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