briefly

 

see how the drop in the water

has caused the paused log 

to be caught between honest

to goodness from birth beneath

the streams to home, briefly

in this deep honest cleavage

 

each retreating, each receiving

repository

repository

this now is my driftwood:

the stay-put roots, legs

of them that's been

twisted, suspended above

the lowering level of the river-

fed pond. What's gone blond.

what's gone common

gray and water that's new

enough to such bare oracle 

roots it not only falls down

in awe but looks up in awe

at the blackening under-

neath (what's hid from me)

but keeps me leaning 

into my knees between

the pinching splinter

in the rail, insisting,

embedding.  

Grounds Keeper

 

 

Grounds Keeper 

Then she was dead,

The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

And we all knew one thing by being there.

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

                                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                                Clearances

 

Who knows what he goes in there for.

The stove’s cold, the window’s open

enough that there’s a sloe explosion

of snow as though the skin’s split

 

in between the thumb and one or

two other fingers, succumbing, as it does,

to such tender pressure.  It’s along

the fold of the tatted cushion, that

 

snow.  Some as come in small balls.  

He’s going for broke, maybe,

having thrown in or out and it’s not all

landed yet whatever bone with its pricked

little dots.  And outside the tatter of some 

jack-hammer rugged against the new

year freeze, and all that it takes away

with it to bury her with some gauzed 

composition of dignity.  Mostly It enters 

the froze as stone  

burial home, mostly he’s on his own

and he thoroughly parts the rugged

tomb air, his home out of home for the last

thirty-odd years.   How it’s all exhausted, 

how all the breath is bested by the bittering

wind.  He’s hatless.  He thumbs the run

of dust the grunge among the loved

things: a cup, a clam hoe, a bucket,

a cover for that bucket, that, if he looks

through his breath, is rimmed with her

favorite blue, chipped and almost all washed

off except for that underneath, how 

it’s fresh as off the shelf, or just,

and set tenderly at home to keep

what’s in it in and what’s out 

of it out.

How To Pray in the Damned River

 

How to Pray in the Dammed River

 

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

                                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                                Clearances

 

 

The opening in the stones is only

visible at low water and then

the lowest still is unapproachable.

It’s closest to a door beneath

 

the river and because I don’t

know the way of rivers going,

I can thoroughly sit and watch

the stationed run-off caught

 

all summer in the century-ago

placed stones: going leafless

trees, two or three fishing

bobbers broke free their rod,

 

bobbles for a cast-off Christmas

song.  An oracle, that door.

Maybe, if I’d come walking

down river with the same boots

 

as I’d wear out into low tide

I’d reach, pull the tops up to

my crotch and walk past all

the crockery, river glass, all

 

that’s been cast off (or pocketed-

because in time I might

find enough of this one pattern

to resemble and reassemble

 

a memory) and walk, v-ing

the little patches of Jesus

bugs skimming the water, slip

on the slime all waters contrive

 

to make, toward that door

in the dam.  It’s open, I only

just noticed.  It’s always,

even when the river’s full

 

of itself and insisting its winter

spoils, even when its behind

the tossed over the face hair

of the goddess’s gate-keeper,

 

--have your question ready

                and written

                on a slip

                of your best

 

                paper – and then

                make your way with it

                in your fingers – and –

                                arriving

 

                bow and breathe

in and swallow

                the breath of the old

                river inside its vestibule

 

                find the right seam between

                two boulders and heave

                but delicately,

                like a ballerina, and only

 

                the arc (the peace between)

                of the arms – the pinch

                of fingers, the rooted feet

                in the deepest grasses, wet

 

                weeds

reach, balanced, or un

balanced if you need more

forgiving – and wait to be

 

                                wait to be.

After Night Shadow

 

2020 first day
of spring

After Night Shadow

 

I prefer  

winter and fall, 

when you feel the bone

structure in the landscape--

the loneliness of it--the dead

feeling of winter.  Something waits

beneath it--the whole story doesn't show.

                     Andrew Wyeth

it's a myth that shadows are

                easier

        to look at

            than the sun.

