the flower that grows in the dark

Monotropa uniflora

 the flower that grows in the dark

 

What we define as human tenderness troubles

each of us differently.

                                    Ada Limon

     for Ruthie

it’s not just the ghost

flower rising white as hairless

 

mice but last night’s

spider come to cat’s-

 

cradle the tips

of the little globes

 

barely latched stitches here

seen just post dawn.  something

 

in this simple resilience

is akin, given the decay

 

of the place, to a quiet

moving through, up by

 

last fall’s old growth

going slowly back

 

to soil.  imagine how they are

pushing up from below

 

their very bottoms

and casting their lots

 

casting off true

into any wind or humidity

 

what chance or small winged

thing may latch, flit a bit

 

in the stick, or picture it, someone

leaning in after that, to

 

examine it for a wound,

and seeing naught, to let it go.

After Carol Ann Duffy’s Treasure

 

After Carol Ann Duffy’s Treasure

 

How the poet called lies

                fool’s gold.  Still, and none-

the-less, kept: beloved treasure.

Hoarded, lidded when dark is being

                lifted.  Its precision. The dark.  It’s – it is –

precision we’re consistently

                calibrating, weighing, eye-

balling the needle or digits on the machine. 

 

Having

                been in the mine or in

the wide-open sky finding or trying

                to find in the sluice and slurry

dredge and hammer and ax and bleeding

hands, it’s all drawn back to

                itself, where and under what

 

circumstances it was made and yet

                to be made.  As we read, real gold

is being made.  Aging.  Tell me, how do you expand

and then tame worth?  And then tell me:

which is more?  Labor to break

the world and her dirt open to expose the broken

                or brief lode of gold, to stow it

folded, in the once was skin of

 

a young doe?  Or the broker, who presses

                his scale in his favor by lifting

some of it away, unpaid for?  Or the jeweler

                with her warm ores pouring,

then briefly ssssssssst, quenched?  Or is the worth

                the beholder?  The beholding?

The seam of truth depleting to dusts

 

into autumn, under the yellows fallen,

                suffering such a leave-taking

in the curl (how the not yet brutal fifteen

                below zero, she is yet

months off) against the rib and stem

                a particularly brilliant cuff

of solid sun that when lifted

 

crumbles, succumbs to the drift

                of wind, bits of it gone for always,

bits of it briefly near: the elbow,

               the toe, the yet to be licked or kissed

lips . . .

Ceramic

Ceramic

 

I slip behind her into the future; memory.

 

A bat swoops, the lake a silence of dark light;

how it will be, must be.

         

                   Carol Ann Duffy

                   Orta St Giulio

 

It’s true absolutely I watch all

Their movements as if they were

Porcelain, the finest ceramic

A king’s-worthy glaze surviving

 

The fire ungauged but by the wave

Of a hand over the flame.  How

Some make it unscathed, how

The sound of those that cant

 

Resist the furnace break

Though we cannot know what those

Are until its as cool as a memory,

The kiln door open, the heat

 

Released and we reach in to feel

For what we’ve made, what’s lost

In parts on the floor, in parts

On the shelf, a self in tesserae

 

Maybe, the simple shard

Of glazed clay waiting; amazed

The single piece that made

It through to the end was the crust 

 

End discarded as whimsy, simple

Lengths of a little girl’s fingers

Pressed together the way kids press

Thumbs meeting up-

 

Side down, finger knuckles joined

A handsome heart gleaming

The exact blue they needed

While each were cleaning

 

The pieces from the wheel

And making them pinch & here,

This too! Before the door closed &

The heat rose.  Here, Mama, this

 

Too. 

 

 

The Saints of the Old Places

The Saints of the Old Places

Their calls grate

like shears cutting heavy tin.

Misfits among robins and wrens,

they flock to this street,

stolid as midwives on their rounds.

I receive their song in my ruined life

like scalding water in a new wound.

I walk on, redeemed.

