small temper (a): subject, space, time

small temper (a): subject, space, time

after Moon Madness

                ...Turn now darling give me that look,

that perfect shot, give me that place where I am erased...

                                                            Jorie Graham

                                                            Orpheus and Euridice

the irony of trying to explain it:

    in? away? with? word then

    words is: one is too much 

    and then beyond three, well

    that is not enough.  there has

    to be an agreement to make it

    make sense (think physical

    here, skin) a gathering of all

    the ingredients & the trust

    of experience or the rush of

    spontaneity headlong into it just

    for this moment that folds 

    to this moment to be without

    words how the first flower

    of the season will be picked 

    and placed in the middle of

    the tension and it will be 

    shared and stared at and given

    altar status at table and maybe

that is the first stitch in a series

    of stitches intended to draw 

    closed the wound flushed of

    its debris and its infections 

    of days its relationship to the

    wielder and the betrayed

    the instrument long thrown off

    down the drain and the flush 

    of the beginning of decay making

    vain efforts to ascertain anguish

    from passing away to days of 

    barricade--maybe take away

    the gauze but carefully maybe

    make ready for the pain it's

    going to make in raising even

momentarily, the dead.  I'll tell you 

    it's as necessary

    as this vernal moon whose illumed

    full face has made it all the way

    from the beginning without needing

    to be explained and doesn't she

    pull back the water and draw it along

    the face of the world like the veils

    of Veronica and isn't it a bit of God

    left in the linen and isn't that too

    unexplainable isn't that the first

    moment of seeing the miracle: the

way, drawing off that gauze, the wound

    is an open throat and the veins

    exposed and the surgeon holding

    the needle and sinew against the red

    flesh and before the puncture says

    a little prayer, lips and tongue and teeth

    (but behind the blue mask so this

    is only assumed) drawing breath 

letting breath, the first sign that a word

    is going to accept its fate and take on

    lungs and esophagus and tongue

    and let itself be lifted out to fall 

    to his still dumb studio wet and dry 

    and in all manner of sunlight and ice

         

        

Broken, Open Bones

Broken, Open Bones

 On Demolished June, 1195

watercolor on paper

What poem shouldn't begin

with two juncos

trapped in a room with windows

open?

This one maybe though the hope

of that or even

the practicality is lost

if only for the simple

fact they're there already in the second

line and also because

even if it's curtains I tell you curtains

they are tangled in they're still

not giving

in or finding or able

because they're delirious

with fear, so delirious that 

the open space below the solid

not-opaque-too-opaque membrane

is a simple white blood cell

between them and their freedom.

What's the answer--if they stay

they'll bang their breasts and brains out

repeatedly, like a penitent, and it makes

for good drama to say maybe they are

just that: two penitents flown in

from their own bodies and battles

and taken up in

this little feathermachine-and and lifting it

muddy the translation

of their intentions on their death

beds until the only thing left

is fury, is the catapult let

go and the miracle however

brief of being flung at someting

solid only to have that tiny opening

a forgotten door or window

meant to let the air in fresh

the air out stale.

Fear alone has its own particular

odors.  They are pushed out through

muscle and skin and sweat.  Imagine

standing in a light drizzle of this aroma.  It falls

soft as a lost sight before it's even

caught on that it's lost, before the jump-

start-recognition that what you had is now

gone and probably forever, or forever 

enough that if you put your ear to

the wall those birds still

burst themselves open on, if you do this 

week's after their death and it's quiet everywhere,

maybe you'll still hear what it feels

like to have some of this perfume fall

on your upturned fingers and palms.  Maybe

you'll even hear it fall, and you'll raise

your fingers to the cave of your ear and let it

drip into the cave of it like bird-

song, or like other sounds that didn't

make it into this fantasy, because, right?

All poems start with juncos,

two of them, trapped.  Or in the very least

all poems start with trapped birds.  You choose

your species.  But I will tell you this for nothing:

I mean I won't charge you:

Choose your birds with care

if you can.  They will be, they always are,

in the room with you.

Plot of Land

Plot of Land

We close the eyes of the dead so they will not see their unseeing.

                                                            Jane Hirshfield

The return of things you'd thought

you'd rooted, now halved open, publicly

read: the veins and rings and ancient

signs of weather.  Maybe today it's acorns.

