the art of the...

the art of the...

Take a long look at the strangers

you’re going to bed with…

You’ve heard it said but, children, it’s truer than love—

you marry them all.

                                    Cora Fry’s Pillow Book

there’s time maybe for a quick

rain…

and after, because it was so furious,

a pinch for what’s been

left out uncovered, what’s been

waiting to be

put away.  It’s not lazy.

It is

a walk beside it for a while

and then leave it alone

complete-

-ly

and when the ashes are bagged

in black plastic, tomorrow,

there’s time for a quick

rain—

don’t even get undressed.

Just wait for it.

Wait

for the blue break.  Stand

beside everything that’s coming

undone and wait

to get wet.

stone

stone

I'd been carrying something, 
clean towels?
when I picked up a little stone

with the front pad of my right

bare foot on the cold cement 
basement floor: step one shake stay

step three shake stay

until it still

                  stays and my full weight's

a bruise there, like the tip

of a pen held too long

on the paper so that the blot

spreads itself into the white

clear nothing. 

                        The wet I want,

the dark heart, I admit, is

the not fading, and then the out

against that white, that no-

thing until it’s lifted…

                        maybe, before I stepped,

I didn’t know I wanted

the stone, though it’s safe

to say I don’t unwant it now.

Even hundreds of millions of steps after

it’s gone into powder 

from other feet

it’s not really gone.

Because it weighed

something and I weigh something

and there’s a prick of heat

that’s always a hawk, the burr

in gravity that makes one head

look up from their plate at a family

friendly dinner: the rapid bare

foot in the flaring glance, when 

shoes began to matter (or the lack

of them) the quick prick into

                                    limp limp limp grip

the wall

and lift the foot.  There it is,

some preciously obscure

assault thrust between the bones

as by a thumb

as by an eye, as, 

because I won’t know

until I pull it out, I decide

I need  the skin’s pink puncture,

wet for the guest, the guest

seeing it all with a pause

a start
and 
a pause,

and a napkin to their lips.

the key

the key

How absurd it would be to spin these noises out,

so serious that we call them poems,

if they couldn’t make a person smile.

Cheer or courage is what they were all born in.

It’s what they’re trying to tell us, miming like that.

It’s nature to the words,

and what they want us always to know,

even when it seems quite impossible to do.

                        from “The Cheer”

                           William Meredith

Because once it’s in there it’s needed

to have been there all along—it’s right

and the night is almost

always successful

in unlocking the door, is able to turn

the answer in the other dir-

ection.  That slid bolt, the gears

and her oils, the teeth of the well-

worn key, each Morse groove or dash

of her surfaced edge—listen

we pat ourselves in public

looking for such keys, the envelope

pocket on the hump of each

cheek, or deep along the seam

in front, the thigh, or up high,

breast pocket empty, empty,

the locked

door the knock, but before,

the coming up

of the hand, wrist first, then the whole

arm, the hand we write with,

the tap on the glass

or not, the wood

or not, tap, a single knuckle first

then the urgent fist because it’s please

open the door, I’ve lost

my key

and the space between

the ripple of the noise and the    listen…

steps down the stairs, down

the hall,

and the slide of the palm against it,

the door, before the pinch

the click

the sound any jockey is born

making, teeth, cheek, tongue.

It’s been too long.  Far too long.

Before You Say Anything

Before You Say Anything

It’s the body I want  

to make the first commitment

to stroke the pimpled Braille of

the jaw, the long esophagus,

the pause of what’s caught

there before the voice is even

needed.  Where all the vague

shades in the room are illuminated,

when our two suits are unlaced,

unbuttoned, unlatched,

and unzipped.  The moment

before the paw drops

between the teeth of the trap:

the buzz of a late bee, the finally free

(sweetly) swallow or thrush

flushed up into the coming

morning, the coming evening.

Not a shhhh, or ssssst,

or ultimately ahhhh.  When the teeth,

the tongue are touching the other

teeth, the other tongue.  Only

outside the shriek, the sleep

of felled fruit, warm bruise

cooling, but not at once, no,

not at once.

Disambiguate

Disambiguate:

to Establish a Single Semantic or Grammatical Interpretation for

You who long for things

who can’t understand borders

who like to spread your magic and your blame

forgive yourself.

She’d given you an impossible task:

she’d said to follow and you intended to.

