Influence, Or

 

Influence, Or 

Something Like It

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples 

widening out from an original center. 

                                                Seamus Heaney

Pinned & welded to the thin metal pole,

the birdbath’s bowl holds only enough rain-

or hose water for our few wrens & robins &

song sparrows.  On days it's dry: a caravan 

of ants.  Lately, this thin scrim of pollen-water

a southeast wind ripples.  Her motley yellows, 

her blondes of a lot of hues.  Cirrus clouds

in a bowl.  At times, at just this certain spot, at just  

this time of day, the roofline’s gable, her specific New 

England pitch, is reflected in the basin’s stationed

rain.  Once a hawk watched me there & then flew

off.  I only saw it blot the water, briefly spot

 

the sky.  & once a kit of pigeons lift, beaks flick,

to dip their small noggins to their peculiar

music of coos.  Only ever briefly slack, the water's

often  rhythmed,  cautioned by all those log trucks 

hauling their bed of pulpwood to the paper

mill that ripples a sometimes windless surface.  

It’s when the distant bridge shakes, it’s when

the reverberation is both airborne

and underground undertow, you know? When

it mingles with what the makes the ground

shake: the sway of the bridge, her columns

 

of rebar and concrete plunged deep beneath

the river, how she receives & then delegates

the weight & seeming seismic waves reawakening

commitments in the shifting granite we stand on,

or the boundary walls we make that are taken

down by the constant shaking (recall what Frost

 

said about all that mending). Sometimes

the birdbath bottom is sand dry, the water being

called back the way water is called back, and so

filling the bowl to the rim again, I watch the slow 

garden hose nose the floating duff,  then saturate it

 & cause it, while I'm looking someplace else, to over-

flow into the lupines that are pulsing to seed and rooting 

deeper for next season, and the season after that.

                                                                                                s. lee

 

Late May

 

Late May

 

And lie at last by the little stream that brings

all gods to truth.

                                    Julia Randall

                                    The Bennett Spring Road

 

A morning ago snow the hold of it in the globe

of rain fat and splattering against the raised window

glass.  Stiff wind let it drift loose & lose its bearings

indeed if it had bearings at all this late in

the season.  An accident happening in the

atmosphere?  An arctic blast??  Muster of dust

in the cold rapid clouds?  (what kind of cold are clouds,

don’t you ever wonder?) But this it wasn’t enough

to do much but bring us to wonder.  & to hunker

the rumps of the songbirds in their

boxes & grasses & bits of bramble on bending

branches to dance to pause the persistent

gobs of their offspring for just one doubled

second and then one more– this chilling extravagant wind – 

it’s 32 degrees and tomorrow it will be June.  So I took myself

 

to the roadside swathe of lady’s slippers I saw two weeks

ago beneath all those stunted hemlocks.  They were still 

living after all these weeks & still hidden

in the middle of the evergreen’s peculiar camouflage. One  

steady drop of water on the skin of their pocketbook

of veins.  What remains but that I knelt in the wet

and made of them their dozens while the wrens

while the wood ducks while the mallards & song

sparrows . . . but we are golden here, right?  So golden.

Precious purse this rose gold rising from the snow

a month ago hello to all this hello to the season's last

blast of snow.

Genuflecting

 

Genuflecting

 

 

It’s not blue of course it’s not blue but it’s called blue

when it happens too soon after the last one all those

seasonal days making a headway we want to pause on

 

but what’s the cause is beyond us I think it’s tried

the explanation is given in some mathematical equation

her revolution in companion to an earth’s

 

revolution and those stints in season a skies way of saying

it is time it is tuning frequency it is giving her calculated phases

doesn’t every lady need one freak-out every so often?

 

though following her descent into the far horizon a fog

is rising like modesty like quiet applause like standing

ovations rise before and clapping first is knees cracking

Lately Going Home

 

 

eagle gargoyles atop the roof of the lantern room
west quoddy head
lubec, maine

 

 

 

Lately Going Home

 

home where I grew  

up home

& with her this gibbous moon

rose I happen

to just look just above the spruces

& it was two past noon & she was

getting through

enough and gauzily illumed in her

cool ash-white

naked light

she seemed pinned

against her will a wrestle

against soft blue chiaroscuro

and a being being

birthed in her mute rise she was

compromised by the absolute

of nothing not even coincidently

while the tips

of the spruce trees seemed

to be teasing her face with their feathery

bough & spiky cone she gained

& maintained

her own gray against the haze

 

& between her

& me

 

between the trees more than

half the globe

she was was abbreviated to be held to  

the old woven broken  

branches they seemed open as an empty bowl

& she could be their dome she could be

the lippy curve of a brimed chapeau

her crown alone though & flat as bats

wings

 

but not only this coincidence moon

or sighting the

solitary nest in the crown

of another spruce: two mature enough birds

their white bright head emblematic

one sitting near the edge of the nest & one feet away watching her

watch this moon

Blind Date

 

Blind Date

 

Yesterday the crow

            lifted the stiff/froze squirrel

                        her frost-fur a prism glint

this squirrel was

            headless and the crow

                        didn’t mention it, each

open to each.  Neither seemed

            timid in touching, being relieved

                        of these streaky shades of

pink: neck, tongue

            a dawn camouflage.  See these

                        briefly similar interiors: where

sound once was

housed, then unhoused.

                        Moments, only moments.

                       

Fog

 

Fog

 

All winter this electric fire

& a tree door

closed room.  In fact

 

it was last fall

October probably

if I look back that started

 

mornings of warm

in these small walls.  All

the night a cold

 

kind patient waiting.

Years ago it was smoke

going up the chimney

 

& the children would sleep

through the descension

& pressure of ice

 

that declares it is

going to stay a while.  Today,

mid-April, a coastal

 

fog inland.  Road lights

make the moisture

seem to be lifted to

 

the hood & eye, slick

on the pole.  All my life

I’ve liked morning for

 

her quiet, her tension

mannerly, gracious

as a guest.  Probably

 

also because she is soft,

those Sandburg paws

walking almost weight

 

 

 

less.  Leaf drink leisure.

Smallish drops even

teeny to the briefest

 

& relief, her endurance

of winter rewarded with

heat of her labor then

 

cooled by this thick lithe

brightness that has nothing

to do with light

 

& more to do

with what I cannot be or

write, lissome at night

 

departed by daylight.

Resurrection Sunday

Near Flood, Contoocook River
Peterborough, NH

 

Resurrection Sunday

In his darkness then an epiphany: 

such a love he must not fail.

                                Niall Williams

                                John

 

This particular river bulges with mountain

            water run-off.  It is falling

            with such velocity, it makes great

            mounds of foam that float

            & flail in the crotches of a rock

 

& the sawn-off ithyphallic

branches caught there, watching

the rise of a body gorging on snow

melt twenty miles from here,

pushed in laborious rushes

 

of contractions and rests. And

also west of here, this limb’s

mother, this limb’s sibling

saplings.  Imagine them quiet

in the sober quiet of their grove,

 

reaching up to touch their mother’s

one limbless spot.  Her pruning wound,

renamed to cicatrix. Forgiveness,

in its measure, is callus tissue, in time

the lid of an eye.  Blind by then. Or

 

outwardly sightless should I say.

Inside, beneath the cambium,

a nob of love is forming, late

twin of the limb that by now may be just

the right size at just the right time

 

to be sunk by the mud & crush of others

like it, & beaver pups touch it

like a talisman before their swim

out and against it all.