Shadows can drive us

    mad but the sun only leaves us

            blind

                if we take too much

                if we're gluttonous

        for too long

and velvet as they are

    at casting such a touch

                without touching...

shadows,

    un

        pin    

            down

                    able

ar as

shifting as wind

    in

 constant

there's nothing

but hunger in them

and fantasy - take

Wyeth's Night Shadow - Helga

is /and or isn't awake

but the play is the way

the shade makes half her face

    conjure a Hawthorne

Revered

        Hooper or Moody

        (remember the crepe

            black veil

                how it lived 

                    in the world 

                        for the men who 

                            wanted/needed

                                to be taken

                                    out of it)

and in sleep, how

it eased

up from the breath

and went limp or if not limp

than withered and if not withered

a bereft companion

in the tradition...

if you want

            but do you know

                    do you

                            do you really

                                    know

                                                ?

sun more

than shade

stay naked all-day

and wait for the way

that sun escapes and makes you

shade.  let it play the way flame plays

as it is drawn up and away from the place

it was laid down into and made, with breath

and the finally, finally! open and bare palms of his hands.

Down the Cove

 

Down the Cove

 We come back emptied,

to nourish and resist

the words of coming to rest:

birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash

flagstone, hearth...

                                             Seamus Heaney

                                             The Birthplace

 

I think maybe when Wyeth went out to row

from one ledge of the bowl of Broad Cove

to the other ledge, her edge, knowing the below

 

of him was the below of her and of the boat,

that only flowed, ever flowed and through flowing

the puff and blow of his breath was sowing

 

not rows and rows of the deftly hove

throats of open ground, hoping

no blight, no crows, no baren clod closed

 

after such a hopeful spring opening, but only

the great owing that wasn’t owning

but was, bless us, a stove lit with coal

 

and his dear friend holding the door open

with the toe of her old boot, the toll

of the years on the unstiffened deliberate roll

 

of the tongue unstrung poking to the grotto

of that stove glowing and her palms open

my friend, my dear, dear friend, welcome home.

 

Local Receipt, Folded, Soaked

Local Receipt, Folded, Soaked:

1 tea 1 pkg chips 1 sandwich

Love brought me that far by the hand, without

The slightest doubt or irony, dry-eyed

And knowledgeable, contrary as be damned;

Then just kept standing there, not letting go.

                                        Seamus Heaney

                                        from "The Walk"

It's a road you go by knowing:

wouldn't you like to see

how far into the trees it sneaks

before the abutment of some

other property is KEEP OUT seen: laundry,

clapboard, 1 turned-on- a- pedal,

wheel-pocked-with-dew-

and-rust kid's bike--the kind

if you were a kid that would be

measured against the neighborhood

and seen, if new, a bucking 

wheelie of a steed.  Take it,

that vision, and walk up

and up and up the hill that could

be a literal killer in winter.

The litter is natural, its

pine and every quarter

of a mile maybe a deliberate,

old-blowdown-drug-from

the-once-lightening-struck-canopy

splintered trunk.  Deterrent only

for wheels, it's easily

stepped over, they flake

and break apart in the seeming

infinity of their age.  Sawn,

some ends.  and some, if  

I were still

a kid, a tusk of the fallen (because 

out mission was Alexander's

infantry and my brother 

was alive and we'd stumble

and die in the thick

curl of the tusk. And they'd

remain while we, lucky or un,

you decide, no favor

no quarter, went on

and on and on.  Cresting it all

is the handmade mortarleas

stone wall and within

the family of bones.  Old owners

of the land.  Maybe, when 

they were interred, there weren't

so many pine or oak covering

the kind of steep hill they were 

brought up, to rest in all

their finality, and the crest of it. 

On this old road in the woods.

On an old asphalt road at that.  Steep.

Curvaceous.  Kept, but covered.  

I brushed some needles and cones. 

I think: tree teeth.  I think:

pangolins.  I think: these people, 

sleeping, beneath their boulders

and stones.  I see the gate is already

open, as though they're waiting.

But it has been, if the moss and cross

and all the lichen growing over it

says anything at all, for years.  

I leave it that way.  And maybe

I'm seen in an upstairs KEEP

OUT window.  And maybe

because I leave the way I came,

I'm not.  Either way...

Either way.  And then I have

to wonder, what of the dead

we walk on and over who

have never been celebrated,

remembered.  Who we build

roads over and tamp them

with the weight of our passive

neglect.  What of them?  What comes

of all their loves and all their

sorrows?  No cemetery in the woods

for people like me to come upon

at the end of a disappearing road.

What of them and their last call: chips,

two slices of meat between two slices

of bread, and lucky, sweet tea.

