Taking It In Means Feeling Your Way

Taking It In Means Feeling Your Way

Speaker and hearer, words

making a passage between them,

begin a community.

                                    Wendell Berry

                                    “The Handing Down”

But no shoes of course,

nothing with strings—more like they give

slippers.  Shit, most things about this

cell is cliché except how the way

through each bar in the window

a shaft of light comes right

up to my fingertips and then

past them, like warm dry water,

and then past me entirely, and then

stunted or just put out all

together, or depending on the time

of day,  crawls down behind

the bed, a deep creep,

a Quasimodo grope for the bell

rope, the breast feather ends

of it tuff on his cheek.  Like my love’s

braid end on my lips just before I came in-

side.  See where one shaft of light

will take you?  If you listen close

the poet said you could hear

each flake of dust collide before they settle

forever together on the floor

in the corner.  About as close

as anything will ever get in here

and as mute as a barefoot hunchback

pulling that rope and that pause before, 
before the clapper and the iron and the weight
strike each other like the planned impact

and the sound hasn't made it out yet,
it's still inside his tendons, buzzing
like blind things hitting the unfamiliar.

aging

Aging

Is aging is the length of time it takes

to get from the belfry of your own heart

to its very threshing floor (or is it

the other way ‘round?) to find

the fix there?

Is it’s height, the measure

of stacked bales or casks, that each year

are a thicker pick

                                (if the crop’s been good)

and it’s depth, a darker stilling

                                (if the sugar’s sweet-bitter

                                rock gone sand-granular)?

Could be too those lean times, a scale-rusting

empty sack times, are lips pouting

out of the pile flaccid and gray and waiting

like any two year old baby to be inflated

with praise and a hand up after a fall. 

Or it could be too that the measure of all

of this is the brain unfurling its fist

slowly, after impact, after blast trauma, after

soaking it all in like charred oak barrels do to

draw the whiskey  (and then later, decades,

the wine…) the liquor that stores it

in the cooling barn of your maturity.  And from

time to time don't we uncork it and damn

does that dram go down slow as liquid

gold and doesn’t it guild every agony

every pain every delirious joy

it was distilled from.  Every fall,

when the crop’s come in, and the choices

are made about the grain

                each to their grade 

                fire and dry

                each to their crush or grind

                will either come to this amber

                sap of resined life  
                or will go to the miller
                to rub between two wheels
                high-polished as a fairy mirror
                

                or will go to the silage
                to be poked about and through

                by the noses and bare toes

                of rats who are so so much

                like our own at times

                they don’t know, being blind,

                it’s worth they’re shitting on

                precious worth scattered

                on the threshold floor, worth

                we can only see from the precipice

                of our crumbling aging belfry.

How to Measure a Near Quarter of a Century

How to Measure a Near Quarter

of a Century

The room of love is another world.

You go there wearing no watch,

watching no clock.  It is the world

without end, so small that two

people can hold it in their arms,

and yet it is bigger than worlds

on worlds…

                        Hannah Coulter

                        Wendell Berry

What time doesn’t measure, or can’t:

It measures the length of day and dark

but not the depth of it, how a child

tracing a line in the sand is later

plotting a house then a lot for ash

and bone a whole four hours

from size to open to close.

It measures this the last twenty five years

we walked in then out on each other

before and while we were married, it levels

your glance with a carpenter’s L

and tries to tell us, like an old house settled,

of the discrepancy between

the front of the door to the back—inches!

difference, and how for the length

of time we were married we accepted-

adapted to the slant until one day (I’ll say

it was you but we both had our pants

down) the grip relaxed and it was

and still is a letting go.  And see

that’s not measurable either, even instruments

as mark, needle and dark, wave after wave

of shock once the cliff (before it falls)

opens its mouth, parts its strong mossy

lips and kisses and gropes and buggers 

in every warning it can raise and see, I fell

in and to save yourself you unhanded me 

and let go miles and miles and miles

before I hit bottom.  I don’t blame you.