                                                The Crows of Mica Street

                                                Jo McDougal

I hear it sometimes in the spines of old books

like I’m opening a door quietly and have to

because I haven’t been there in a number

of years and because what’s waiting

on the other side has been as patient as

a plaster saint and I’m afraid

to see how far it’s been left to flake

in paint and clay and heat and cold of

their being let go, how over and over (years

ago) I’d rove the low nose on Joseph, it’s line

straight to the dewy lilies (some flick in the balcony

light) straight to the toe poking through the stone

hem of his robe.  I noticed too how they’d loaded

St. Patrick onto the backs of some come lately

pallbearers and now he’s at the entrance

door where I have to pass my hand her shadow

over the heads of the snakes glued and refusing

to leave the beginning of the plinth.  I was a kid

when he was hid in the confessional, a room

as big as the sacristy for the balance of an imagined

apse and before I could walk down the aisle

at the start of mass I’d have to gather my alb

and slide behind the black velvet to clasp

the processional crucifix where I practiced

my straight lines and my acute and obtuse

angles along the brass effigy, the green tarnish,

what’s it called?  verdigris? dripping (not really

but it seemed to me) down the handle that looked

so much like the handle of my father’s barn broom

I laughed at the irony of how some wood ends up

shoved into a sort of monstrance and how some

always comes upon the shit end of it all.  That Patrick

would stare and stare, all ears and dented eyes

and depending on which mass, four o’clock winter

Saturday afternoons were particularly dim,

he’d seem (but it was only the lack of heat

and the clang/bang in the cast iron radiators)

near to ready to step off and give me a lift of the chain

and hinge holding the crucifix pinned to the doorframe. 

Believe me when I say this little out of the way place

is not immune to the blacker, pitchier instincts of people,

men and women and kids confessing to a tired priest,

his free hand on his knee, his other tucked up under

his chin to keep from going sour against mistresses with

bruised lips (he sees them close up at communion) the slip

of the richest parishioner nine percent less

than his tithe, the leaded glint in that particular pane

of stained glass in the sacred heart window as penance

before mass dwindles it to smoke and the boy comes

to dress him in the vestments of Christmas--purple

is it? No, that’s lent.  White, right, and a swatch

of green. St. Patrick’s seen it and all and can’t

blink or feel sorry choked as he is with all those sins

and snakes.  Yes, I’m telling you it takes me back.

But especially it was the coming up on, just the other day,

the Native American rising up out of the Rosa Rugosa

the carved face I set my own hand against, warm on warm

cooling while the sun was going down.  I loved how

the artist had seen it all in the long log it was, maybe pulled

it out of some winter’s pile meant to be split and pined,

burned in the little kitchen stove he made his tea

on, gloves and all.  He saw this chief and day

after day chiseled away to make him what he is, at least

to me, right, as he looks out to sea at the saltiest confessional

of all, a broader coming and going of tide and life washed up

and washed in.  It’s his lips and wide nose I admire, his

unapologetic (not like the saints at mass) glance.  Mostly

though it’s the split in the wood straight down

the edge of his left eye, from headdress feathers

to chin, dignity and silence, still in some way

alive, more alive at being given to the weather,

not held under solid dust and chipping paint and plaster,

what flakes now and falls all week long

and is vacuumed before the new priest comes,

the new one on retreat, the manic depressive,

who’ll take long walks in the night out at low tide,

throwing all his faith to the creak of the old crumbling

factories, their scattering bricks, the gulls that squawk

at him and shit as they fly by, bullies all, sometimes facing

sometimes not, the mute coolness of the Indian

the priest has yet to find.

Somewhere the Photos in a Clear Plastic Moving Box

 

Somewhere the Photos in a Clear Plastic Moving Box

 

Photographs are a writing of light.  Photos graphein. 

 

and:

 

                                                                                                                                 Perhaps

the greater responsibility lies with poetry, in any arrangement with photography

(rather than vice versa), to sort through the inaudible signals before speaking up.