Don't You Know

Don't You Know 

Maybe memory, in order

to commit itself some

-what toward entirety or 

at the very least leave

a print or two surviving

the damage or the con

-valescence or what

all comes between, needs

to be paired, needs to be

hung to a sticking

post to hold the reins, leather

strips or rope strips brass

ringed into the bit on each 

of the mare's cheeks.  and

maybe the brain is that mare

i ride or at least some

of the time and train the be

tween of her ribs to my grip

of  knees or, all in now with time

and holy matrimony come to

need the reins less and less

so we both can know

where it is we're going.

Association.  Only in my own

knowing of home if I'm going

to the old swing rope will I

see the boy there and how his toes

hold the throat end (he called

it that, the choke over the bone, a

half-way down bobber every time

he swallowed.  I'd watch it near dis-

appear under the collar of his 

cotton rock-n-roll motley.  He'd

stolen the rope from his step

-father's boat.  He'd told me going

up was like knowing the way

husbands go know their wives best

friends and he let slide one eye and one,

then two, fingers to my elbow

then through my shirt and the curve

edge of a new restraining toward an

unrestraining test.  And up

the rope he'd go.  And only in this 

version does it hold, through cold

winter snow, through assuming it's mine

now that he's dead, knowing shoes

are not at all necessary, or because

he always did it bare

footed, all toes and soles.  

Now, I'll take my own life

time to climb the height

of that rope into the sky

and straddle the branch 

where it's caught and knotted and the three

of us coming up over the rope,

growth rippling like the winded 

withers I'd hoisted myself up to, 

and give my curved back to, and his

and let him turn me, eager bit

strained, unrestrained, cut, 

and sent through the branches

to the trunk of the only one

still standing in all her braggable 

height

 

In This Old Colonial

 

In This Old Colonial

The darkness was thin, 

like some sleazy

dress that has been

worn and worn 

for many winters and always

lets the cold through 

the bones.

                        Eudora Welty

                        "The Whistle"

I'm wondering coming round from

the back to face the front

door, if the parlor was to the left

or to the right?  Being courteous, attending

to the grief the living participate

in, if I were to arrive at this 

house two hundred years ago in some

honor of the dead, which direction

would I take to sit with the laid out

remains and disappeared stains buffed 

from the quarter-sawn pine, fire

on the inside of the andirons to drive all

our breath/wind up the brick in 

shocked or resolved shuffs, 

depending on the unnatural or 

or natural they may have gone

down, and then gone up, some

part of them stuck in the deep gleam

of the creosote, tinking like

clinked glasses, to come loose

in the next heavy rain and some

staying, when the brick goes cold, 

for the once favored, for the way it gave

to heat?  Maybe, this isn't the time

to ask, but can you remember reading Eudora

Welty's "the Whistle", when such a dying

freeze is so near their  ( I want a word

for the skin, the way it dimples when

the ripe's on, the way it stays

thick as thieves all summer and then gives

way to the least of freezes)  

tomatoes, the dearest

thing they can bring to heat is

their cherished heirloom? And once lost,

the crop is nothing but limp along

the macadam path

of hindsight---all is lost come the

icy dust of morning.  If I'm re-

membering correctly, they 

freeze to death, yes?  And aren't 

their memories given back to them

with the ferocity of that heirloom

on fire and don't they become

fiends for the least streak of soot

and warmth?  And too, these 

immediate to me ghosts?  Don't

they too go up the chimney 

where some part of them stays

stuck, like their last supper, 

tucked to the flue and brick?

Two hundred years of it, what

the sweep, with his bricks

and sticks, misses?

 

if there were ghosts in this

if there were ghosts in this...

if there were ghosts in this old house

or i should say because there are 

ghosts in this old house, ask: should i

hold my breath in certain doorways

to rooms where i know the dead were

waked and made of for their last

ever walk down the road of the earth

and finally, because it was done, 

and the sum of it, into it.

For Ruth

For Ruth   

On Hunt Road road, the old pine's 

been losing her ground, who knows

for how long and who knows

how many have walked or driven by.

Numerous.  --And she's opposite

a tight curve so someone was avoiding

something oncoming--see where

there's a deep enough set

of gouges, down into 

her meat, and it's an old injury but not

old enough she's stopped

her drops of pitch from falling, right?

And I wonder if the thick dregs are her

way to cover what's been

dismissively done to her, a hit and run.

