briefly

 

see how the drop in the water

has caused the paused log 

to be caught between honest

to goodness from birth beneath

the streams to home, briefly

in this deep honest cleavage

 

each retreating, each receiving

repository

repository

this now is my driftwood:

the stay-put roots, legs

of them that's been

twisted, suspended above

the lowering level of the river-

fed pond. What's gone blond.

what's gone common

gray and water that's new

enough to such bare oracle 

roots it not only falls down

in awe but looks up in awe

at the blackening under-

neath (what's hid from me)

but keeps me leaning 

into my knees between

the pinching splinter

in the rail, insisting,

embedding.  

Grounds Keeper

 

 

Grounds Keeper 

Then she was dead,

The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

And we all knew one thing by being there.

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

                                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                                Clearances

 

Who knows what he goes in there for.

The stove’s cold, the window’s open

enough that there’s a sloe explosion

of snow as though the skin’s split

 

in between the thumb and one or

two other fingers, succumbing, as it does,

to such tender pressure.  It’s along

the fold of the tatted cushion, that

 

snow.  Some as come in small balls.  

He’s going for broke, maybe,

having thrown in or out and it’s not all

landed yet whatever bone with its pricked

little dots.  And outside the tatter of some 

jack-hammer rugged against the new

year freeze, and all that it takes away

with it to bury her with some gauzed 

composition of dignity.  Mostly It enters 

the froze as stone  

burial home, mostly he’s on his own

and he thoroughly parts the rugged

tomb air, his home out of home for the last

thirty-odd years.   How it’s all exhausted, 

how all the breath is bested by the bittering

wind.  He’s hatless.  He thumbs the run

of dust the grunge among the loved

things: a cup, a clam hoe, a bucket,

a cover for that bucket, that, if he looks

through his breath, is rimmed with her

favorite blue, chipped and almost all washed

off except for that underneath, how 

it’s fresh as off the shelf, or just,

and set tenderly at home to keep

what’s in it in and what’s out 

of it out.

How To Pray in the Damned River

 

How to Pray in the Dammed River

 

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

                                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                                Clearances

 

 

The opening in the stones is only

visible at low water and then

the lowest still is unapproachable.

It’s closest to a door beneath

 

the river and because I don’t

know the way of rivers going,

I can thoroughly sit and watch

the stationed run-off caught

 

all summer in the century-ago

placed stones: going leafless

trees, two or three fishing

bobbers broke free their rod,

 

bobbles for a cast-off Christmas

song.  An oracle, that door.

Maybe, if I’d come walking

down river with the same boots

 

as I’d wear out into low tide

I’d reach, pull the tops up to

my crotch and walk past all

the crockery, river glass, all

 

that’s been cast off (or pocketed-

because in time I might

find enough of this one pattern

to resemble and reassemble

 

a memory) and walk, v-ing

the little patches of Jesus

bugs skimming the water, slip

on the slime all waters contrive

 

to make, toward that door

in the dam.  It’s open, I only

just noticed.  It’s always,

even when the river’s full

 

of itself and insisting its winter

spoils, even when its behind

the tossed over the face hair

of the goddess’s gate-keeper,

 

--have your question ready

                and written

                on a slip

                of your best

 

                paper – and then

                make your way with it

                in your fingers – and –

                                arriving

 

                bow and breathe

in and swallow

                the breath of the old

                river inside its vestibule

 

                find the right seam between

                two boulders and heave

                but delicately,

                like a ballerina, and only

 

                the arc (the peace between)

                of the arms – the pinch

                of fingers, the rooted feet

                in the deepest grasses, wet

 

                weeds

reach, balanced, or un

balanced if you need more

forgiving – and wait to be

 

                                wait to be.

After Night Shadow

 

2020 first day
of spring

After Night Shadow

 

I prefer  

winter and fall, 

when you feel the bone

structure in the landscape--

the loneliness of it--the dead

feeling of winter.  Something waits

beneath it--the whole story doesn't show.

                     Andrew Wyeth

it's a myth that shadows are

                easier

        to look at

            than the sun.