The way you'd watched the grey

squirrel rumble under the flop

and slop of last autumn's color, gone

now past its trauma into something

undramatic, an ending you want 

to be used to but never manage it, how

it becomes less and less sweet all

season, the way too much

heat for not too much time makes

the green in leaves, (or at the cook

top, the broccoli turn from awake

to anesthetized but you eat it any

-way like all the rest of the pleasure

-less vegetables gurgling their limp re

-sistances in the white and under

-cooked rice.)  Remember, you'd 

watched the bob of the tail curl

to the question and then lay straight

out in the who- spooked -it- get- away? 

Who can say?  But before you turn

to stay in another present 

moment you take the day to watch the blue

-jay hop after the quick sashay

and sway and break its broad

and brainy cranium against the feed

box, laying his inner landscape down 

from his lungs outward.  Or a grey

gull's announcement of MINE! 

would sound a hell-uv-a lot more

like (admit it, you miss it) home.  But you've

been away a long time, longer

than you've lived

here.  Or almost.  After the pan

-demic, what animal will you be?  Jay?

Gray squirrel?  Or that way-ward un

-tamed gull?  And way-ward, what's that

ever mean even.  Random seed?  Broke open

from husk and hull to meat?  Swallowed

a moment before the migration from one

hemisphere to another?  Come solstice, then

come autumn, the vernal turn hurts 

in a way no one can see or even speak of

but only massage, deep, it's so deep

beneath even the beating, and not just

the heart but the whole species: beatbeatbeat

in the homing, in the agreement we make

taking up all their stakes: behold! there is our

we- are- no- less- than- Jehovah.  There is

no staying in one place all safe and made

neat against decay.  Even if what lies

buried is never seen this season, next

there's offspring, there's crow or fox 

or stumble-bum sashays of jays.  Something will,

as if magnetized, pick the same plot

and drop what they've brought, almost

weightless now, on top of what's cached.  

Chance and circumstance.  The days of making

one's self into ammonite, into bone

impressions of the pressure it takes of being

left behind.  Dropped hot before flight.  Opening

and closing is, live limpet, an ending quite like instinct.

And the earth takes over, also quite by instinct.

Pats it, soothes it with dirt.  Cools it all winter.

All is not hopeless it says, and breaks it, like

a memory, and makes it take the light straight on

and into the squinting newskin face and says

but without words see?  Touch me

not, please, touch me not, I have not yet 

(but wait, I soon will) acceded.   

Lines I read twice

Lines I read twice

Lines I read twice and then twice

again like it's nothing but time's smile

in the rising moon.  It's morning.  It's still

dark.  For two days now I've made bad

coffee.  But it wakes me the way this 

wakes me: If the unbearable were not weightless

we might yet buckle under the grief of what

hasn't changed yet.  I've taken up with Jane

Hirshfield again.  I want to deserve a poet

like her I want to kiss her on her hands

and her cheek and maybe she on mine.

I want to know we both look up because

we all do anyway and at the same going 

and arriving sun and moon and stars and rain.

It's all quite simple.  We age and the dust

falls and we wait for months without seeing

the need to wipe it away.  Is this neglect? Slutty

housekeeping?  Or sitting down with hot

bad coffee and drinking it regardless straight up

not because we're a martyr, but because maybe

we've just had some bad news and we don't quite

know what to do with it.  See?  We swallow

what we put in our mouth.  We read it as it slides

down our throat, as it dremels our esophagus

deep enough in the muscle so that every bit of what

we eat will groan, will groan until we sing.

*Jane Hirshfield

Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station and

a Full Moon over the Gulf of Mexico and All Its Invisible Fishes

on last night's full moon changing to snowfall...

 on last night's full moon changing to snowfall...

listen: do you

hear the snow's sly

arrival by night and

how at once the moon's

lace of light

lays on the lilac

branch then blots 

it as if it were sand

scattered

to dry the ink

on the letter 

someone or other

and ages ago

had just written

and how then it must

let itself be

tucked out

of sight 

and behind

the light 

and variable

 

wind of what

it has taken

up with?  

ah this  

snow after cupping

itself in the elbow

of a branch is

either a joy

or sudden

  

come to before

the slant 

fall at

that odd wind

driven tilt to be

settled and

caught albeit

briefly

on last autumn's

blossoms gone 

from living but not 

from life.