 

                                                                                                  C. D. Wright

                                                                                                 Pictures Never Taken But Received

 

Since moving from one town

to another one house to

another I’ve kept

the photographs in a box in the attic

at the north end I couldn’t

tell you what box exactly

and one of these days I’m going

to have to find them before

someone else does but I’ve put that

off because what do I do

with them once I do

find them again I remember

framing your face your chin your eye

lid filled with what all the beaten

are filled with blood and suffering

probably and it was all you could do

 

lay sedated and cut-lipped

and when the exposed tissue pooled

its shreds and too much nerve

there was a gauze pad to dab it with

who but me speaking of nerve

had the balls to walk

along the side of the rail and raise

the flash ass to appetite ass to elbow throat to

swollen mouth hole (though enough

for one small straw) and those two raccoon

bruises through and through your

eye bones

 

you know those photos you never want

anyone to ever know about but you know

if you’d never taken them they would never be

believed like walking through

two or three years before you

were beaten the burned out  bedroom where you

huffed pure air remember I stepped in

the cooling pool of sooty fireman’s water

if I’d never taken all that into my eye

and froze them there in black

and white (it seemed the right medium

at the time) who would have known

there was a home there

at all where we all grew

in and out of tune to the music

of amitriptyline morphine oxy

 

and your sleep the sleep of one who sleeps

it off absences I’m sure

that’s what you intended to do

once you were able

to stand and glare at the blue blue you

naked you made your next two

or three moves and the edge

of the bed was in the exact spot

your muscles knew off by heart

like a recitation of some act

of contrition right

 

had he never found you there would never

be these squeezed with easier

moments photos (I remember telling

the 1 hour clerk there was a crime done

to you and not to be alarmed the police

were already involved you were

my mother and barely

hanging on at the hospital

up the hill she said she understood did she

understand

I dropped

the film off I went back an hour

later it was a hot June day

blue and not a cliché cloud in view

After Jane Hirshfield's Spell to be Said Against Hatred

 

After Jane Hirshfield's Spell to be Said Against Hatred

Until the Dramatis Personae of the book's first pages says 'Each one is you.'

              Jane Hirshfield

              Spells Against Hatred

what vessel would you be if you had to be

a vessel that would carry each and

all the stories living and dead beneath

the bone and sinew of your body your neighbor's

body the bone and sinew of strangers on paved

or unpaved roads rural or super highways or bullet

trains and their special tracks like the ones

in Japan that can and can't slow down 

paradoxically in a vessel that takes them to

wherever their wherever is in a hurry such

as the California condor could never

comprehend?  Would you be an animate

or inanimate vessel and then ambulatory or station

-ary until someone if they could if they wanted to

moved you which is to say are you the train

or are you her passengers or even are you her 

just the right recipe of carbon and steel rods

and rails and roads?  And of passengers are you

standing or sitting are your limbs loose or

keyed are your eyes and navel shut or or 

halfway closed lazy or startled wide with surprise

or shock or deja vu wary?  Or maybe you

would be the story of your choice in a stained

glass window in a cathedral or chapel again

your choice and you would be the colors

and you would be the lights (sun and altar

or stations of the cross candle) and too the leaded

solids between each broken mosaic's tesserae

and then be the eyes taking it all in and suddenly

blink and sting and turn off the voices reading

in your head and settle instead on the two

cruets of olive oil and wine respectively and watch

the slow air bubbles rise but not rise in 

the acidic green and be too that chrism pressed

between their own olive wood Gethsemanes,

squeezed and squeezed into sweet agony of flesh 

of pits of kisses of inexhaustible after inexhaustible

drop falling and caught on the thumb and rubbed 

into the finger and lifted to hover while 

the proper prayer is conjured and said above

the head of the almost blessed the almost (but O!

the tired limbs of the godmother) redeemed, 

the almost free?

What the Seeing Think They See

What the Seeing Think They See

As fragile as it is, it’s glass that,

even though it has the most

to lose being broken

protects us the most as we look

out during the rise and decline

of our day to day, hour by hour

(yes, for some, the dying

or the about to be

born, say) second

by second lives.  How, as sun

rises above this stand of river

pines or that line of cove

spruce we watch the water pull

herself up like pants after a long

time off or if not off at least below

the knee, the spring life plea

purged (for now) and the cuffs

like leg irons chuff and rattle

as the sexed wander off to meet

the tide and try to beat it.  Don’t we,

looking through the glassed-in view

of our own lives, corneas pupils

irises the broad sclera, feel somewhat 

apart from or even above it 

all, watching what comes and goes 

without feeling

it on our cheek or hearing the rut

and grunt and don’t we look partly

away, piqued all the while saying

not me, not me?  Who first,

and who can say, is going to break

the glass?  The watched or

the watcher?  Are the watched too?

in some way, (maybe even sneakier

because of the fee) voyeurs, giving

their thrust their pent up sarcophagi 

sweating ll for the audience?

