Vera Icona or Volto Santo

Vera Icona or Volto Santo

Yesterday a student told me about her best

friend, how he put a towel over his head

and laid it down on a train

track. 

And later, while waiting

after school, first for my daughter, then my son,

I watched the five-year-olds sprint

from the line to their mothers,

shrieking

for the joy of her face.  And I wondered

at the distance between

that unrelenting love and that boy

with his ear against the thick vibe of cool steel

biding

his ride?  And I thought, hearing

Rachel say she missed him still, she missed him,

how in some way she was Veronica holding out

her veil days after the crucifixion,

at arms

length, and there’s the face, and one

or two thistles stuck in the weave.

Shit.  Isn’t life Shit. A Green Mile runner

tred by the desiccated?

Isn’t it

the edge of a mother’s bed on Mother’s Day.

Isn’t it the space between the final

extubation and the gathering

at the rail, her percolating moan

drifting

like a struck bird, and isn't it, I’d like to think now,

a hand-woven head veil, pinned

to the line after a long wash,

next to the sheets,

the jeans,

and children at dismissal, in awe

of this stiff wind, hiding in and out of it
the scurry from line to line, flash
and scoot and fall between it all,

then finding

the fingers that wipe them,
grasp them cheek to teeth
then just, and suddenly, let them
go.

After the Salt Marsh, the Sweet Grass Pulled, Plaited

After Gathering in the Salt Marsh, the Sweet Grass Pulled is Plaited

Show me a woman who does not dream

a double, heart’s twin, a sister

of the mind in whose ear she can whisper,

whose hair she can braid as her life

                                               

                                                from “The Book of Ruth and Naomi”

                                                                Marge Percy

One center reflects another center, base to lid.  But how many fibrils,

such braids?  And then, how many braids?  
Thirteen?  Thirty three?  And how many steps in the gather to the final

pleat?  Even though only one scalp cap throbs with blood it's her long

long memory that plaits you into a taut Passmaquoddy ash and sweet

grass weave—can't you see those beach grass baskets women sit with

after the long mid-summer cull at low water—sweetgrass

up to their hips then laid flat as a swaddled baby, kept cool so it won’t go

brittle, so, as they do with Palm Sunday’s thin fronds, they won’t burn

in a year to smudge the third eye shut for Lent? They smudge for other reasons.

Each blade, each splint has its root in you, her cool bog, you the who in the song she sings,

gleaning alone, before she’s cut forever from that place.  Her mourning

is breathless, separate, until, one by one, in a way wind could never do,

it’s all unity again, dream and heart, a basket bottom, a tapestry of brown

ash and grass, it’s one girl’s hand reaching for another girl’s hand,

walking off the lip of the frame, then nearly out

caught, when the ends are tied, by the same grass top, free

as Ruth and her Naomi, from the plait that was pulling the screaming scalp,

to choose to contain, once it holds water, what’s gleaned against all that's
chaff.

Through the Sun-Stained Curtains at the End of a Long, Long Day

Through the Sun-Stained Curtains at the End of a Long, Long Day

                                                                     

                                                                      Memory

is the simplest form of prayer.  Today you glow

like warm precious lumps of amber in my mind.

From "Black Mountain" by Marge Percy

 If it’s true—about memory being

the simplest form

of prayer, what happens

when memory becomes

a thin linen

tea towel

and the tea, tepid,

poured and misplaced

next to the burning

cigarette filter, next

to the day’s

unopened mail—

the door’s open just

that her cats come

and go

with the flies, with the

close of summer

wind, with the tide

going out,

half a mile away.  Earlier,

when she first came,

she’d clam, the flats

briny as a third child in quick

succession, and that

one up the beech

with a spoon, no shoes,

sunk like gulls who

try to glide

but only get as far

as their squawk in

a south-east

breeze.  There’s

a half a peck in her

roller.  I remember.

Does that mean

I’m praying, simply,

or simply because

it’s clear today? But today

there is no tea. 

The linen, pissed

on by the feral

cats, has been turned out

of the room.

