mirrors

mirrors

and too in the bowl

of the Buddha cumulus

moves to its edge, breaks

                                                s. lee

when it’s what’s behind

that makes what’s in front

                a              bl            ur.

when a blow to the back of the head

is what comes next, is a slo          w

“what did he say?” when  we know

not the hour, day? and when

in our face, after the years of bore-

dom, it’s all in the mirror:

we’re already old, even though

the day’s not done.  it’s too soon

for gossip of the April birds who rest

in birches.  even when their song is out

beyond us, even when these

curved words, hauled up

out of yesterdays are like sips

of warm milk, pinches of stale

cake on a cracked plate, even when a stray

grey hair is rising up out

of the morning’s dull uncombed

brown, the mirror’s nothing

but honest

In Utero

In Utero 

somehow, in some ways,

it has managed to survive—

papas grass in the snow              

                                                                matsuo basho

It’s said, I've imagined, that a womb is a radio

receiver, or a pregnant liquid music

box, wound and let to dance, wound and let

to dance.  Each key tightens to release the sighs

in the pool of a reflection generous,

nausea’s little punt, sometimes so

unmoored it drifts out to the end

of the rope, the corkscrew worm

planted deep in her, deep in him, as tuned

as an orchestral oboe.  Reception is clear  

on most days in his sea as clean as green tea

whose first leaves are given to the Shogun

with, I know, geisha grace.  They

are hand rolled, these teas, and dried tight

as his mother’s day hair, a French knot

at the back, and then her pin, it’s little

red bird painted at the tip, an antenna

absorbing the world’s waves, taking them in

to the root of the hair, past the eyes

the jaw its companion throat, straight

for the hara, conscious fluid

conductor and into his fetal sleep.  Then

like that dried tea, it’s what shocks it flat

on its face that makes it drinkable

or piss, the boiling water pour, baby

you can’t see it but someone’s handing you

a cup you can’t refuse:

the windshield’s full view is black now

beneath the truck your mama screamed at

(that noise you opened your eyes to)

and beneath the truck, in the snow she'd

just held her tongue out to, twisted her hair

against that pin in, and laughed to feel

your six month’s kick.  In the center

of the road your grandmother didn't make

it, your father…

It’s a weight that crushes skulls.

It’s a birth canal you’ll never pass through,

your radio’s gone

to static.   Maybe that gracious geisha

is singing to you now, you alone,

in the skin of your comma’d mother.  Maybe

her radio only picks up

stations that meditate the water,

that cut through sirens, ventilators, brain

surgeons and their third plunge in

to her swelling skull.  You ask:  Will this hurt?

She says: A little.  A little pinch.  Are you sure?

As sure as I am of snow.  As sure as I am

of radios.  Let's tune to something soft.  Something from before.

Tea.  Don’t let her

rush out the door.  Who cares

if you’re late.  Who cares.  There’s all the time

in the world.  I’ll wait.

A Word Please

 A Word Please               

…a fisherman…could taste

a stream and tell you what the trout were doing.

                                                from “Up and Out”

                                                Marge Percy

If words are made flesh, isn’t the tongue the most sweet

                and most bitter of organs?  Doesn’t it walk

                on its very own through the air when the mouth’s

                open, curling like toes in hot sand or against

                the cold departure of blood when the boots go bad?

Isn’t the tongue made bold with breast milk, warm as

                her placenta, amniotic sweet?  Isn’t that why we know

                the taste of seas?

Tongue, tell me, what were your first words?  Aren’t they

                burned in there somewhere?  If I peeled

                the skin back, would the scar of sound rise up

                into the air like lit incense, an Enoch, and then be

                no more?  Weren’t those first words like God’s,

tight fists of need, but before that, the claws of an osprey

                wide open over the water, over the slim solid fish

                bubbling up for the bug?  Don’t they, words, gurgle

                out around the drowning trout, on their way

toward the pine, her bloody gill a bellows we’d know

                the aroma of right away if we were brave

                enough to bend, to inhale, then, tongue tipped

                and tight, lick up toward the eye, the pearled

                gloss beginning, the last breath of the rainbow

going down our throat?

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