Maybe the Greatest Praise Is Paying Attention

 

Going Out

Maybe the Greatest Praise
              Is Paying Attention to Cliches
 
the way my saying ‘you’re an old man
at 53' makes perfect sense 

and you say: ‘maybe you need 

to shut your yap' and I don't say

that back because you're licking

an old sore, you 

always have been, or ever 
since your father dropped dead
 
you were ten then and the train
with his remains left the station
 
without you.  what is it you’re up to
now all these years building
 
your bridges and then taking them
apart, sometimes plank by plank
 
sometimes in your murderous fury
each and neither predictable?  still
 
all those raw and live wires exposed
and no one knows coming or going
 
if they’ve touched you
off.  for the moment and for the sake
 
of this argument, I imagine you’re making do  
with a day’s worth of coffee and smokes
 
to go to the dock where you
open and close the hull of your boat
 
and the mouth and nose of your long-
dead pops.  don't ask me how i know

you do that or what it even means

but i bet it has to do with blood 

and the word of god and the faith you keep

when you set the boat to floating

and you don’t know if it will

(because all these years it's been sitting

in a shed's fink truss and i want to ask

you if i ever told you how apropos

that sounded, how we were all disposed

to tell those elaborate lies, keeping 

the truths absolutely untalked about but now 

i'm guessing

it's another conversation, right? ok

back to that drawing board) i left you at

the dock, i watch it float and keep on 

floating until you haul the rope in and take to

the deck and wheelhouse and put to go out 

looking for blowholes: porpoises

or right whales or a bob of seals.  out
and out and out and by jesus the boat holds
 

and your boot soles keep out the cold

between the bilge in the fiberglass skin 

and that unforgiving ocean you float in

(i'm kidding) on top of.  you’re not friends, 

you and the sea, but maybe you two have come

to an understanding and made a mature  

agreement: keep each crack
and leak within eyes and fingers
 
reach.  if you see it begin to seep and then tend it
immediately or make your peace

while the water seeps, maybe you'll be 

atoned though I hope not be

-cause like a teased and eager boy, 

once you’ve unzipped him...

remember?

well, you know how that old
story goes, don't you. still,
 
maybe today’s the day you’ll go to
bottom and won't be raised.  or maybe today’s
 
like yesterday: you’ll make it back
again with an empty pack of smokes

and between you and your coat something 

will be beaten against the dry deck of your bones

that makes a shape that can't be contained

or even (though you'll gurgle it) be named.  

overcast/ wind ssw 7 mph

 

overcast/ wind ssw 7 mph 

 

Waiting for the moon to eclipse, 

I stood beside the dying

lilacs.  For days, all season 

really, they've needed rain.  and maybe,

 

because they’re lilacs, (and aren't

lilacs, clumped up with their

perfume, flush with all that

fragrance) they spend themselves

like day drunks, all rounds

on them.  the breeze is nearly too

sweet and between the three trees

I stand in the easy dust of it.

But I see nothing at all

of the moon and her predictable, almost 

solstice eclipse.  I can reach

of course into the places I believe

the moon is supposed to be, judging

from where I saw it rise yesterday 

and then where she was descending.  Today,

though, seeing has to be this: a nose

dependence.  It is shriveling 

blossoms on the draught of the over-

cast’s breath.  It is drought-dry and still

getting on and going on

and going by just like they have been 

doing in this grove all their lives 

beneath skies that lately make pretend rain

far, far off, and mock

 

the solid hill the lilac has built

itself into, root by root and through

and through.  And though

they are not on view, who

 

can’t imagine the penetrated, 

(it is still spring remember) the deciduous 

limn of their twig tips or their 

limbs, these cartographers 

 

of all kinds of dark, scribes

that scroll and and write 

while the heat of the sun-

rise stokes the undercoals yet

undistinguished from the night?  

 

 

Is This a Definition of Mercy?

 

"Is this a definition 

of mercy?" she asked.

"Yes." he said.  "This

is a definition of mercy."

  

 

…Their ships have drifted away

They are stars, and snowflakes floating down

Into your hands, love.

                                           James Wright

                                           A Way to Make a Living

 

It’s too cloudy to make a view

of the moon worth searching for.

In a few hours, a flower is supposed

to pass over the shadow

or through the shadow, brief

where we plant our feet, briefly.  Maybe

 

by the time the eclipse is going

to start, the wind

will have blown enough of the puff

and rumple off and at least

one of us will see how the moon seems

to lean into darkness like a cheek easing

 

into a hand that’s on its way

down into it all once more, once, once more.

A hand that’s been around the world

and back

a hand that’s on its way

out into it all once more

but for this moment and for the full

 

duration of this moment will stay:

it will soothe and be soothed, cupped

into clouddark and then, pulling the shadow

with it, move slow,

deliberate as a magician, off stage

and away.  

After James Wright’s “To a Defeated Savior”

 

After James Wright’s “To a Defeated Savior” 

 

 

I was born on a day

when God was sick,

gravely.

                     Cesar Vallejo

                     Epexegesis

 

Maybe all along you wanted to go under

Water and breathe there instead

Like the fishes and their way

Of never having to come to

The surface unless their caught lip

Lifts them and they give in

To the fight.  Beneath

It all the hard world is

Abandoned and you are

Weightless and make the proper

Exchanges naturally: the weight

Of you in the near

Absolute absence

Of light (aside from what penetrates

From above in shafts) and

You teach yourself to read

The bends and intentions of

Such reflections.  You translate

With the best of them

The possibility of the sea

Scape’s eventual absolution

That fathoms baptisms from an absent

God so that the final hands

That reach for you are human again

And they pull you to the surface

And to reintroduce you to air, how it

Scorches in its fire-

Dry enlightenment and makes to

Abandon you if Goddamn you

You didn’t clutch at water 

With so much fucking might.