If you want to give her something

of your empathy--she's still

living and it's not this going 

which going to kill her--this pitch, 

thick with gravity, gives it the same shape

as weeping. I'm thinking to

appreciate her standing still

is a mercy too - listen - imagine it all

coming down to drops

of sap.  Is it the end of it when

they finally fall atop the moss and then

the moss is kicked off onto the tar

road and walked on or driven

over and stuck in the treads - the stick!

of the essence! I mean, isn't this something

of what we hold 

out for, that shiver of inspiration

we want to ripple and never diminish

because isn't it a lifetime

between seeing it and being struck

to the last stroke, the standing

back to see it 

finally needing to be, like 

cones or flown birds, pinched

and then let go?

After Cellar Fireplace

After Cellar Fireplace

What looks the strongest has outlived its term.

The future lies with what's affirmed from under.

                                        Seamus Heaney

                                        From the Canton of Expectation 

The last owner's ashes

have been hidden within

and underneath

the three or four sticks

of wood they put down

to cover them.  In a hurry,

they let it mostly cool

before going out, possibly

forever, sniffing creosote

all the way to their car,

their hearts hearts of iron.

We'll never know the last

of what they burned

and it being late

autumn the smoke is no

surprise and the easterly

breeze takes it on its own

and introduces it to

a whole new way

of living.  

Have you ever wondered what 

was the stuff of other

folks innermost internments?

Their roping themselves in

and the duty guards alert,

the cliche of prison

wire glinting in the seemingly

benign light of the night?  (be-

cause we all know dark, possibly

more than light, is anything

but benign).  Letters home?  Letters

from home?  Appropriate how

holding them over the coals 

is similar to first opening them,

with their hot flashes

of hope.  The stove's cold

the coal bin's hold is down to a day

maybe a day 

more.  Shoveling through

someone's love 

and thumb-rubbing the black back

of the dry cedar, I've come to

sense there is

a real weight  to ghosts.

And they puff up 

when they're roused, and then

being roused, they come back 

down not far from where it was

they'd been taken, their final rest

settling the score for 

whatever they were before

they were pushed forward to be

ravished by the fire, tired 

and prayed on,

and even though it might not

blaze, it will do the job.

After Seabed

After Seabed

What is more unsounded than water 

caught in the hollow

of the bowl of the

glass and stone

bird bath?

Evaporating is simply it, being.

It is its rapt compulsion

and alms gathering, a

kind of duff

and frigate

-like

ease to slice completely

through (reflected) or

be needed, freely:  

tin or finger-

tips and lips,

drawn

by penury, tongue rigged

to set east where all

glottal gods pause,

all talking stops

with this:

water.

 

To truss the tongue so

that deserts remain

not (but only

if you're

careful

of every drop) so,

so lonely.

dowser

 dowser

water: no matter how much, there's till not enough.

Cunning life keeps asking for more and then a drop more.

                                                                Marin Sorescu

what sounds then draws your water long

    before the ground is split, shoulder

    shudder come up from the withers 

    like a fly's six whispering feet ripple

or water's top taken off, driven spade

    hand driven thirst tongue and brain.

    what coming up is a thumb or thimble

    sheathed middle finger easing

the needle through two or more overlay

    of blankets or cuffs of pants above

    the next-to-lowest eye-hole of

    the nearly new work-boot, like a ruler,

inch by inch, or what's thrust up

    by genetics or need or both, the seed

    in the pitch of the earth.  what, pray

    do yo prefer: a spirit

level to the stone you're going 

    to have to go through humble

    as the first time the hazel branch    

    was laid one right one left

in the pockets of your palm then

     drew all the water from your tongue

    first so that when you touched the edge

    of your lip with it it might've stuck

like a lodestone and then drawn off

    all it could before  turning loose

    a dirge or blessing, words that whet

    the edge before what's struck 

is struck, where the stick plummeted

    suddenly, just like Seamus Heaney said

    it would if you touched it with 

    the him still gripped.