I mean listen, authenticity alone

is at stake.  We make the most

of our glass no matter what side

of it we stand on, even when some

anonymous bird, shunted by the sun’s

glare, sees nothing and at her best

possible speed flies straight into a wall

of air breast first and plunges

as far down as the ground can go. And

having met so, this glass spreads the way

webs spread when a body just begins

to fall or be shoved through them: 

they stretch and hold on, stretch 

and hold.  And the light that falls

through, beginning at once to be 

blotted by a coat 

pocket or lip is Noah on his boat,

dry land all around, the immensity

of a blue too much blue, way glass has

of keeping it, secretly, briefly, in the 

gasses of the between

               

A Leap Year Day

A Leap Year Day

                Open the hurt locker

                and see what there is of knives

                and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn…

                                                                Brian Turner

                                                                “The Hurt Locker”

Next year today will be the last day

of this month.  And for the next three

years.  But then another one more

day in February.  For balance I suppose—

someone somewhere maybe a lot of

someones in a lot of somewheres,

what for growing things in neat

little rows and boxes?  food and low

income row houses? 

I don’t know.  I don’t care really

and I suppose most days go like that

but tomorrow, the here and now is 

it means I got

one more day in this month, here

in this tiny room to shut my mouth

to walk solo, slide when the lights go

on and the door clicks the lock lets

loose.  And you know I bet that’s the one

noise I’m taking out of here, I bet

when I’m fifty something  a little

click will make me stiff, whatever

I’m doing I’ll stop, the way I’ve seen

guys in movies stop before they step 

down on solid ground and then just 

like that the whole world

is in the sole of his left boot stop, 

like in that movie,

Hurt Locker, remember?  I watched it

before I came in no shit it has got to be

the best movie I’ve seen

in a long time though right now

I’m thinking about nothing,

nothing in particular but that click

when something’s coming and closing to

and I’m just waiting in the in/between of it

and the dust the skin of the guys

who were in here before I was and left

whatever it is of themselves, when they 

scratched their balls or 

their heads, or the spaces there are 

between them and one last

mother-fucking gloriously mundane

day.

Finding a Dr. Swets American Beverage Bottle Empty and Whole

Finding a Dr. Swets American Beverage Bottle Empty and Whole

The tiny skeleton…

remembers the falter of engines,

a cry without

answer, the long dying

into

and out of the sea.