Under the Influence

 

Under the Influence

              

                            

…alone

All afternoon, I take my time to mourn.

I am too cold to cry against the snow

Of roots and stars, drifting above your face.

 

                                                   James Wright

                                                   “What a Man Can Bear”

 

 

Where two weeks ago the hill

And the dip in it was crusted

With ice and deepening

Snow, now the early spring

 

Rain has made her changes:

A blanket you could lay naked

On if you wanted and didn’t care

About neighbors or traffic

 

Or hornets.  The lilacs, what remains

Of them (winter, or really

The weight of winter, had

Her way with them and broke

 

The old, twisted wrists, they looked

Like wrists to me some of them

And too, whole

Lengths, to the elbow and occasional

 

Bicep) dropped from the crotch

As what was wet and heavy and cold

took hold of its age

and shook it like a stepfather 

 

might another man’s child

who won’t stop crying until finally

it lets go and drops

limp in the soft earth.  And just this last

 

storm, because before that

there had been a vibrant violence

of unleashed spring, the blossoms

still in their small pouches and closed

 

mouths and knap

sacks waiting to be awakened

naturally with a warmer breath,

a kiss surely and a dripping

 

nipple on the lips, surely, if

even a little chapped, if even a bit

weepy, still intact, still, see,

rooted and firm and, waking, alert. 

Conceived

 

Conceived 

in Paradise 

Born 

in Perdition

 

In paradise I poised my foot above the boat and said:

Who prayed for me?

                                    James Wright

                                    Father

 

Following the inoculation I turned

a 12x24 swatch of mostly grass sod

by hand and hoe and rake,

weighting the arriving rain.

 

Soft sifts of humus, small pockets

of sand after the gas tiller quit so

then the blade end of the garden hoe   

rose and fell in old-time before-

 

plow sweat that chilled me

when I sat down three or four

hours later.  I thought I’d never be

able to hoe like that by hand

 

if my life came down to it

and thought how habitually a good

Catholic considers Adam’s first son

plunging his bone hoe or stone

 

hoe into the earth God gave 

to him and he opened it and felt it

sift though while he rubbed it

with his thumb and tasted it

 

with his tongue.  He was conceived

in Paradise, that Cain. I read it

in a Midrashim once and thought

it must have some consequence, some

 

thing in his flesh beneath his impatient

scars, something in his flesh

and beneath those edges that ached.

Cain.  Poor Cain.  Raising lesions

 

and his own blood and coaxing his world

to bend to him the way maybe Able

bent to the stone when his ewe

was hard delivering how he’d coax 

 

the womb in letting go and though

that stone was cast perhaps from

Cain’s acre yet another parcel

for harvest moons and moons

 

into God’s own length of days,

so you’d have to know when Cain

blistered and bled into his dirt

he was bleeding bliss from his tissues

 

and suffering it into the clods

and turned over sods and eruption

of rocks rocks rocks.  It makes me

want to say: Imagine Able, lazy,

 

gazing as his sheeps, their babies

graze on Cain’s green grass

turning it somehow miraculous

into black and white gravity.

 

Bound land clouds.  It makes me

want to ask you to imagine that

maybe Able’s lazy gazing as the sheep

graze is taking his time to poke Cain’s

 

laboring, (maybe we have some

of the story wrong or simply

misunderstood or too just listen

to the side we’re given) and that pro-

 

verbial you missed a spot and only

Cain may know, corporal and alone

the hiss insisting beneath his

skin and lifting up a liquid

 

sizzle within his rhythm—we’re

taught to hate Cain—maybe

as much as he was said to have

hated Able, the favorite of God’s

 

offspring’s offspring.  Consider

maybe the stone was already chosen.

Consider the loosed handle and hoe

already thrown over.  Bow to 

 

every muscle then brush the dust

and afterwards weigh what remains

and say you agree with me that the taking

is silent as the raising when it’s lifted

 

into the air free of hand and land

to arc to its companions.

There’s that fleeting weightlessness

of the freedom solid things can never

 

possess.  God probably walked

that newest garden Cain made

and tested the rock for all its flaws

and tossed and tossed and tossed

 

until this this is the one and left it

lonely as himself on the cairn

that will come to mark and cover

the crime that’s making its way even 

now past the trees past the heat and strain

of rain. And who after all

of this will be well entirely?  Won’t we

all be the real banished ones

 

both those above the earth and those

below it all on their own and turning 

first above and then below, to stone?

a verity

a verity 

The woods all dark now,

birded and eyed.

Then a light, a cabin, a fire, a door standing open.

                                                    Jane Hishfield

                                                    Amor Fati

the truth is the moon

is a boulder too

floating new to old

to new unrelinquishing

unrequiting rising

through the eye

of zion's horizon light

rolled over rough

or plain terrain the truth

is the moon's a shape

shifter and today a bone

hook early she's been

rising above Easter's

horizon like a summons--the 

trees are more discreet

(truth is it's too early

for leaves) in this kind

of dark.  Miles away and in

other countries the faith

filled and the believers (I

go through phases 

on the nuances) sleep in

some have set their alarms

some will have read

the prophets some will

watch for the hook 

to begin being

pulled and they will

let themselves be caught

and utterly unzipped.  They will 

bleed profusely though

no one will ever see a wound

or the blood -- and 

they will begin to 

close the whole of winter's flint

in the folds of their skin

and wait by the opening 

the moon has made

in the grotto of stars

of course untouchable

at such a distance

while it rises  and it rises