Sky

Clearing the Air

Clearing the Air

I’d cut the partial cup of the now hollow vault

of lemon in half and half again and sunk it to float

in a steaming bath of lavender and cedar

oils.  It will slow-boil in this water so the steam will soak

up the stale smolder of last night’s fish,

cleaned and eaten but still, like a wash in winter,

it's hung in the stillness of the early December

morning pause.

Isn't there omething about the old aromas of things,

how they hold on, how they sink into a body only to be

pushed out again, in sweat  or just sitting

down?  The waft of it pillows up like flight,

a quick wind these December mornings,

when storms try on coat after coat to see how large

they’ll need to be, so that by the end, come late

April, the wool’s worn through at the elbows,

and night after night of drying, sunk into the space

between the old radiator grills, is wet memory

of sheep, or, where all those years ago now, a girl

fell and hit her head and bled like a pool erupting

and no one thought to wipe it where it had

dripped into the ribs—it was summer—who was thinking

about that kind of heat?  And by the time

it was steaming, who could touch it, who could put

their palm and a rag on it for anything more

than a sssssssssst?  And so the scent of rust drifts up

and something more intimate, the caged cavity

of the raw rinsed turkey, but more than that, leaning

in: matted bloody hair, the scalp unzipped, before

gauze, before iodine, or later, the great track

of staples.  Lips kiss over and over the still head

calming the two pairs of lungs, two hemispheres
of brain, two hearts, giving off

a perfume all their own, held in by ribs and scalps
of iron bone, somehow a clean aroma split in half

in the purity of its own panic.

  

But Then Writing It Brave

But Then Writing It Is Brave                         

…Ink has it’s

own creature life, one drop a sudden

artery.

                        Marianne Boruch

                        “Chinese Brushwork”

Some days I don’t take it down

at all, only note it the way most things

are noted, a passing by, a surface

registering, a shift against the rhythm

of depth,  preventing it from sinking.

Maybe it’s because I’m on a kick

of resisting cliché, how quickly a habit

becomes that, like noting

the time of day at the exact same

time every day and mark it as coincidence

but not at all routine, a track

worn and worn like a road into

the woods where feet trample, trample

in utter visibility and safety.  It makes me

wonder about cowardice,

how a man suffers the training

from birth to battlefield and the nerve

is cut and he crawls away from it all,

heart open beneath his fatigues, so that

when he’s found, after the bombs

and bullets stop, they’ll see the hole,

they’ll wonder how he got this far

and if someone carried him and see

the snake of a trail his body made

and write the casual-

ty in, an almost bored redundancy

before moving to the next and the next

the flip of their legal notes thick with it.

Because they weren’t there they didn’t see

and couldn’t imagine the complete shock

slow motion puts on a body, so that a bullet

can seem like a bird who flew down

from a tree when the soldier was a boy

and sat and ate the seeds from the palm

of his hand.  I would have noticed

this.  Wouldn’t I?  Even if it happened

every day?  I’d hide and stop breathing

while the finch or cardinal dropped down.

I’d wait…it would bore into me and root

like no other thing could

simply because it was on the verge

of flying off, and, in leaving, open

wide, gush after gush, mine, his, red, red

capillary

wind

Wind

We live our lives in the Aeolian zone

                                    Windswept:

                        The Story of Wind and Weather

                                    Marq De Villiers

…the wind/was history and its filthy sweep…

                        “The Vietnam birthday Lottery, 1970”

                                    Marianne Boruch

How exactly are the chosen chosen?  Is it all random ball

slides down a chute of a wheel dropped before the show

and dented on one side, and the bag of balls

dropped too so that one rolls out under the chair

(it will be found when the building’s demolished

and the marked cards will always have that

vacant space) and how the spin seems to favor

the dent.  I tell you no one notices, no one

from the crowd, certainly not the woman who's hand is

next to the hand turning the wheel next to the dent
because they’ve got their own thing, fingers

creeping to fingers while the money turns into

the small hurricane of chance.

