Sturnus Vulgaris

Sturnus Vulgaris

dear almost friends what happened

to you after that

                                W. S. Merwin

                               

He used to shoot

the starlings that nested

in the rotted lower rib

of the north-facing corner

of the house.  Was it north?

Yes, it was north because

we lived on the south

road and going up meant

leaving and going down

meant coming back. 

It was spring and mornings

I was sent to my room

for I don’t know why

I’d bury myself

under the green/brown scratch

of the army surplus

blanket and listen, my ear

against the peeling place

in the plaster.  The newly

hatched would cheer and cheep

and I liked the way

they could howl against

the dark, wait for food

in it, how the ground

was far away and they

weren’t afraid.

It might be a Saturday, we’d be

home from school,

when we’d find the clean dry

blue cap of her shell.  She’d poke

her yellow needle beak between

the crumble and whistle, fly off,

her small shred

of laundry in my palm.

He’d always told me

it was a robin’s egg.  And I’d believed

until now

it was a robin’s egg.  He never shot

robins.  Just starlings.  He called them

destructive.  Pains in the ass.

But I liked their brief music under

the rafter, inside that crumbling

rib.  He’d laugh and reload
(I'd hear him through the wall)

and say Jesus when she flew out

at him and shoot again, not knowing

my  ear was in the corner

just inches from the nest

where at night

most nights, most seasons

the rats would run up and down

between the partician.

I’d hear them gnaw and scratch

and scurry and think of the birds.
Their brief wind.  Their remarkable
blue entry, and the cracked
dome of it white as a ceiling
pealing, crumbling in my fist.

When What Falls Finally Meets the Ground

Because
all falling
is
tension
letting
go:

is,

once
the throat
reposes,

a long
swallowed
seed
slipped
between
the seam
of
the teeth

and then,
between
the
palatable

labium,
the grazed
uvulal

vibration

because
it
wrings

and
ruptures
the husk,
swabbed
with
crism

it opens
the wind
in its lung

until
the far away lea reaches  up and

Soldier's Heart

Soldier's Heart

On the Approximate Ten Year Anniversary
of the Death of my Student 


Question:  What's the distance between
conception and death?  And how long
before the canopy is brushed aside,
marked with finality?

Maybe we mark days to prove
they even happened at all: squares
of thirty, thirty one, and the odd
twenty eight or nine if it divides
evenly though I forget just now
the rule.

And maybe, so we don't lose it,
there's a mental glue, some umbilical
in the fetus seed (can I call it that?)
stretching out for the solid wall.
Conception dates are guess work:
Do you remember when you had your last 
period?   Only if there's a calendar
on the wall will I see are perfect
February squares. But I still
do not know. 

Only it was a Tuesday.  Or was it
a Wednesday?  The afternoon when
Justin crawled under his truck
and squirmed for that wrench
and with a quick kicked grip of the floor
his lift was just enough to settle it all,
axle right across his lungs when it fell.

It was.  And I mark it now.  Ten years
ago.  The date's the same, even if it blurs
for me.  And he'll never age.

Sweet boy, I want to say.  You go out and my own
would come in just nine months
later.  We were reading Soldier's Heart,
you and I, by Gary Paulsen.  Hearts,
all those civil hearts in boxes of sorrow.

It's hard to imagine the acres you've marched since.
Maybe their distance is the time it takes
to fall to the ground, to sit at the patch of grass
above your urn.  Maybe it's the last period
entirely before the final pause, your mother
somehow, the small room

of her womb, or its scar if it's been
removed.  Or me, these past ten years,
seeing you in the oddest places: faces
my son makes when he's content,
or when the world he's carrying
has been lifted from him for a moment,

long enough to breathe.

Vestigium—

Vestigium—

                it's what a cloud does:

                unzips, sometimes in satin 

                sometimes in cilice

                                                s. lee

Like trod on mud at half-tide,

it’s water filled foot-prints rising up

that stun me somehow, the way

they saturate as soon as I set

my boot down. This is section

of the beach I love the most

that depresses me the most, how

it pulls and sucks like an ill-bred

lover, all need, all grit and salt

and self.  I want to press my face into it

make sand angels in sweeps,

clam-worm a halo.  I don’t want

to look back at the way my gait

is pressed into the dryer edges

up the beach.  These footprints,

are never as stable as a tidal pool,

whose two faces are all ground and cloud,

unplumbable yet the bottom’s

so close.  Minnows spook.  Mussels

tighten under the weed.  Random

stones stay put.  Were they there yesterday?

How much can all these things hold?

Each bauble above this sea pond

seems to sizzle and swell with August’s

sun.  And those minnows, jiggered

by the rim, are thin wisps, cirrus

if I’m seeing sky.  All the while the tide

grows large again—it seems to

exhale, pushing itself ahead

of itself, all that’s been

drained coming back.  And my foot-

prints never were.  They dis-

appeared almost as soon as I rose

up from that angel i never made and backed

away, fresh mud not on my tongue

the tide coming but still out, way out, too far

away to hear, yet turning.

