Five Shiny Crows

 

Five Shiny Crows

 

Spend enough time seeing shadows—

 

Whatever it is they’re finding,

it’s a feast.  Beneath the low

oak branch they’re a swaying halo

around the dying

yew.  Then they’re like friars

in a silent line, walking their inaudible

lauds.  Discalced, sifting

the breached

debris.  Breached to

brief release, and when these sweet

beasts break away they are able

to receive

the limb like an ancient austringer's 

prosthesis.  See them

landing there, see them

                            shake a few

loosening leaves looser.  See each

leaf unhasp, glide in their own

delight of flight, then gather

in on the grass then at last batten 

down just as those five bright

black lights find, at once?  Close

enough. Their flight.

 

Water is the Shape of its Vessel & We, We are the Shapes Of the Places We have Swallowed It From.

 

Water is the Shape of its Vessel & We, We are the Shapes Of the Places We have Swallowed It From.

 

 

 The lived & living tip

Their cylinders of sand

To spill into the lotus’s

Enclosure.  There is fire

There.  Eye.  Whelk shells

& labyrinths of well-

Water.  For our thirst.

For when the wind slips in

Ahead of us, & lifts

This generous living

To our lips & says sip

The Visit

at sunset: great blue heron

 

The Visit

 

We are many who speak of heaven.  But few

who understand eternity.

 

                                    Lars Mytting

                                    The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

 

And then they left me with you and went

about nursing the living, tending

the alarms, walking the long hall all mopped

 

and then all your caution

was set down and could be now

with the last of it gargling now

 

and then in & out & loud like old folded

bellows raised

& lowered to stoke those few

 

then remaining going going coals.  And so. 

Your one open eye.  Your slow though

sudden silence.  What, now that you could,

 

then did you lift yourself out of,  encased

in your own bones these last years your 

bones & atrophied hands, your raw

 

dough-like skin?  I pulled the one

chair close as I could to your elevated bed

And then I held and held your hand. 

And then you flew. 

Vows

 

 

Vows

 

On the stalk of the blossoming

Lavender her calculated perch,

Innate in wind, one discerning

bumblebee.

See: she gracefully

Separates the purple

Velveteen into her

Fragrant geometries,

To enamour the bloom

Her vestal servitude

In exchange for this: a layered

Living lace briefly brought

To her collar, her face—her…

 

            TASTE

If It's Possible

 

 

If It’s Possible

For One Stem to Kneel

 

 A rumble went among us, glancingly,

like a flame flickering limb to limb in a stand

too wet to catch.

                            Christian Wiman

                            In the Time of Fire

 

The rain has made the Queen

Anne’s lace to brace to her

one knee.  Her ruff is

suffered to the riverbanks & to

the pavement.  In the night

 

I heard bucket

of rain & I imagined a life

boat taking on water & the clogged

bilge & the boys sluicing it all over

the gunwales.  Probably this

water & all her attending

 

molecules have shoulder-rubbed

the pomp of the near drowned, down

the inner hulls, into the buckets,

charged with the rescued breath

spit into the wind.  Wont’ it go

 

back up int the sky & be lugged

over the small mountains?

Won’t it have changed some given

their rough revivals?  Imagine

ministering to them, imagine

 

the slim distance between God’s

baptizer’s hand on the back

of the head and the clasped grip

of the penitent, plunging them

under to the count no one has ever

 

agreed on but for the waiting

of some sign in the raining

sky, in the crowd of flowers ecstatic

on the bank, their grip of ligaments

closing over the sopped wing

 

of the bee giving up, giving into

the struggle.

 

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.