All that’s left

are those pocked black-

crusted scars

what her stray

cigarette embers

burned into the sheets

that still dress

her bed,

that still mark

a Hansel path

from the kitchen

to the bedroom,

then beyond

though I don’t know

where.  I simply

don’t…

A roof over our heads...

A roof over our heads...

You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound.
Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks
barbed and drawing blood with their caress.
                                                                from “My mother’s body” by Marge Percy

Don’t we all?  Don’t we all live
in unsettled houses, their frames
adjusting to the seasons
with much more aplomb than we
do or even can?
                                the May lilac waft, or, going back two
                                months, the frozen clothesline warp
                                bowed low in the still fisted, elder-fierce March
                                or ahead again, rain in the cistern’s  
                                generous edge of the wefted scum of bugs?

Windows.  Who wants to see anything more
                                than with the level eyes of the first
                                floor?
                                Consider the second or the attic?
                                (and looking up, the
                                cellar?)
                                How we rake
                                every sunrise to gauge
                                the day’s approaching cliché:
                                a deer in the new lettuce
                                a crow on the light pole?

Doors, then are throats, doors and stairs
                                the course down the middle, the up      
                                or down
                                a growl or purr, a
                                pulse besiege increase
                                of dirty
                                dishes
                                of puckered
                                bed covers
                                and thrown down wet face
                                cloths and
                                towels (warm melting soap)

                                It takes it all
                                in pace, all this: and the way
                                into the basement, the way the swing
                                of the door rides low, the way it sticks to
                                then chafes the kitchen floor.  In time there’ll be
                                a scar, a perfect half
                                (or most of it) arc from
                                the threshold to the first step
                                away or toward.  The only

                                evidence of unremitting friction.  And listen, when
                                it all begins to burn, two things meeting
                                to rub themselves together like sex
                                it’s fire, and the first thing to catch
                                isn’t the proverbial curtain—No,
                                the first thing will be the floor
                                beneath the low swinging door. 
                                Even beneath that, between ceilings/floors
                                a suspended capsule, hoarded ore


waiting for nothing at all but a moment
                                where stroking becomes smoke becomes
                                glow becomes flame, moment after moment
                                floating up out of the cracks.
                                But not just smoke.  Voices.  Voices, voices
                                of the long dead,
                                (or the upstairs dying)
                                resurrected by the simple
                                continuous
                                opening going down opening coming back up

last full moon of the year

last moon of the year

Given our way of tracking

days, moon,

given the weight of time that seeps

then rises amidst what’s green,

what’s stone, what’s pushed

up through all that’s packed against

the grass,  against the visage

of winter’s gravid demand,

the full of you is immersed 

as you've always been, below

this copse, between

these bare fingered maples

 and into, from where I’m living now,

a perfect, well augured

tomb.  Even if I took

my first step down into it,

to finally at some end stand

inside its somehow still fresh

depth, the you that sunk there,

the you I put to rest there

 would, in true Jesus

stile, be gone, and those

linens limp against

the raw embankment.

No: why

seek ye the living

among the dead,

no I have not yet

ascended—

Because you have.

And so.

I do what every mother,

whose child has gone,

whose clothes are still soft

  with them, would do:

raise them up cupped,  palms

a split breast, 

up

to my face to drink

as though this were the only

thing I knew, the only thing

I would hereafter know,

the perfume of this birth and death

 mixed with every breath

an ebbing force surrenders to.

to listen. entirely.

moon,

let’s just listen

today.  let’s still

our clotted tongue

and keep,

 keep deeply.

our vigil.  because someone

someone,

somewhere, has their dark

descending—

and their lamps

are unlit,

or are charred,

are long-wicked
when lit,

are bilges of soot…

let’s say nothing.

  we have

listening

to do—

and then we have sifting

to do—

moon,

you are god enough

to know when the house

has burned,

has finally fallen

room by room

into itself,

and all the heat of it

has risen

has sunk…

please.

let’s, when asked,

come with our thin mesh,

come with our ear,

come with our tongue,

to shake through

to catch

to wash

stroke after stroke

the story the story the story

each little shard

whispers to us

and then let’s oh let’s

fall on our knees

for each one of them.