But you’d come to a place in the forest

where there weren’t any tracks—

                                    From “First Tractate”

                                    Brenda Hillman

I.

Seems simple but I looked it up, tractate,

and it led me to disambiguate,

the way I’d looked up the shorts

of that eighth grader who let himself

be seen—I don’t think I had to look

far—and it led to all that hung there, relaxed as a

stuck out tongue and one laid

egg—a one worder—one warm

reserve, suspended, waiting.

                        II.

Who’s got one at that age though,

a treatise—? Because all I notice at first

is the root treat and that can mean

something forbidden and sweet,

like what’s behind those satin trunks,

or it can be deed, the way my father’d

pull my mother up the stairs

or the way she’d fall, years

later, down them, breast-bone

broken open over her shredding lungs

such a flimsy cage for her flaccid

birds…

                        III.

And who can fight back?  I mean, Jesus,

they weren’t hawks, those lungs, more

like canaries revived and suffocated

at equal turns, song all but sterilized,

as though when they’d gone under

the invisible carbon monoxide blade

a hand reached in and lifted

them up to the air and shook them

with a kiss, maybe two, but one’s enough

to be seduced. Hell, a glance is 

enough.

                        IV.

Balls and birds—they don’t exactly…

ok, maybe.  It’s their tight fright and flight, the suck

up into the sky of the pelvis when the water’s cold

and everything practically disappears

so you have to coax it out again with one

finger against the palsied breast

                        V.

while on the outside it’s all hunky dory

no one’d know, no one’d guess opening the door

that the kitchen’s a disaster area

and the wife’s intubated after some girl

and two men came for pills and choked the bird

instead, bird that flew first chance out and after resuscitation

its ER/ICU beeps and swishes and soft

soled shoes.  And her restrained wrists taut

against the bar are what she wakes up to,

                        VI.

and listen, her once best friend is in

the waiting room with her husband who’s talking to me

about overdosing and then about fawns,

how they’re born odorless, how still

they are in the grass, not a scent on them

and the coyote walks right by

thinking the grass shakes with wind

                        VII.

and the orderly looks like the boy

who tugged at his sack all those years ago

and looked at me and smiled and knew

and walked away knowing, disappearing

forever in the tall dune grass,

the salt and sulfur all drift and off course 

in the swift southeast wind.

Buttons

Buttons

I like thinking about unbuttoning

words.  As though there’s a whole box

of them to reach into,  sounds to sift bit by bit

between fingers and tinks against

rings.  They aren’t as cheap a currency

as they’d seem—they open and close—

whatever, there’s a gift in the do and undo

a shirt of words, a bone button on the blue

linen.  It’s sewn on again and again,

so that now, years after being new,

it’s the only original—the rest: they are

where the sifting begins:     

            because undoing makes it all loose

            a stretch of thread, the heavy breath

            of the moment pops it off—it is a small

            satellite, some find after sweeping

            or maybe it’s picked

            out of the dust from under

            the bed.  Imagine the missing,

            the missed, the stunning button, not the shirt,

            and then the fingers that stitched it

            in the vacancy, tie the knot, rock

            the teeth back and forth to cut it all

            away from the needle fog, it

            with their breathing.

Do you want the button or the breathing?  And then,

because it’s up to you, which string of words?

After Bishop's Iceberg

After Bishop’s Iceberg

We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,

although it meant the end of travel.

                                    Elizabeth Bishop              

                        from “The Imaginary Iceberg”

I know, and you know it is so, the slow floe…

            Yet we need to see them from ships,

            and from far off, watch them stay still, filled

            with blue air a thousand, thousand years

            old.  In their middle at least.  From here

            that age’s a guess, a melancholy, a shiver

            we can’t give rhythm because the ship’s turned

            starboard and don’t we have to look over

            our shoulder and isn’t the wind off the stern

            blowing out our carefully pinned

            hair and don’t we brush it away so some comes

            undone entirely, from the scalp, and it rides

            though who’d know, over the backs

            of arctic birds to, oh we’d never guess

            in a thousand thousand freezes or thaws

            the crack and yawn of a whole face calving

            so slow when the bow is lifted we only slip

            up the gunwale, (because we've already fallen)
            hair flat to the cheek,  

            the left cheek—a heat we wonder later, must

            have begin in the middle of that solid float

of almost stone.