 

    

       

    

    

   

away from the sea these twenty plus years

 

-away from the sea these twenty

plus years, 

this now is my driftwood:

the staying-put roots, legs

of them that's twisted in

the lowering level of the river

-fed pond.  what's gone, beyond

it, blond.  what's gone common

grey and water new enough to

such an oracle as these roots,

i wonder and want it to after

i've wondered, doesn't it 

look up in an awe to the blackend

underneath, what's hid from me,

leaning my knees between

the pinch in the rail, confessing,

bless me?

penny in the dry well

penny in the dry well

copper on the bottoms

    of the grass stalks and up

        the shaft.  copper

on the mosses i walk on

    and maybe (it's

        unavoidable) nip

off with the heel tand read

    of my boot.  and too,

        copper in the wheat

penny, its weight true,

    truer, listen, when

        i let it fall and

its not a slug, a lump

    of nothing, it's pressed

        with a president's

head, it's not a fake

       a phony all polish

            it's scintillation in

-evitable until grub and plug  

    fumble to come up with 

        gravitas, like spring

reeds in recovery

        winter killed, hollowed

            last-seasoned

hauled to bonfires

        left to cool in April or 

                May or June through 

to late Autumn and past, way past

        a December noon.  and new waits

            her turn to be scythed &

planed & smelted down to fine

       gleam cooped or sent to feed  

            old wax relief

saving face one cent

        one cent one cent

                sun's rising up

over the top of this

        bald reservoir.  through

                last winter's breath

caught in the hollow 

        of the yard's vale 

                where once a dry

a well, where once

        a wish  

      

after rain clouds

 after rain clouds

the drop that falls in

and carries all of what it is

made of all of what it has

passed through all of its film

like projections slipping from

its surface like a face

backing away from a mirror.

maybe receiving it means leaving

off the umbrella so that 

its falling will fall

on skin on fingers on cheek on tongue

and teeth and be soon

enough what it once was: 

blood then air then bird

a fever'd ululation

a shard of ice/dust coming up 

to the motion and rubbing

like frenzy is its entirety

tell me who without

umbrellas can help but be,

irrevocably, changed? 

after winter/trodden weed

 

after winter/trodden weed

try tight-walking on

your own, at- full- of- sun-

shadow, without flaw

15 august feast of the assumption

 

i'm thinking maybe rain

        drop/drop    and taking

every broad & narrow waist 

        and/or cinch/pinch its way

from the tip of the beginning 

            of its too full swell 

top/to/bottom fall. this: 

                    cowbirds are born

    to fell their foster sisters

(any gender, truth of it) and settles

                on his bonnet or he's not

able to make enough wind 

            to pick/up and get going

over the ocean and so it's only

                    what the poet said

after all: the air you breathe was once

                water

                        in

                            clouds

                                over

                                    Africa

and i'm saying they are, drops/

            hollow eyes

                    reflecting the way

    a petrified branch

            has been polished/glossed

                thumb-dug (can't)

                    rubbed (can)

cloth crumb dumb

                the way the shut up

                        mute

                                are dumb

            or something other:

the buck on the run who can jump 

            and summon the hedges the

 p a n o r a m i c s    

to curl end2end        and then

                            zoetrope

                    their own 

way, going/    while/    staying

                                                    put,

the page her anima

                                -tion

mainly merry-----go-----rounding

through light through all it has ever caught

                    one drop

                    and one and one

and one

un        til

it

falls

and is the hart,

in flight,

of the

story

Question for You

Question for You: 

When the painter paints the nude's 

eye does the painter see what the nude sees?

Like, right? it's watch

the artist's eyes

and how he starts 

to tithe and tie the light

behind the night

the first dip and stroke

across the empty canvass and that's a kind

                of being

                born right I just want to watch

                the eyes

                can they be

                captain and see

                to it the hand's                

                of the first mate

                jump to: do you

                in your muscle and iris

                with your pupil a sort

                of stool in the middle

                of it all and the earthy orb'd selara

                see a nude

                    the same way 

                    as you see, say, 

                    the braid in the lobsterman's buoy

                    rope, thick as the middle

                    of the bored-through

                    float?  Or do you see

                    that stray strand

                    of greasy hair or

                    the bump and bumble

                    of the bottle's arrival

                    on the morning step

                    that lip thick and stopped

                    and if he's going out early

                    on the boat, with yesterday's 

                    news around the daily bread,

                            aside from the perfect-as-quilt-squares

                            spots she's cut through 

                            for coupons,

                    I'm likening it to a child

                    who steps around a father's 

                    studio and listens to the fall

                    of the conquistador's visor

                    against the sides of his skull and how

                    it shuts everything

                    out but the dim beginnings

                    in seeing into the eye

                    like an ophthalmologist

                    the exposed nerves the floating

                    retina the seeming finger-

                    tip touch to the very back

                    of that eye imagine!!!

and then

the stroke all his own

first touches such an eye

such an eye.