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.

Throughout the Morning, Early, Early

 Throughout the Morning, Early, Early

After 'Miss Olson'

1952

tempera on panel 

Throughout the morning early, early

and as coffee has no choices

or solutions in it all, cooling

how it goes to almost unsippable

to gulpable in the December room

nearly all to once - how the tip

of the fuzzy tongue burned

impatient for the cooling delay

is lately numb to the water forced through

the ground to almost powder beans

(depending on your temerity) (your

need) with the start of the coldest

water brought up to the hottest

the both you can muster heat

the last is almost obligatory a

clean-your-plate-before-you-

leave morality because someone

somewhere is thirsty.  Keep it

at least briefly, on a first sip

meeting.  Don't be bored or force

the kiss.  Imagine that all night

you have been stoking

the coals and roasting the opening

of these beans and then broken them and sifted them

between the mesh and strain

and forced them

but only sweetly only ever sweetly

into such a being

sickbed

 

sickbed 

our bed 

shrinks from the soot

and hapless odors

holds us close

                            Elizabeth Bishop

                            Varick Street

this absence is anticipated 

the way waiting out her dying 

seems the least discrete: pee

breaks, creaking number three

stairs and in between frictions

of released (even after being

so sneaky) cedar floor suites

(the one that seems

to be breathed like a swisher

sweet) on our way to relieve

ourselves which really means

making room for more ease

sudden gone the bedpan takes on

because why not we're going so

don't waste a trip the whisper

squirt of disinfectant the one healthy

breath the one noise that will

come back afterwards the gesture

of holding one's own over 

the mostly wiped away sick

how some smells immobilize

and then go on into the future

the way sounds do when you're through

i want to go with you but first i want to

press my full weight on every board

and stair rub i want to flush the toilet

every time and not to have to 

wait not to have to tiptoe back

to your bed where you're sleeping

the last of your morphine off 

the twitch in your cheeks come to

mean like some eyelid on a coma-

tose invalid how some noise has

got through it's like a breakthrough

like wading to the water spewed

with ivy spewed with alder spewed

with a whole clean-up crew i want

to get to you then by instinct 

like bats do switching frequency easy

drawing the sheets back after

they arrive and take you and make you

clean again while I sit and try 

to doze and soak (or want to but don't)

in the room that almost instantly

starts reclaiming for itself some of

what it was before any of us came

rearranged made a life then vacated

like weight either lost gradually or 

stropped down eventually longing

to the flip of the switch

I Imagine She Kept/Dolls

 

 Imagine She Kept/Dolls

Where are the dolls who loved me so,

when I was young?

                            Elizabeth Bishop

Sweet as she was told she was,

the gnawed off fingers

of the doll was all she could see

herself being

told she needed for Christmas.

Each piece of clothing

sewn together again

and again after all

her previous nights of keeping

the dark inside

her open eyes.  She learned first

nights if she kept her

propped in the corner above the edge

of the pillow 

her eyes would stay

open and she would swallow

in the ways only dolls know

how to: all the dropped 

acorns on the roof all the creeping

between the walls and the outside

night.  She'd been through

the mill her elders would say but never

to her which meant only

that she was battle

field commissioned and ready

in her reliable eye (one socket

stuffed with cotton she'd change

to keep her near new one clear

pinched from some catalogue

ordered do-dad or aspirin

bottle, a smidge to fill

the hollow) and they made their way

into the land of nod and over

the counterpane and they kept

their blood and porcelain hand,

fingers crimped fingers broke and worn

to nubs up against the mouth

and try to 'keep still, keep very

very still, or we'll both go down

into it.  Vigil is kept

in such trust funds.  By daytime,

when Doll was tired and laid out straight

as the dead in the middle of the pillow,

a content corpse who was revived

by suppertime, propped in the corner

before dark walked in 

often unannounced as a hollow swallow

she'd be there to see when her mistress 

walked in without (she was not

allowed when kerosene

was thin) benefit of light.