                                                Donald Hall

                                                The Blue Wing

I pick up scraps of glass and say they’re

beautiful.   But only if the edges are worn easy,

and forgiving them if they have a lip especially or a letter,

if (because I need an imagination for this) when I took

to the sea I’d be looking into

settling down here again in a place that claims

great heaps of people and land without partial

prejudice.  It breaks everything against the cliffs

like ships at war.  I don’t take it up,

though later I wonder, should I

have, the whole hazy with age and tumble

bottle of Dr. Swets American Beverage.  I walk out

instead into the tide where the living things

are.  I walk out into the sunrise.  I walk out

where men and women and children have

died.  Somehow though I’m never close

enough to that lighthouse no one can ever touch unless

they’re at the year’s lowest tides.  I’ve always wanted

to lay my hand against her, maybe even

my cheek.  I’ve always wanted to stay off

the shock of getting stuck out there and no way

back on foot.  She saves most people, right? The light-

house?  Those going by in their fog-choked boats,

ignoring her, though maybe that’s the whole

point.  I want to walk out far enough,

to be able to, and taste the corroded iron

and hope if it even comes close, it's what I want

or what I think I need.  I don’t know.  And I won’t

this year.  Instead, I push back at the sand and noiseless

waves and find a favored three or four sand dollars—

and somehow taking them home living and unbroken

is the only thing that matters—all that walking out

and holding my own, past the clammers and that

one antique bottle I could’ve sold for fifteen

bucks in the Clutter Shop, past the battered lobster

trap with all her catch gone out of her, past the salt

marsh the Passamaquoddy come to

when their baskets need grass (South Lubec’s the best

stretch of beach for that) past he Ferguson boy’s last

breath in the black dark, his body heaving to days

and days later… scraps of them all.  Worn by what’s struck

them, licking them clean only after they’re broke

open or left whole but hollow like the bottle, like that Hopper-

painting-sky changing behind me, like the sand dollar

dying in my inner pocket while I outwalk the tide 

that's always behind me but not that far, no, not that

far. 

And It Is Written

half moon reflecting

And It Is Written: 

                The

Least Among Them:  

                Small Stones

Her one worried memory at hands she takes

the natural breaks in stones and places

them here here edge to middle to make

a solid mobile without a string.  Once,

above her son’s crib, she turned the wings

of the music box and watched the plush

toys twirl in the absence of his nap in

the absence of him then and ever after.

She’ll never again say that nothing’s

solid.  Not the water we boil soon solid cold

in the dog’s water bowl, not the stall

in the barn where in a different spring the un-

restrained body of the bull surging into his yearn

not the hole in the stall wall all bawl spit and horn

not the lawn on an October morning her

hoarfrost her rough tongue not the rocking

chair where she sang her baby her baby after

tomato picking before not after the frost after

apples after a sudden no breath at all and never

again and dust she comes to this and that

place where she’d've taken her baby she follows

the natural breaks and makes his grave day

after day because going up like the swell

of breath is only momentary coming down

six months old or twenty two or seventy

nine why this making is in the blood and stone

erecting it in the middle of a girl’s earthwomb

only eventually it all comes down what hour

what day the breaking when the boy’s mobile

wound up and when it wound down

still, birth

Still, Birth 

For they were deep in the earth and what is possible took hold

                                                                                                Orpheus and Eurydice

                                                                                                Jorie Grahm

Something of you has to die to go down that far

into the basalt of a dust so dark so thick it numbs

the lungs, it presses on the back of the tongue

like drying lava in the throat of those who don’t remember

or know enough to close their mouths.  I’m in

my first and really my only labor and all

the months coming up to it, the swell of my belly so

white and tight it reminds me of an antelope

in mid flight where all that could be

seen was so hollow it was sahara camouflage.

and once my son’s ball of a hand brought itself

across the sky of his red room as if to say LOOK!

LOOK AT ALL THIS!   IT’S GOING TO BE TOUGH TO GIVE

IT ALL UP.  And it was.   It was tough.  Once it all

started to liquefy and stream out the only possible

end of the line I was made to lay down to rest

at the lip of it and the Orpheus in me

with my strings and winding sheet set about

to seduce the hounds of hell to let me

pass.  They growled and rippled against their ribs

and stood up on end and pawed and clawed and lapped

at, at, at, the salt and water at the song of it seeping

between my knees and rising off the lyre and finally I walked on in 

and I walked for hours, hours among and around cables

of veins and caves of all the others, babies who were

almost born, all the tried and tired who were the shades

of who would make a stay of it for ever and ever, those

unborn unformed babies (a man I’d rather not name made

one for me and he bled out of me in a public rest-

room and I knew he'd never have claimed him made

that way and razed and Fuck he tried and I was

a long time walking by, a long long time seeing 

and walking by my winding sheet my lyre my throat closing

to only the highest notes so when I arrived

at the foot of my own bed with all my dead one

was rising up one was loitering one was listening

one was asking me one was dying one was only no one

and never would be and I had a hard time deciphering

the one who wanted to be.  Maybe it was my turning

away maybe I’d come into the wrong grotto and I heard

WAIT! WAIT! WAIT! YES, WAIT!

Orpheus was told not to turn around.  It was his only

Rule.  And he wanted to he loved so much he couldn’t

resist.  His Eurydice followed voiceless as a shadow.