Only this morning I knew I needed a new biography

and there’s not a lot of time really so I pulled

and put back, pulled and put back—and chose

one on the wind—I know right? but there it is

and I’m intrigued not because I can see the wind—who can—

but like everyone else I see what floats in it from time

to time.  I see who bends almost double into it

to get out of it, and I read about it in this gentle quiet

room on the second floor of a house I’ve lived in

for ten years—a house that’s tucked out of the wind—

so unlike the house I grew up in, when every little draught

would wind—ha, that’s funny, through the cracking

plaster and like a small Pentecost float above me

in a dust, I saw it once, that outside, late in spring,

would be pollen, a yellow float drifting by like any

calm parade.

and wouldn’t you know it the poet, now this is random

right, talks about wind and the way we cup a flame to keep it

from going out and she says this when everyone is

waiting for that announcement, the lottery of who’s going

and who’s not, and though she doesn’t say in this poem, the who

turning the wheel is smelling the cleavage of the assistant

as it wafts up in the breeze the wheel makes and his hand

slips off the ball so he grabs another one—and oh

but the wind, they both said it, the wind blows.

chance

chance

…thinking is mostly

trying not to drown.

            Marianne Boruch

      from “The Great Ape House”

Is there a relief in their world, a warren

they shiver in, to watch a hawk slide her beak

into the warm cage of her prey, their sister?  Do they praise

whatever breath splits another hare?

Is almost victimhood like that?

So random, like the D-Day soldier who broke

down sixty years later but he's really in the thick

of it still, buddy in front, buddy behind

and then both very simply not? 

What’s the imbalance of random

chance, the coin’s fifty fifty and the way

the coin’s held, when the math of it

suddenly becomes shape, becomes speed,

so if it’s tossed from the tip of the thumb,

right against the wide nail it will be different

than if it’s sitting further back, if the arm jerks

involuntarily, a twitch of wind, and arcs

and speed are free to elbow their way in

to fair chance.  Maybe saying the word

reason (and see, just like that, just by looking

up I’ve lost it, what I was trying to see)

the hawk with her strip of hare

and all the throbbing eyes staring—the Private

on his way up the ranks completely

unscratched in flesh comes out broken,

in places like surrendering in the first place—how close

to acquittal it is when we’re in someone else’s hands.

If the Serpent were a Mare

If the Serpent were a Mare

Maybe it’s the sweet almond oil

and all the other subtleties 

of fragrance in the white cream

that bring me to want

the slick rub each morning, a

fragrance only lather

of nose silk slipped into

my  stripped and bloody

cuticles.  And how soon they’re all

staunched, flaring but still

staunched, pushed back, away from

my lips and insistent teeth.

A horse would snatch the way I do,

lower lip first and then pull in

toward the horrible bone that would,

if I’m not absolutely flat, bite me clean

in two.  But I’ll go other places

with her, places I want to go,

where breath is alfalfa grass, is a toss

or two of sweet feed, an apple

in the autumn that sighs up against

my palm, up my nose, and she’s waiting

for more—I wonder does she smell

my morning clean and cream? 

She relaxes more.  Maybe it takes

feeding something as immense as a full-

grown mare to know the held out, flat-as

a-fall-on-the-face-hand is something

more than what it seems.  Because that

apple is secondary, isn’t it.  Really. 

It’s the reach—on her part and mine—

that agrees: some things given, some things

taken are a permission we’d both wanted

all along.  There’s no sin in it, saying yes. 

Kissing You

Kissing You

Later it’s not

not just once

but a hundred

thousand times—

and countless in

that hundred

thousand…a

thousand

plus one—but first

it was  

between almost

and happening, still

arriving at   

One.

Cliffs give way

beneath petites,

our twin splints

of lips quiver

above one another,

as though they

are on their own

without us

and it’s breath’s

hush that pulls

our pushes—

there’s no way

getting ‘round it—

we can’t leave

off, we press

into the firth,

on a slim

kayak of wind

and…today is

a slow, slow

day…there’s rain

a touch of frost

thawing

in each drop