Even you didn’t know who you were.  Still,

in every dream I have of you, the ten years

we knew and ploughed and knew some more

were blunt shovels, toys in a dirt

pile.  Dented buckets.  Dented cars.  Scabs

and scars and under the skin ruptured blood.

It’s never been wiped away or cleaned. 

Abandoned, we turned our backs.  It’s still

there when I look.  Still smells the same,

sounds the same, tastes the same.  But what’s

unmeasureable, in all that turning and walking

away is the grip of aching to let go.

To let go and watch you watch me walk

up to you in my sleep and see how

you shift in your chair and clear your throat

and, rising, crack your spine.  It etches

its seismograph tack, its thin ink line, deep

into this still darkening dark, and I marvel,

don’t you marvel, that the distance between

you and me, these last thirteen years

we haven’t seen each other, is so close, in this 

dream, it’s so close it’s never ever undreamed.

contraband:

contraband:

it’s so blurred I don’t know I dropped

in that flat black tray at the caged-

in pane the grid glass the jack-

ass (whose latex-gloved thumbs

touched mine when I laid it all

down) a truck key maybe and he

grinned bastard licked his lips

and grinned and hung the ring

up in the air by his other thumb and said: this

pricked your balls didn’t it boy

and they tinked in the tray again

like nickels I do remember that

the dull plug enough snuffed

sound I used to drop ‘em again

just to make sure I had two

and that thumb fucker up so far

I can’t hide shit and it’s that

not the rest not the rest not his

loud mouth I legit get rigged he’s

up my ass and every time I tighten

my jaw he squeezes: keys he’ll say

thirty years he’ll say and I stay

bent my ankles rimmed red by my own

fists lookie lookie we got a packer

he says my first day in no way no way

I shake my head I back away no way

I dropped that in the gray

snow when I fumbled out of my folded

over ford just after I heard son, son are you

alright son?

Just Talk

Just Talk

He said:

you make it in here same as you make it

out there only the clothes are different have been

pissed and shit in by someone else you never would

have called your brother or cousin or uncle or any

blood running up and through from the toe

to the brain.

I said:

no it don’t start there, not at the

toe, it gets there from the start in the dark

behind bars under all my skin and I’m not just talking

ribs and scapulas I’m talking like there’s rivers

in there and if my head pounds the way

my heart does when the only way through a flood

is over a collapsing bridge you go, shit you go

and he said:

yeah, toe first, and if if if it holds you ease down maybe,

maybe to the heel and if tried and firm it’s the foot

you’ve left behind you’ve got to mind

and when you lift it, when all the weight’s

on that one foot you put down

when it holds you and you hold your breath

it’s that moment: one ground and one air

and I said

yeah and the tension wires stretching in the twisted

wind you really right there you really have to say I’m going

it’s rising, this water’s rising and what’s behind me

is this dry prison cell and it may be all I need

to live through this flood but Jesus I’ll tell you

the river, man, it is in my skin, it is choked

to the mouth

and we both said:

with my old house, and when

I watch my dirty kitchen dishes float by,

when I watch beds float by, rumpled with fuck

knows what I’m risking.  I’m stepping full down

on the bridge even if those wires scream and the sleet

boils and it’s a wet and lamenting dark on the other side.

I’m stepping.

