Wedding Night

Wedding Night

When you arrive late it’s not that at all

it’s because the groom had been waiting long

at the rock, for hours before some search

was taken up, and then it’s only in

the dark, like men do, groping for the way

with their sightless hands, that he comes to know

you’ve been there the whole time while he looked

everywhere but where you really were.

His story’s good.  When he reveals the muck

in the cups of his armpits, the backs of

his knees, every bowl of a place, every

print of skin rubbed inside of him he won’t

know while he searched, while he clung and stumbled

some angel tended you, when he was through,

kissed your bloody lips, and you can’t explain.

Only it was dark, you didn’t know the way.

When a Poem Arrives

When a Poem Arrives,

                                    …we know

from the beginning that the darkness

is beyond us there is no explaining

the dark it is only the light

that we keep feeling the need to account for

                                    The Marfa Lights

                                    W. S. Merwin

All it takes it seems is the slim vein of crow’s

beak grey, her only trace across everything else

that’s fixed in the morning night. It shifts, soon to blue,  

and a wind fingers in, cupped the way swimmers, who learn

early,  find their entry into the wet of it.

And the words as I've heard them these past

few days conceive, in a far away canyon,

a sun undressing herself.  And I’m so anxious

for the show it’s ink and fling and sheets

of rumpled crumpled tight or loose

paper, dry snow on the pine floor.  Why can’t I wait

to know?  Doesn’t she, with all her spice and singe,

need a time when she isn’t penetrating,

or, from here, on this hill, isn't burning with (I imagine it

so) her nude eye, a Medusa of slow blindness.

Though my limbs still work, and my tongue,

Jesus it’s a long way from grey

to blue in this cold sheet of a sky but don’t I

sleepwalk on just the same, not seeing it.  Don’t I.

House

House

An empty house was a found dream,

part of it forgotten, but perhaps not beyond

recall.

                        From Summer Doorways

                        W. S. Merwin

You were the house I wanted to know before I lived

in you, maybe when you were being

built, when every beam and sill, every hand

sawn shingle and cut nail was personal.  I wanted to live

in you when the windows let in enough light,

when every step up to the bedrooms didn’t cost

what it later would.  Because by then the old bones

of your spine were sagging.  Still, they were able to keep

the lonely abandoned woman and her four kids

dry and sort of warm.  I loved you even though

we were either sent outside of you or upstairs

inside of  you, until supper was ready

to be made, potatoes waiting

next to the ground beef thawing in the stainless steel

sink with a bloody wet ring around the Styrofoam

and siran wrap.

I’ve heard it told, old house, that you had ties to a sea

captain whose last voyage was run aground

off Diamond Shoals in 1921, coffee on her stove, spare-

ribs in a pan, spooks already setting a place

of their own, the way later the old handy-

man would slide inside of you, a tinker who came

to hammer old pots, sharpen knives.  You saw him

set up in your old barn and when he took

too long a girl went out with her mother’s one last knife

and find him swinging like a pendulum

from the center beam.

You absorbed him.  You soaked that old captain

who, like his crew, was never found.

You opened your back door and pulled them

into your arms, the way you did all the dead,

the way you would pull my mother

when she fell through your rotten steps.

Sea captains. Lobstermen.  Widows.  Delinquents

spraying their initials on the inside of you

when you went empty

all those years.  Arms as broad yours

must get tired.  They must.  At some point,

giving up the ghost means just that.  Even so

you waited. Ever gracious, no one

was home when you rubbed femur against femur

until they caught and you began your slow way  

down into the fox hole of it all.  The table’s set. 

Bread’s fresh out of the oven.  Potatoes

white as bleach, mashed and finally perfect.

Sometimes I think I’ll drive down that road

for those two and a half or three miles

and look, once I make it, up to the right,

way up the lane, and see your scroll

of simple rafters, your porch whose storm

door hinges went almost all the way

across, as though some wind,

when it came, would lift your skirt

somewhat tenderly, somewhat vulgarly

the way a father might lift the blanket

of his new son, just to check.    

Old crone home, you have been cremated now.

