her confinement is

wrinklin'

as kin to the pine as water

breathing in the fog

and is bobbing

up the falling moon

who's already 

past her full

and is pulling an edge

of her rented hem 

of mist and film a borrowed

lace of cloud and soon

she'll be new

and in the very least decreased

and deceased

for the days and time

it takes to rise

again shy and shyer still

with the light 

edging off, the least common

-place face ever

the change and the station

-master's sold out

knowing there's no

predicting even with all

the formula's accuracy: 

the face seeing

a face

takes it

in as them

-selves

and makes a chemistry

that they say's stopped

in the bottle of her body:

what precaution mustered

for remaining corked

or what all prediction in

the window and her light cast

on the cruel floor and the curling

foot smudging 

into it and though there's no

warmth and though slowing

she's going

like a moody boat he's holding

in the cove

and the day's early

and earnest.  still

nothing touches her 

wound as honest

or as shy

or as unpredictable

as this moon: through

atmosphere through

hemisphere through

all sphere's glass and cracks

and spread squarely:

a constant stocking

taking no pain 

save excruciating

to put on.

Cellar Door Pull

Cellar Door Pull

It's like using the same oar

all your life.  

The oarlock wears it out

till there's not much left of it--and 

you're the one who did it.

                    Andrew Wyeth

maybe taking to her hip the way she had to near

the end the way her dis-

                                        

                                    ease curled her and burled

                                    her knuckles and knees

and made them seem

a Stradivari

                                    pegbox and scroll

                                    and pelvis an f hole under her

skin and made them

cellos and violins 

                                    fists stiff with her peculiar

                                    euphony...broke off ...maybe

she missed being

able to lift the cellar door or grip

                                    the pull to take in the whiff 

                                    of the underneath before she went down

in to get whatever was

hidden there.  To bend her knees without

                                    needing to think to grab at some deliberate

                                    clutch: the doorjamb the window

casing and how later the years were

laid into the paint by kitchen grease and wood

                    

                                    smoke and constant touching

                                    and by the time

the door stayed shut enough toward forever

it was a slit of an eye

                                    when she dragged herself by

                                    it and sometimes puffed up some kind

of dust: cat hair, chicken dander, Andy's or

Alvaro's mud coming undone from

                                    the boot tread and left off almost perfect

                                    a little castle of sand

she'd've swept if she were able to

stand and now it collects

                                    in hinges of the brass pocket-door pull

                                    in the cellar door and the scroll

a mote throughout...

            

                                

A Great Truth

A great truth is like a mountain

that one walks around, and the changes

of its contour as one moves

his position only emphasize and revivify

its majesty.

                    N. C. Wyeth

Through one muntin and one alone the grass (because

of the glass

                I suppose) is a windier

green, I mean see all the way

how through can't  you                pretend to

ease your skin and bones into

the air free of

                                  the barrier

                                                    while you're standing or

sitting or licking your lips

and the almost healed split

lets itself go again against  the knowing

point of your stiffened tongue just keep

                                                                    going 

                                with the sod coming soft on us

true as the wintered cemetery

stones over and down below this

                                                        window and what's left

of the blue or what's been

worn through: water

                        slop

                        aged

                        pink

                        rag

                                wring and wrung and all undone of her

buttons - if you draw back to that

arm coming in you might

if you're in the right frame

feel the weft and shag 

of sand that were made to make you able

to see such grit insisting

in the splinter you'd felt stuck in a week ago and just left off the skin  growing

                over the hole

or blood coming on slow like a child lowering

her chin to her throat when she knows

what she knows though she won't....and those

old buttons become a rosary sewing alone to disclose

what exactly? maybe covering up 

the one eye like she's told to go out alone

to her bed in the dark when going 

beneath such dark of a thing makes

beads come on her lip 

and when afraid she licks them from

the tip of her finger she rubs them rubs the grit a little

pock on the interior like spots inside 

                        the old glass you look through

                                    that one pane see

                                        trapped with (whose?  

whose?)

                 old air?

                    

                                                

soda, salt, sand

 

tell me, aren't you already exhaling when 

the thing's that's said to take

your breath away takes your breath

away?  Isn't what was in the lung being

pushed through your chimney: 

the flue of your throat and crown

of your mouth, the cap of your nose?