Shadows can drive us

    mad but the sun only leaves us

            blind

                if we take too much

                if we're gluttonous

        for too long

and velvet as they are

    at casting such a touch

                without touching...

shadows,

    un

        pin    

            down

                    able

ar as

shifting as wind

    in

 constant

there's nothing

but hunger in them

and fantasy - take

Wyeth's Night Shadow - Helga

is /and or isn't awake

but the play is the way

the shade makes half her face

    conjure a Hawthorne

Revered

        Hooper or Moody

        (remember the crepe

            black veil

                how it lived 

                    in the world 

                        for the men who 

                            wanted/needed

                                to be taken

                                    out of it)

and in sleep, how

it eased

up from the breath

and went limp or if not limp

than withered and if not withered

a bereft companion

in the tradition...

if you want

            but do you know

                    do you

                            do you really

                                    know

                                                ?

sun more

than shade

stay naked all-day

and wait for the way

that sun escapes and makes you

shade.  let it play the way flame plays

as it is drawn up and away from the place

it was laid down into and made, with breath

and the finally, finally! open and bare palms of his hands.

Down the Cove

 

Down the Cove

 We come back emptied,

to nourish and resist

the words of coming to rest:

birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash

flagstone, hearth...

                                             Seamus Heaney

                                             The Birthplace

 

I think maybe when Wyeth went out to row

from one ledge of the bowl of Broad Cove

to the other ledge, her edge, knowing the below

 

of him was the below of her and of the boat,

that only flowed, ever flowed and through flowing

the puff and blow of his breath was sowing

 

not rows and rows of the deftly hove

throats of open ground, hoping

no blight, no crows, no baren clod closed

 

after such a hopeful spring opening, but only

the great owing that wasn’t owning

but was, bless us, a stove lit with coal

 

and his dear friend holding the door open

with the toe of her old boot, the toll

of the years on the unstiffened deliberate roll

 

of the tongue unstrung poking to the grotto

of that stove glowing and her palms open

my friend, my dear, dear friend, welcome home.

 

Local Receipt, Folded, Soaked

Local Receipt, Folded, Soaked:

1 tea 1 pkg chips 1 sandwich

Love brought me that far by the hand, without

The slightest doubt or irony, dry-eyed

And knowledgeable, contrary as be damned;

Then just kept standing there, not letting go.

                                        Seamus Heaney

                                        from "The Walk"

It's a road you go by knowing:

wouldn't you like to see

how far into the trees it sneaks

before the abutment of some

other property is KEEP OUT seen: laundry,

clapboard, 1 turned-on- a- pedal,

wheel-pocked-with-dew-

and-rust kid's bike--the kind

if you were a kid that would be

measured against the neighborhood

and seen, if new, a bucking 

wheelie of a steed.  Take it,

that vision, and walk up

and up and up the hill that could

be a literal killer in winter.

The litter is natural, its

pine and every quarter

of a mile maybe a deliberate,

old-blowdown-drug-from

the-once-lightening-struck-canopy

splintered trunk.  Deterrent only

for wheels, it's easily

stepped over, they flake

and break apart in the seeming

infinity of their age.  Sawn,

some ends.  and some, if  

I were still

a kid, a tusk of the fallen (because 

out mission was Alexander's

infantry and my brother 

was alive and we'd stumble

and die in the thick

curl of the tusk. And they'd

remain while we, lucky or un,

you decide, no favor

no quarter, went on

and on and on.  Cresting it all

is the handmade mortarleas

stone wall and within

the family of bones.  Old owners

of the land.  Maybe, when 

they were interred, there weren't

so many pine or oak covering

the kind of steep hill they were 

brought up, to rest in all

their finality, and the crest of it. 

On this old road in the woods.

On an old asphalt road at that.  Steep.

Curvaceous.  Kept, but covered.  

I brushed some needles and cones. 

I think: tree teeth.  I think:

pangolins.  I think: these people, 

sleeping, beneath their boulders

and stones.  I see the gate is already

open, as though they're waiting.

But it has been, if the moss and cross

and all the lichen growing over it

says anything at all, for years.  

I leave it that way.  And maybe

I'm seen in an upstairs KEEP

OUT window.  And maybe

because I leave the way I came,

I'm not.  Either way...

Either way.  And then I have

to wonder, what of the dead

we walk on and over who

have never been celebrated,

remembered.  Who we build

roads over and tamp them

with the weight of our passive

neglect.  What of them?  What comes

of all their loves and all their

sorrows?  No cemetery in the woods

for people like me to come upon

at the end of a disappearing road.

What of them and their last call: chips,

two slices of meat between two slices

of bread, and lucky, sweet tea.