If only he’d watched that shadow the whole way out.

if only he’d read about Medusa.  If only he didn’t need

to confirm the flesh.  If only he’d stepped

out into the light and been blinded so that when

he did turn back he couldn’t see.  He could pour himself

down the hollow of her pupil and feel the mouth

of the cave filled all at once and all at once not empty out.

Having a baby is like this, don’t you think?  Of going

ax and shovel into the mine, of digging and lifting

and holding the light to the vein the vein that goes

back and back and back and forward and forward?  The wax

in the light in the fist is thick.  The wick is tough as cat-

gut, it is thick with song and when you come to the end?

Listen, it changes.  Some come to draw breath.

Some come oh some come to the edge and stay

still.  They’ve been seen and suddenly they can’t

breathe.  They irradiate their custom’s cold blue.  They are

held dead as hair.  They are beautiful but can’t be

taken.  And Orpheus, before he goes mad, drops

his winding sheet and goes out ahead of it all, naked,

singing, singing, the cave mouth closing over him

like an eclipse on an elliptical strip.  A Mobius. 

Planning Ahead,

Planning Ahead,

on Saturday we’ll take the kids

apple picking—it’s early

enough in the season, maybe we’ll be able

to go a few times—into the orchard’s ancient

as cemeteries leaning limbs that  year after year bring us

back to capture what’s not fallen

on the floor of grass at the base of the tree.  We’ve raised

our children this way: to wait

for the sweetness to begin to rise to fight

off that dry meat a sometimes bitter

lingering a sometimes, after the pickling

spices and the alum, I lick finger-

tips and I purse my lips—my grandmother

once told me it was good

for canker sores, alum.   Sometimes I’d

dip my finger in the can, and the wet tip of it

would pull up the white gumpowder, and singe

the open ulcer and grind my teeth.  I don’t

know if it worked but it was enough I trusted

her and remedies tell me aren’t supposed

to be sweet to the edge of deceit if they were

we’d overmedicate instead of dose we’d know

eating all the Courtland’s we can hold is

our only preservation in the glimpse of Eden

we bring our feet to each fall.  I don’t know

the orchard the way the keeper does—But I

know he’s already planning ahead to spring

and several springs, new ground new trees,

the elderly crones slowly going, but so so slowly

and in the heartwood like a grit incased in an oyster’s

wet shellac.  Even if he’s getting on and letting his son’s

son drive the tractor that pulls the trailer

with mounds of hay while other kids reach and bite

and walk in and out of a September October late

late morning early afternoon.  It’s early yet

in the season.  I want to go

this Saturday.  And too another and another.  My

brine’s been boiled for the pickles already.  Let’s

plan on apple butter, let’s plan on summer

being in our mouths in the winter in a blizzard

lets open it to cramp our jaws just by lifting

its lid and putting it under our nose.  Lets!

Today If I Could

Today if I could

I’d lay the palm of my hand

against the face of the dog

who bit me savagely

when I was four

today if his teeth in their yellow’d

vein

if his tongue could taste something other

than blood if I understood why

his tail moved the way it did maybe I’d be

able to move away

in time maybe later we could’ve been

friends right? big as me we'd've seen

people fall down drunk in front

of us and hold their broken bones we'd've

watched them back

out of the driveway without

looking we'd've seen the animals limp

to the grass in the ditches

and stay there and not wait a

day or day after day waiting

for the school bus the dead dog

in the ditch because it wasn’t

us not that day it wasn’t if I could

lay the palm of my hand

against the chest of this Tramp

and take his heart-

beat into me

and ease it like I’ve seen

surgeons ease the heart drawn out

to the open and coax and rub it like a new 

baby being 

born like a favorite

grandmother dying if I could

look into his dreams of that day he was

a sweet dog I know he didn’t mean

it lunging after backing up

and lunging and backing up and rough

and sunk into my face and the putrid

breath

the shit in piles all around the mud

puddles no house only a rumpled rough Army

blanket moth holes bored to death

holes hot August on the edge

of the blueberry  

field if I could

lay down with him and take it

again take it so he’d be a happy dog finally

I would