Alvaro kept the ladder against

the house if in case the brick lit

flittingly the dormant creosote greasy 

as cheese, jagged as half-rotted

teeth, imagine coming from the bottom

up, the chain banging the bucket

of sand, the pocket of damp rag

filled with salt baking soda

and to inches beside the jeopardized

shingles and trusses and if it comes

straight in without asking, though

in some backward hindsight invited

when the match's struck and when

the bellow's squeezed and poking full

open in the face maybe those bats

come to roost there.  who's not had his 

chimney up and running all summer but come

the first frost, come the crops all bedded,

come her fall on the cold mud road

walking home and no shoulder

to heave to and soon she's legitimately

ill. And her breath legitimately taken 

off as like in hod after hod of shingles 

they'll need before what? full-on winter?  wait

until spring?  situate to the kitchen 

and only two other rooms beside?  what 

of falling and keeping it secret, like creosote 

stitched stalactite thick in the brick 

and then the sucker-punch and double

over what's broken off and what's about to

bloom beyond smoke...couldn't it be 

true that what's ugly or what's about to

throw roses from the roof stuns just as

much and there's just as much force

that draws us off and on through?

?

Is it the same force as beauty seducing 

to see what's covered set free? 

Getting There, Pulling Herself, Amazing

Maybe raked maybe 

picked by hand does it make

any difference after

each mostly clean 

berry's free enough of her

stem and stray green

knuckle and an odd

leaf maybe and say they all take

on sugar at their own

pace shrug it off 

entirely or soak it in like it was

the only ever lost thing

it truly hankered

for.  Come cold butter come then

some crushed, come under

the millstone milled flour 

and come some pinch of salt

and what all unmeasured

come just eyeballed

the toss of water.  And soon

pinned and rolled in

thin enough a crust.  And soon 

what's come: the filling of those rough

and casual and familial

(because doesn't it 

depend on the level of light

in the room in your mood

doesn't it depend on

what life and breath you've got in you

that morning or afternoon

stoking the stove too

and keeping it all 

hot enough and steady

while heating gold comes on

melting in pie crust stroked on canvas

under hands a brush

a flush of crushed red then

faded into the places taken

under aprons under stations

they make you

stay in assaying the stained

entrapped ulnar the knuckled

chuff across the floor 

the push still hot from the oven

piece of pie ahead

and to the bottom 

of the stairs calling "Andy,

here's your lunch."

*Title and quote  Andrew Wyeth: A Spoken Self-

                            Portrait

                            Richard Meryman

 

Lace

up

when the wind is let in

when it is let in to lift

everything left

everything let lie, listen

the lift of lace

and crocheted wings, beaks

and bodies of birds

left placid against the glass

to take their courses back

to favored places they may

have been, being lace: hook

and fingers and thumb

the coveted cotton, pillow box

the gone bobbins, prickers

and lifters, all sundry

accouterments...listen: wind 

wants for nothing, needs

for nothing to be it but 

breathing.  Who hung them

up there in the attic, giving

them some affirmation inside

and maybe to the glancing

up eye, out?  Don't you

want to know, depending

on your romance, maybe how

they came to be made? 

Machine stages or staying

weights of bobbins

or do you want to know

who stood up in the window

to thread those cotton robins

(make them that) through

the rod and then walk back

-wards out of the room judging

their level sobriety? I wonder

if one of the things maybe

she was hankering for was

the simple walk up those stairs

one foot after the other

the scuff of her shoe on 

the tread and toe-kicked riser,

the sag and sigh of the cede

of each step, still relenting,

beneath her.  Just to see

those pieces.  Those lace

darlings come up in a breeze

if Andy'd left the lower sash

up just some, just some, stuck

probably in the pocket, but

the robins are free, like they're

just new, just relenting the nest

lifting before the last possible crash

after such a shocking, shocking 

fall, and how, if she could, she'd

press her face against them 

and let them touch her, and they

her, bird after bird.  She'd taste.

She'd awaken.  And tell no one.

 

Flown

Dear Betsy

Experience is an intact fruit,

core and flesh and rind of it; once cut open, 

entered, it can't be the same, can it?

                                Mark Doty

                                "Source"

Nothing's showing now but the small

round hole.  A week ago the tree

swallow, the one I watched insist

the air zip and unzip and zip

some more then come to perch, her

miniature claws on the rim

of the open hole.  And inside don't you

imagine the twigs and bits

of dead grasses she sat and sat

then flew from then came back

and sat some more?  Yesterday

not at home or not the day before

when I'd come to mow. Maybe

I got too close?  But I noticed (it's

probably gone now, the wind,

a scythe sighing and sighing)

a brown breast feather and some

of a tail maybe or inferior wing.

I wonder did some predator bird

fly right on by and noticing did it

circle back to attack and crack open

what now mother bird's had to

by nature abandon?  There's not

a lot of noise after the flights

like this are reconsidered.  At first

nothing at all took notice (though

only me to come to stumble

and once in a while look up 

and see everything and all

that was normal and par

for the course but hating I don't

know if she's flown and her chicks

too, through with the little box

with the roof on it, and hope that

ominous feather had blown in from out

of town and was lost long

long before this nest was even

seen and then needed in its dry

and mostly out of sight height.

Love, Christina