But I keep a singed piece of you I picked up

when I went home long after you were gone, charred

thumb of some window frame or gable end,

and I put you next to all the other dead

in a little model of boat I’ve propped against the wall

of a house that looks somewhat like you. 

And because she sits on her stern, as though

she’s rising up out of the waves, she’s always

floating, like smoke, or running aground, or finally

stopped at the end of a long back and forth swing,

boots skrying the air as though it were beach sand.  

Tempting Patience

Tempting Patience: On Cooking Oatmeal

the Old Fashioned Way

I want the oatmeal to be a slow tar-pit bubble.

The tick of heat beneath the pan,

the warm coil inside the sky

of a damp morning

is a back and back and back,

when men and women lived   

into their hundreds of years, when

patience, stewed like tough cuts

of meat, came to its very end

in a raw red, soft as a talked out jaw.

It’s guests who show up at the close

of such a life with their best perfected secret:

family cakes soaked in just enough

lips-sealed spike of cayenne and age-

cask bourbon all centered on the pulled-

out-for-company table.

Hasn’t some small pearl has been

prevented when it’s all so easy

and the grit’s gone, when the husks and brans

have been removed with machine precision

and we only ever eat the germ?

How can we ever be patience

when all we ever have to wait for is

three minutes instead of the thirty

five it takes for the water

to boil and the oats

to soak the scant salt, the arrival of heat?

Even the fast passage

from hand to mouth is too brief.  What

pray, had bored us?

Myth of Happy Marriages

Myth of Happy Marriages

So the feeling comes afterward

some of it may reach us only

long afterward when the moment

itself is beyond reckoning

                        W. S. Merwin

                        from “The Comet Museum”

It’s called sail rock and although

I’ve never seen it

from the sea I know it’s an island

of true stone that wind and tide

and other small things

have tried to hurl themselves

against, their shoulders bare to it

or bows or port or leeward sides

their starboard ass up in the air

with her pants down amidships

and the stoic pope remains all rock,

as though flicking

flies, as though it were

a grizzly with a fist

in a hollow log, claws dripping

with gold and comb and wild women

bees all frenzy of multiple suicides

against his nonchalant mouth.

The first time I got married I stood

maybe a mile in front and above

this gray shock

of granite.  The tide was in

the fog was in the gulls were in the horn

it was all anyone knew possible

in such place in early July.  It was liquid

predictability.  At a cross

between worlds my groom barely a man

fidgeted with his loose suit    

buttons his fresh haircut a little off

the ear—everyone was there—

except my mother who refused

on principle or hatred or because

I was leaving finally for good.

And we drifted like that, fraying

at the hem for years aft-

erwards.  Other ports.  Away from Lot’s salt

wife, we went down like so many

who climb hills that look simple

in the fog.

Later I wondered if last chances 

are somewhat like rushed

marriages.  They wrap everything

in tulle, or a suit and tie.  They pass pictures

around with dates and names written

on the back: Summer, 1996.  Maybe

it’s while Nova is talking about bears.

Maybe it’s only then I come to see

it’s 18 years later, and all those swearings

to keep and bear and swab have been

broken against every prow we ever stepped

on.  I can say most of that happened. 

Ok some of it.  Ok, just the bearing. 

All that keeping and swabbing?  Instead it was

the becoming (or else

I’d be beneath it) a solid wall

of granite while every craft he could

sail out on and arrive on came and went

the way gulls come and go.  In wind.

In fog.  And sometimes, while waiting

for lobstermen to throw out old bait,

perched on a cube of sail.  While the shore

waited, battered proud, always a credit

to lupines and guests.

To the Girl Who Taught Me How to Cry

To the Girl Who Taught Me

How to Cry

Eyelids then are cellar doors

and the anterior of skulls, the sockets,

are bone walls of a bulkhead

long ago closed, padlock

a copper rust.  That frame

and sill’s in every course of rot

and absence, but with some dim

tremor and shaky hand

we're made to crack open the door

and listen to the most clichéd

haunted scrape, made to step into

a dusty spider web’s fog,

and part the waters.

