Fishing Winter

 

Fishing Winter

 

Maybe in winter promises are

auraed with warnings: a promise

 

of snow, a promise of sun

but the temps well below zero.

 

The folks who take on such a,

well, I don’t know what to call it,

 

gift-giver, bluff-caller, that this

weather is, have been made

 

to earn these cautions.  Their downs

& various animals of wool. 

 

Their fists in their mittens.  Like this

sea in front of her

 

house, all steeped in vapor.  &

the boats, they all seem to be

 

cloaked in smoke, the ice is palling

the chain-made scallop drag.  In it all

 

a lost scallop shell, its meat

long hauled off by a gull or some other

 

wintering-over shore bird

that gropes & toes the rockweed &

 

tideline, this shell, nearly invisible, is

half now of itself.  Valveless.  What was just

 

being said about promises? or  are they

warnings?  The boats are going

 

out today.  The sternman breaks the ice

with his hammer.  The captain smokes

 

& blows his coffee cold.  Somewhere,

though not here, not yet, a sun.

 

The sun.  What else will burn enough

to burn off the sea’s smoke,

 

the slabs of frozen water falling

back with a splash?  And who hears it,

 

soft and swallowed in the seemingly

invisible ocean yet making the boat

 

rock and rub up its mooring like that

half-feral cat in the kitchen at her leg? 

 

That merganser, maybe.  Lone and poking

below the water, drowning some

 

and rising some, in the sea made thick.

thick with smoke of dare.

 

Dare to come out.

Dare.

House, Corner Lot

 at the Olsen House,

Cushing, Maine

House, Corner Lot

 

That haiku are thought

more often than written down:

light’s eight minutes old

 

who even knows that

so much of what is being

is somewhere else

 

nailing it down means

yes, a hammer, and yes, nails,

but too a roof, or

 

rough structured framework

bracketed to the flat, firm

cement the men poured

 

last week over stones

hauled in from some pit, then dumped

strategically on

 

the bottom, made smooth

with feather delicacy

of thumb and pointer

 

up/down up/down/up

down/left to right/left right 

smooth flat then flatter

 

the joystick’s his proof

in the excavator’s cab

his precise pattern:

 

five seven and five

right?  the pattern of breathing

while a hole is being

 

made, & being made

boxy & framed & finally,

hole’s filled partially

 

 

 

to hold those wood bones

to hold open or closed

a window, a door

 

January 19th

 

fades...
for Hazel

 

January 19^th,

 

little enough wind, &

the old bend in the bough

of the lilac is for now a brief

yoke for yesterday’s,

for today’s, hours & hours

of falling

                        snow.  & below,

 

holding to the thickest

stem, a long

tune of bell-tubes,

whose clapper is a

dainty enough

hut-roof of fluff. 

 

This is the quiet

a tired soul might walk

through, might pause

 

on her now timelessness

in it all, watching the figures

the snow closes over,

their honest geometry

a familiar though cloaked

coincidence.  No split second  

nows merging into a cacophony

of thought

 

just simply now

and the belonging

to it. & even as this snow,

caught and paused in its own

falling by its weight of

waiting, will surrender to

 

some wind and some sun,

& fall to the moss-

covered stone wall the lilac

is rooted to, it will cool

the music that winter has

set in the throats

of the dark-eyed juncos

sorting through the blown

and scattered chickweed seed

harmonied at their feet.

She sees them.  She sees them

and is relieved. 

Near Mid-January

 

3/4 panorama
MacDowell Lake, Peterborough

 Near Mid-January

 

A small thaw has wandered across the lawn,

a widening eye.  Last

fall’s blonde offerings almond-shaped

in the blink unfreezing.  All of December’s near

foot of snow is now a thin misgiving, slippery.

I don’t know enough about the weather,

 

barely more than how to weather it.  Yesterday

near to 50, & our lake is slush now.  A boy

with his skates makes his way home, fist

gripping the blades, laces like hazy,

charm lazy, baby snakes.  They sway

 

against his ski-pants and make a language

I cannot translate.  But if I were

in his skin and walking away from the

untamed lake I might be awake enough

to say wait—it’s slush today and winter’s

 

not even close yet to staying. 

