see, it's this specific

 

see, it’s this specific 

 

seed, with

the monarch’s need

having ceased,

with all that sap

tapped

 

having been

dipped

into and sipped

flittingly,

 

it’s this seed’s

metamorphoses

of cellulose to silk,

a floss

so insistingly soft in her

offering, having been

given this 

much volume

within her skin

 

that stops me and makes into me

 

a surrendering contemplative

 

and by that I mean: see

how the pod

can do nothing

but ultimately

cede to this

division, where her dam of milk

                        -weed skin

has, though not suddenly,

(invisibly, it seams, unseams, within, listen… 

 

 

 

…)

 

 

thrust her heft

against the quartered horn to force

her hull-throat to open

to wind’s casual oscillation

once, it's worth

the weight, 

it’s risen 

At the Gate

 At the Gate    

 

“Enlightenment,” wrote one master,

“is an accident, though certain efforts make you accident-prone.”

 

                                    Jane Hirshfield

                                    Inspiration

 

You look, though only once

or twice in your entire

lifetime as a mother

and say: I made

                        this, and you hold the bones & the still

                        living skin

                        & thumb the knuckles, counting them counting on them

                        to be always

                        warm always present

                        always gentle almost al

                                                            ways

 

                                    (there will be days weren’t there aren’t there

                                                those days)

 

                                    & you flatten the palm and want

                                    to read every pattern

                                    every alphabet to divine

                                    a future.  But you don’t.  You don’t.  Instead

                                    you close your child’s hand over

                                    yours & bring the knuckles

                                    to your mouth & touch them

                                    the way you used to

 

                                    when they were new

                                    when they were small

                                    when they were skinned

                                                & bleeding

 

                                    & you tasted the blood

                                    you made and you say 

                                    and you say

late in the day, consider this

 

late in the day,

consider this:

 

perhaps the osprey, falling

up from its coffer of odd

jigsaw seeming branches

is a possible thought coming to

 

shape: the breathing

of a phoenix, those old

souls that go down into their own

heat and flame and disappear

 

there for a while, gone the way

camouflage is gone to the one

who is viewing far,

trying to reconcile the fire

 

aerated to ash with

the rising up from it all almost

entirely intact, brand new,

and sifting from its breast,

 

indeed every feather’s vane

and barb, the minute bones of all

those ancient lives, and wedding them

with the paradox of its only just

 

now, this moment, beginning.

A Flowering: Non-Finito

A Flowering: Non-Finito

 

The lilacs are succumbing to rust &

their perfume is thinning.  Today

it is giving rain.  Maybe the river

 

has risen in the night & we’re fitting

the barricades of stone and sand

in a lull between storms. 

 

Maybe what’s coming is nothing

but sun & maybe the mouths &

throats of the changing will (with

 

the help of a breath of low wind) turn

their faces to us & offer the water

on their faces to the old star

 

that burns & churns & turns,

that coaxes and explodes & coaxes

us close to it like 

A Still LIfe

 

A Still Life

 

Once, when I was a boy

I brought him a dead bird.  “Here,”

he said, putting it to my nose,

“smell freedom.”

 

                        Tom Crawford

                        Yellow-Breasted Chat

 

Somehow the gloves are too much

though I do pick up

the bluebird with them on—

 

the grass where he lay is still

last year’s grass where only a few

weeks ago, winter beat her last

 

retreat.  There were ants

discovering his beak, and I touched

him with my thumb to brush

 

them off but they continued on

with their business.  He seemed

only moments

 

dead, & I cupped him in my

gloved palm curved

like a nest.  I thought, how

 

did you die?  I thought: you look

so, oh I don’t know,

alive!  I thought: you are

 

so blue!  I thought: I’ve never seen

such blue so close

to me.  I thought:

 

I am sorry

you won’t see spring through

to summer or your probably

  

already begun brood.  Now the dead

seem to flit in and out

of my making my way to the taller

 

grass where I saw a young

fox a week ago.  In a little

bowl of a knoll, hands now

 

bare, (have you ever

held a bird like this, close

to your wrist & fingers, its weight

 

shaking the world under you, and you,

numb with love and sorrow?

Have you?)

 

If I were John

James Audubon I would have set

the bird on a perch, on an edge

 

of a water filled tin or ceramic

or mosaic bath.  I would have

posed him, opened his wings, & by

 

some trick made him briefly alive

again.  But the gods did not

make me an Audubon.  They made me

 

a dropped seed.  They made this

circumstance of meeting

and the eventual grass and maybe

 

that fox, they made

the mathematics of it, the equation

of what’s random, what’s

 

circumstance, what’s coin-

cadence of one moment being a being

beating the air and next being a being

 

at rest in the hands of a lesser blaze.

 

Passerine: Seeing

Passerine: Seeing

Amazing the layers the fragrances

the nose relates to

in this little room: heat, after

rising, receding.  Or the needling

freeze beginning to really

achieve feet in a December deep.  See 

into the easing leeward east

how the free

upheaving of the galivanting passerines:

they squeeze in the lilac still, and redeem

the freeze for me: their meetings: chickadees,   

titmice, male and female cardinals seeking

each other undeterringly in this winter breeze, seeds

in their beaks, free even 

while the congeniality of this blizzard is weeks

in receding from deepest yet in

the freezing, from flinging me to seeing

in the breezeway window the feet 

of the each of these passerines brief adhesive 

and the density of everyone's breathing,

the seized, and (as if in a bell jar schemed

terraria) each of these seasons 

redolence's feasting wended off in the eternity

in the briefest freeze of splintering

bird needs.

Para/Phrase

 

Ash Wednesday:

    a para/phrase

...did he use the same muscles

to paint as he did to pray?

                        Terry Tempest Williams

                        On El Bosco's  jardin de las delicias

it's a cashmere sort

of morning and early

enough and still

with dark and clouds

one great bank of them

melding enough

to be one mass adrift

which ever way the wind

is insisting has 

blotted out the pins

of light i've come to

depend on and so

haven't you and so

haven't we all

for the bravery

it takes to break  

down and shier and shave

the heavy wools grown

then shorn from 

the body that's worn them 

all winter long

how the lanolin can

smooth and soothe the winter 

roads of your hands 

and make them

a blessing to be touched

by.  wait for that.  wait.

for now the ewe

is still in service

to her coat and lamb 

and hasn't yet been flayed into

the cornucopia of her

labor and because 

she'll be delivering both

into the shepherd's chapped

and bleeding hands

we can wait it out

in cashmere in something

almost weightless

and soft as river bottom

rocks after snow has let

go and after ice also

and only so as trout know

to let go (remember going is going

back to the beginning)

there's still clouds that cover

there's still no seeable

light of the stars behind them

and the lambing is yet

on its edge       but listen: 

the wood's been felled 

and the fire's soon

lit and her flame

is a coal we coax

alone in our superstitious 

gloam of last year's palms

dried and burnt and rubbed

crosswise on our third

eye. and who believing wouldn't

see in the dark being lent to them

in anonymous sparks

lifted like lit

pricks of sin and snow