Because we always lived in

an old house we knew

our cellar hole was dug

by hand one hundred

and twenty years before I was

born.  For some reason

there was a cement, waist high wall

on the north side and the one

bulb in the room that spewed

a squat wattage

made the canned carrots

and wax beans look like little

headless and armless sentries,

dolls all orange 
all torso in yellow

or green bib-overalls.  With

a little imagination their rusty

lids could be that slack lack after a five day drunk,

the stubble gone thick

as my mother’s cold pudding

afternoon words.

It was in that old vegetable dark,

with voices above us in the kitchen,

the crash of glasses, the buzz

of crude laughter, that Carrie told me

her father had shot his girlfriend

and that she was sure he’d go to jail

even though he’d blacked out

and couldn’t remember a thing.  She was sure

she and her brother and sister

would have to move closer to

where the prison was—and she cried

because she loved her grandmother

who would be left behind

in a house older than the one

we crouched beneath, older than this dirt

cellar's rank of last fall’s potatoes

whose sprouts were eyes seeing

in the dark, feeling for the light, sprouts

she and I rubbed off and let fall

at our feet like we were barbers.

Today I’d say I would know her

face anywhere—all these thirty plus years

of passed water since we went

into the dark to get supper

while over our heads coffee brandy

and gallons of milk went down

smoother than tea, smoother than news about moving

away, or why, smoother than one eye closing a second

before the other one because some lash,

some dust (I'd swear) was stuck to my eye and she,

when we were in the light again, showed me

how to pull my top lid over my bottom lid

hold it hold it with a pinch,

enough to make me cry,

enough to float it all out so that it would lie

exhumed on the cheek, brushed away

before the door closed completely behind us
and she saw more
than that splinter or
dust or hair.

On Punishment

On Punishment

Sometimes it’s like this:

            punished for a broken thing

            like limits  or rules or not showing up
            or letting someone in

            we are made to sweep and clean

            soap and squeegee

            the high windows of our father’s

            house.  And from pullies

            and ties and the bowed bowl

            of chastity we are in the air

            higher than a playground,

            and the buckles that strap us

            are suddenly invisible, are unhooked,

            and somehow we are both

            things: prisoner and freeman

            and we begin to learn how to

            measure our own weightlessness.

            Pulled up to the top of a window

            we’re meant to clean but cannot see

            into, what’s behind us is suddenly

            in front of us—a mirror of birch

            and beads of windex we’d sprayed

            against the greasy breeze from all

            the days since the last washer

            wiped it all away.  Even though

            at first it’s sheer glass, and even though

            we’re maybe not entirely ready,

            a shift, a stomach lunge of vertigo

            pulls the bung from our lung and dear life

            becomes something like dear life.

            As high up as we are, some trapeze

            only ever half-way met, it’s windows

            and brownstone, it’s all the way down

            if the strap breaks that we don’t want

            to think about that because the glass

            we’re meant to clean blushes

            when the sun starts to let go

            and won’t we feel it now, the seat

            and the half-full bucket and the ground

            far enough beneath us that falling

            will break more than what we broke

            so that father’s can say it’s all meant

            to shape the mistake to make it into a bowl

            you’ll fire with your own self’s

            kiln of fear, water pulled out of the air

            bead by sweat bead, kneaded into

            the mud so that by the time

            all the windows are clean, mirrors

            of ourselves and what’s behind us,

            we’re ready to let go, to get down, 
            to hold out that cup

            to anyone passing by,

            to hear all the liquid minutes being poured

            into it.  And it's then, isn't it, that we're made
            to drink.  We’re ready

            when we’re on the ground again,

            clutching our stunned defiance now our grail

            and can only wonder
            at the way it throbs and heaves

           

Of Two, She with Bees the Moon in Tulle

Of Twos: She with Bees and the Moon in Tulle 

There is my window.

I awoke just now so gently, I thought I was floating off.