God’s off galivanting, and all that’s left

on bottom is deep

sleeping in the crust of mud it has made

itself a home in.  Something here too is

 

pulled, pulled the way an echo pulls, or

the way memory, stretched back, finds that

soap bubble waiting after all

this time, glossy, paused paused

watch it doesn’t pop.

 

Remedy for Being Cold

winter clam flats,
lubec, maine

Remedy for Being Cold

 

She sits in the timestorm time’s turned into,

shinedying in her easy chair.

 

Love is there:

                                    Christian Wiman

                                    Rust

 

When the hats arrived,

and the scarves,

all the way from Ireland

the ardent nigh smell of

the lamb, of the ewe,

her fleece, and her fleece,

 

speaks with a close

aroma, though not only

that, & not aroma alone

though that is what I

noticed.  And ardent

is probably wrong,

 

too ambitious a word

but I was caught off

guard & my nostrils

stopped & the cauldron

of sheep seemed immediate

if more than three

 

thousand miles…but

I tell you I wanted to fall

back on that air of salving

emollient & be washed

not in water but in the lanolin

of mother, to be

 

embedded into the wool

before it was lifted from her

skin, all burdock & fold-clay

caked, I wanted that,

and thought if I had it

I’d never again be cold.

water over, water
paused

Tired, So Tired

 

Morning, Campobello

 

Tired, So Tired

 

And ever after rafters would speak to me

of falling

                                    Christian Wiman

                                    Black Diamond

 

Somewhere west of

here a wolf

 

moon wanes.  Snow

is bolt froze

 

to the roofs

of things: tree crown

 

empty of green

tree crown

 

needle filled green.

The hem of cloud

 

gown is coming

undone,

 

like it does, like it

always does,

 

when storms start

to blow, then

           

              blow

                        & blow

 

until they begin

to blow over.

 

We might not see

the moon again

 

this month, it might be

so heavy a sky

 

 

that the tired earth, she is

so tired, cannot lift

 

it with her waters gone

solid, like stone.

Cormorant

 

Cormorant

 

 

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

 

                        William Butler Yeats

                        He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

 

 

 

Walking in the thin crust,

the old snow covered what the wind had,

leaving it banked on the pier

post, allowed.  All the bootprints –

size man or boy, climbed the (how?)

tide rising pier ladders

without losing one moment.

Behind me the bald eagle is on the tallest

rising pine, watching probably

the gulls and torment of crows.

It all goes round, this winter

on this working pier, local

boats and boats from Nova Scotia,

 

tightened to the posts, holding

on.  But I’d like to know

how the cormorant came to be

hollow-skulled & flat as an aged

ichthys print?  Here the ink is still

black black feather, the used

broom-straw blonde of its bill

ajar against the drove over snow.

Empty eye-bone, a crow maybe

noted the dull nictitating lid

draining its gloss to the creosoted

timber decking. Wounded? Unable

to rise?  It must’ve tumbled

 

from the pier-post or cleat & lain

prostrate & maybe the tread-wide winter

tires, flattening it fish-like but

didn’t meddle and plowed right

into nature.  Summers I see

these cormorants, their wing

span wide sun drying the water from

their last dives.  Dense-boned,

they can’t rise with all that mass

of themselves, of water falling off

them & back into the sea.  This beast,

stark black feather against the white

of the snow, I notice odd lot

of blonde on its bill, on the webbing

 

between its toes, is all but gone.

A faint tallow, like wax. 

What more is there to do?

It is stiff against this pier. What more

is there to do

but walk off, & leave it froze to

its winter lot, cast against the snow,

stuck till sometime early next

spring when all the winter will melt

for good, and that same fisherman,

nonchalant in all his duties, lifts it off

the deck and tosses it to the tide

before descending

that ladder to his fishing

boat, toe hold holding, toe hold

letting go.