bottom at all no bottom

but those currents of atmosphere we never can
consider not being from that depth, not at least
until we’re riding them and pushing them and making
love to them after a long time of not making love
after a long time of simple naught, of those nerves
jazzed hall ways and nights and knights with their sponge
swords swabbing the walls that concussion man
I felt it in my feet I felt that mother fucker all the way
and it’s a pretty thing a real pretty thing like scalp

skin on the charcoal mountain meaning snow meaning
the iv drip’s pulled meaning in the days to come
the hospital  (listen, it’s doable) is row on harrowed row
slow and a stone bench and some thrown
water and you can visit any time day or night rain
or shine and nothing I mean nothing will ever crush you
like this bomb this pin-pull again.

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Oh If Caution Were Soft. And It's Naught But Whisper,,,,












Oh If Caution Were Soft.  And It's Naught But Whisper,,,,

                          ...the rain
is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
upon the glass and listen for reply 

               "What My Lips Have Kissed, And Where, And Why"
                Edna St. Vincent Millay

Consider the small incen-
diaries laid against the frame
of the heart, along the bone
cage wired with nerve
and muscle and tense
suspension.  Consider
the instinctively mixed
mortar fastening it all
and the precision of
every pause and ever after
detonating.  And those
limbless are carried off.
Those dead are buried.
Those shocked beyond.
Those rocking unnerved…

Don’t you want to touch
the undergrowth where once
she laid her feet so near
the touch-pin the case itself
sweats from the wait?
Don’t you want to diffuse
with the talent of a Casanova
every wire every fiber
and love her back to her-
self?  Don’t you want
to bridge the fissure
with your tongue, rappel
into that fissure-deep
crevasse to a solid fault-
bottom, where great plates
groan and ripple up
their purr?  And the cor-
dite of it, even years later,
on your lips?




Friday, May 29, 2015

full moon in four days




full moon in four days

for Jose

you sent the rain
            into the tide
                        of wind you sent it
                                    into the rake-
                                                furrows pulling
                                                            back the sea.
They were old
            friends
                        the rain
                                    and
                                                the
                                                            sea
Thunder and flash
            are passionate
                        gatherings, a canopy
                                    of cordite and crack
                                                as though who’s going
                                                            to war has returned
to break the host
            of mass
                        in two: you
                                    high in
                                                the sky
                                                            saturated with the
                                                                                    persuasive rain, a train
of cloud rolling
            roiling derailing
                        far enough up
                                    the tracks that
                                                ocean and rain
                                                            salt and plain
                                                                        comingle
until time
            and heat pull
                        them up from
                                    their watery bed
                                                and change them
                                                            completely, the way
                                                                        the war trampled living
who still
            look in the mirror
                        after the battle
                                    knowing it’s not
                                                them returning
                                                            but something
                                                                        else entirely
because of the rain
            and that salt
                        that brine
                                    of road and sky
                                                and foam skeining
                                                                        together
palms wide
            open hello after all
                        this strange time
                                    friends, always now

                                                            friends.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Litter




Litter              

                        Passion is work
            that retrieves us,
lost stitches.  It makes a pattern of us
it fastens us
to sturdier stuff
no doubt.
                        Jorie Grahm
                        “I Watched a Snake”

Litter we let lie litter we tear
and crumble and throw
madly away tight rumple of
a ball or toss nonchalant and all
the care of the mistake is hidden
in one of those folds, it’s spit
without spitting it’s not
the work alone we grind our jaw
on but those hands sweeping
like a broom that buckle us
from behind the ambush we swear
like all the profoundly addicted
we swear we knew we did we knew
shit the disguise was so like
that partridge in the trees we’d walk
right by whistling barrels eye ball-
to-eye ball- shells tight as hibernating
snails breach open safe as sky
and after long after the plastic frown
like that mouth the hull tip stepped on
brass head like any brass
going green already after it’s ejected
before it hits the moss
before even it’s clutter telling the whole
world the trajectory
and not one single flat fuck give a dam
the blood’s already down the left
side of the crag where the bird spooked
and flew shock boom flew
and the trigger is natural after the breach
is slipped to its lip it’s natural
it all fires after that and just as natural
I suppose after what’s hit goes down
and bleeds and sometimes moans
and if the hunter cares he’ll dangle off
that crag and grope a minute and hope
and hope the bird although furiously dying
is waiting and there’s little wind