                          from “Woman in Love”

                         Rilke

Yet even though clouds veil your face

and try to blot most of you

and pull the light into them it seems—

and because they gather like pleats

as they pull then lift and drift away

your face is mostly light, this half

        

that’s revealed.  And listening is

the cloud and the gauze as it slips

over your cheek, it is 

a succulent surge of awe, like the first

time a woman actually wanted

something other than herself

inside of her, when she was opening

the way buds reveal themselves

to a bee, and later her companion,

the way they riddle in, buzz to bump what’s wet,

and pull out to do the same

monogamous crawl into the next

and the next until, drunk-full,

she barely makes it back

without collapse, without unfastening

it all too feveredly, each hexagon 
a mirror of you:

first quarter           new          waxing           waning

last             through clouds, some soon, or through

time that slides down the throats of intruders,

and guests alike, in a smoke confused with clouds

from a hookah that subdues

her with perfume across her only moon

face, her vibrating indefatigable  

longing

                   

            

The White Cat, Summer or Home Neutering at the Kitchen Table

The White Cat, Summer

or Home Neutering at the Kitchen Table

“Human madness is

 …a cunning and most feline thing.

When you think it fled, it may have but become

transfigured into some still subtler form.”          

― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Hardly a sterile place, our kitchen

table was not where I imagined

him going under, if I imagined it

at all, my friendly handling

until that little squeeze between

the third and fourth claw—because

at that point he was a number

of thirty or more and

even though he was a stunning flaw,

a fluke of pure white in a mostly variegated

litter, someone decided he didn’t need

his balls, and neutering was cheaper

than spaying all those females who were rolling

around outside in the mid-June

sawdust, some gone beneath a visitor’s

car maybe to stay when the car moved

and they did not.

His sisters and brothers and cousins and uncles, all his kin

would scream at night, and growl and crouch

in that stay away come closer allure

I didn’t understand as anything other

than tufts of fur drifting

across the dirt driveway, or stuck

in the mud, the girl somewhere else

licking herself, dazed by a different needle,

in an as yet unchanged

little body barely more than a kitten—

So catching him seemed easy, it was meat

in the palm of my hand and a seat

on the porch, it was patience with flies

who smelled it too, it was all next to

the unsplit woodpile and the path to the shed

where he’d had to choose

between two aromas

and once he ate, because he wasn’t

a trout and I didn’t jerk the line,

I hummed and scooped his matted fur into me, all

skeletal wild, and cuddled him into

the kitchen where the man who spent

summers as our neighbor smiled his gentle

ease, an ease, if I may leap out here,

I never saw at that table,

and I wanted him to stay, I wanted him

to wait while I caught all twenty

or more male cats just so I could see

the sea he floated in inside himself,

a Li Po sea complete with moon to fall into…

and that’s what I did—unwashed

meat stained hands—I swayed in his moon

and boat at the whiff of the anesthesia

the slight let of bladder and bowels, the thin

sheet absorbing none of it as it soaked

through to where, in a couple of hours,

I’d sit and eat potatoes and cube steak

all lump and dry as old shoe while the white cat

didn’t wake up in the box he convalesced in.

Walk-through

Walk-through, early spring

                 “Feeling along the dark undersides

of stones”

                        After W.S. Merwin’s “Identidy”

Spring but only at the bottom

even of the least of these

mountains—the greening

breeze pushes invisibly

between walls and fallen stones of walls

the heave of winter's

one last shrug of the surveyed

line until the boundary

doesn’t matter anymore

until what was meant to be kept

in or kept out is gone

and the keeper is gone, the who

who consumed them but

before that a banked winter 
of bails of hay

against the shed for them.

            If you’ve lost your faith

in snow, it’s mid-April yet.

The cheek of the mountain

will meet you and raise you

so when you come back down

you’ll be naked and Prodigal,

the shit of pigs packed

in the thinning tread of your boots

though not pigs, instead

it’s what’s been decaying all along,

what fell against a edge

of those weather smooth fence

stones and shifted them, so the seal,

where four hands two hundred years

ago and all the hands from then

to now maintained in late spring,

is broken and shifted, have made

a small sill for the coming

of May, an altar flat enough

for a sill, dark enough for a hide-e-hole

for some new vermin, their eyes

and spine aimed and vibrating

right at you as you top the hill,

though how would you know,

how can you tell one fallen

rock from another especially

if it is mostly beneath a still

green pine pushed to break

in the last blizzard tipped

and leaning into that crucial

stone, both still cemented with snow

while the altitude presses its maw  

against your esophagus to make you cough

and you turn back down

without marking a thing out of place.