The Interior of Empty Rooms

The Interior of Empty Rooms

Yesterday they were tearing her room apart,

but only in words.  The teacher of foreign

students will be able to live

there for a few more months.  They’re deciding,

maybe they already have, what to keep

and what to throw away.

I can tell they want to do it all without her,

that hungry cat voice ribboning between

the rising and falling feet

of the owner who just came home. 

They’re all anxious, distracted—some by

a future of new paint and new floors,

some by a replacement, a new program,

some by the last big spending before

retirement.  But the teacher—listen,

there’s need in her voice, and desire

to do it all on her own.  It’s like going home

while your mother’s in hospice:

and with your sisters and pens and post-its

you write and mark to save for this

cousin, that aunt.  Remember how

precious it was to see your child self bent over

a little private spiral pad, the mystery

of the before penmanship loops and o’s?

Remember the torn off and scattered

thoughts of clues and their dead ends?  How

beneath the couch, months of this game

became a detective lift and hunt—rugs—

chair cushions, bed skirts?  How you never know

now if you found whatever toy had been ‘hidden’?

So you write with the same distraction

all adults who scope the future have, the same

distance as a cataloger at Good Will: separate, 

sort, sell.  Trinkets of someone else’s life.  Some

still have those post it notes stuck

on the bottom: a niece’s name, the one

who never made it home after the hospice bed

was filled with someone else, different

pictures to end the day gazing at.  And who

ever buys the donated, a book maybe, will open

it and read the flap:  To my darling

daughter on her graduation, 1973.  Love,

ever, always, Mama.  Spoils.  It’s funny how

all these things meant something once, how love

gave them a soul.  And now, when the room’s

empty, after it’s all been divided or dumped, we don’t feel

relief at all, but nervousness.  We’re anxious

in this clean, well-lit, new paint place.  The past

that lived here is incinerated now, or taken

home, shelved in a cellar.  We’ve stroked over

voices with our latex blue, muffled them

without asking them to be silent, just dip

our brush into the liquid erasure and stroke,

stroke up and down, laughing at the joke

of covering over the height lines of the kids

who grew and marked, all those milestones

thrown, or worse, just brushed away

like they never ever were.   

Ponemah Bog

In the bog, in the spring

Ponemah Bog

Something enormous seems at stake.

Against all odds, something is being born.

                                From “Pity”

                                 by Patricia Fargnoli

This bog is finally thawing, after all our solid winter,

                beneath early spring rain.  Two thin strips

                of boards have been pegged ‘round

                its edges, single file, like an old Contestoga
 

road to the west.  One way out.  There.  It seems

                you’d never expect to meet anyone

                coming back.  Maybe, if they’d gone off

                trail you’d see their ox’s skull bleached

               

by heat, a pair of sockets open as empty brogans,

                though those never on the trail, and never next

                to the fallen.  Where’s the rest of the once was bull?

                Why only a head?  Wouldn’t he rather

peat, so he’d decay at the pace of a bog,

                in the leisured freedom of aging heat—?  I day-

  dream, not about the ox, but instead, 

  the brown leather of a man, wonder

if one’s been buried here.  They’ve been found

              in Ireland, throat choked with leather cords,  

bog moss pleached between the strands.  Imagine the hands  

that knotted the noose then cut ‘round his throat.

Or a girl scalped by a turf-cutter’s blade (Heaney

                wrote in Bog Queen) and the modern

                woman who wanted it, the hair.  Listen:

                who doesn’t walk into

these places and see all the feet that have walked

                there before, and imagine their own shoes

                are those, witness or forfeiter, the throat

                of the crowd or the moan

of The Grauballe Man hung with “beauty and atrocity”

                all those B.C.E’s ago coming up perfect

                as butter, as peat, as spring beneath it all

though who’d know, in the middle

of this winter that's finally letting go.            

By Eleven

By Eleven

yet I set my foot down in the same

places I did when steps were there

without even thinking about them

               W. S. Merwin

                      from “Footholds”

It’s only in the dark when I count them, and only

going down, all the weight in my upper leg

as silent a sole as I can muster—I count

and by ten I’m guessing again.  Is this ten?

Because between two and nine I’m drifting

back up the stairs, to the bedroom, or down them all

completely, so that I’m in the kitchen, or out-

side, starting my truck, shoveling snow.  (It’s

April.  There’ll be more snow.)  I’m quick, lifting  

my foot against it all, against what’s solid

beneath them, like a swift kiss on the cheek

when the kids run out the door, into the wind,

to the farewell melt, ignoring the brown grass.

I’m an old woman by step ten, a nerve

my feet are long married to now, and I’m still

counting, yes, two more to go to solid

ground.  Do you ever miss eleven?  Simply skip

right over him so that from ten to the bottom

it’s flight, it’s almost a fall, until landing is letting go

of the banister, which, now that I’m thinking

about doing it but not doing it, what do I do

first?  Step or let go?  It’s an awful lot to trust,

isn't

it

hoping that something solid is what waits for us

while we hover, like a bubble newly blown, out

of the ring completely, and sealed, landing, unlike us,

momentarily on the next to the last step.