Empty is a Dead Bird's Throat

Empty is a Dead Bird’s Throat, Her Song Spun Undone  on a Branch Above Her Young

Sometimes, seeing is more than open-

eyed leaning first slow to the left

then slow to the right.  It’s breathing

shallow, shallow, shallow, deep

the way water suddenly is after

you see silt and silt and silt

and then nothing but a dark throat

getting thick, getting tight

as you sink.  This is the kind

of drowning, waves in climb then decline,

that's like hot hair rising, and only 

ever smelled and never seen until

the heat has gone up under it all

to ignight the wax-fat and there is absolutely

no way out of the smoke.  When you’re finally

found you’re having as perfect a sleep

as you’ll ever have.  Sad you can't say

what you saw that spooked

you first, what stunned you into

not moving at all until the moving

was the only thing done for you

because it all has you now, as they say,

by the throat: one day you’ll be laying

up looking into the corner of the door

jamb and you’ll see some spider’s

got busy with what little traffic

there is here and the web she’s built

is tense and beyond itself pretty

and you know, as soft an eye as you got

you could follow that web until the second

coming, until trumpets, until the field

you’d waited after that accident opens up and all the dead

rise first just like they taught you

in Sunday School.  Here, now, you see

there’s as big an egg sack as you’ve

ever noticed.  But instead of Jesus

it’s third grade and a pig and a buttermilk

bath: a wash of all the sins any back

can carry and yet be glad to be rid of.

This web—straight from the back-

side to the corner, corner to corner, is

suspended (it seems, as you sit) in air

the way your feet were after a long time sitting,

touching nothing solid, after you rolled

straight over her, and, once out, looked back

at the red and cracked glass and its perfect

circle in the middle.  And the concussion

under your skull wasn’t blurring

what you could see but instead dampening

sound, like someone had come with a bell-

jar and you were watching it all

form patterns on the inside.  See it but not hear

it.  Breathe it but not be singed by it.  Hot

gall all around and you, finally,

pounding and pounding until the glass,

like the windshield, like the car

in the road, is cracked wide open

and all the spiders, tight in their little

sack of life, spill out of the throat

of the dead and get on getting gone.

Breaking Ground

Breaking Ground

As solid as November ever is

to dig a grave today means

freeing the bucket and shovel

of October’s dwindling green,

it means greasing the entry

of each squeak going over

to murmur, the hum I’ve come

to remember of nuns under

the summer maples, how they

rumble, not through their mouth

but down into their hips

and thighs and the dark skies

of dirt.  My machine is needed

like this.  The old girl up the road

showed me just last week

when we walked past the white

birch line I’d just cut some of.

She showed me invisibly, with

a stroke curled fist, and deeper

than if she’d had a pickax. 

I’ve dug enough private graves,

always surveyed by the owner,

to know as we both walk back

to the house it won’t be long

now—I’d best tool up

that temperamental bucket.  And so.

Open and new, the can of grease.

Clean as can be bare hands.

Scoop like Crisco into biscuit dough.

Slap against the gleam of the silver

lift unsheathed.  Rub until that can

is by God empty.  Because listen:

it’s ok to whine in the woods

and get mired and cough and spit

and shit but this—when you go up

that drive this time—when the man

of the house is out to the under-

taker to order the prettiest urn a man

can bury (and he’ll be gone a while,

but don’t wait) go slow and brace

yourself.  Raise the fork and let her go

into the froze ground without

a buck or a sound.

A Thought in the Dark

A Thought in the Dark

Except in idea, perfection is as wild

as light; there is no hand laid on it.

But the house is a shambles

unless the vision of its perfection

            upholds it like stone.

More probable: the ideal

            of its destruction:

cloud of fire prefiguring

            its disappearance.

What value there is

                           is assumed…

                                   

                                    Wendell Berry

                                    The Design of a House

Thought is a colony of alternative

lives pushing the dirt into and out of

where?

Where, with solid on all sides, does it go

when the ant pushes like the worm who goes

open-mouthed

into the grave weight and eat just enough

to squeeze through and leave what they’ve

eaten

transformed?  They should be knighted

just for their effort; it’s valiant yearning isn't it

that’s thrust

into the groping and blind fruitroot, to give it

the ride of its very life and heave it up into

the light?

All these colonies, in all these chambered

secrets and seeds we squirreled away

to save

or, more likely, regret, or more likely still 

erect a pedestal and plinth too to

ease the bust 

of cooling, shaped, soon gold gilded coal 

black thought down to the center of it

and from then on,

or from time to time, come to worship there

or dust it off just to recall its value on the name plate,

cover it in shame, 

maybe, with a wig if time’s made it

hairline thin and under- the- chin heavy.  There

are times

the worshiped thing seems fine as butterfly

dust, that stuff that rubs up when you touch it,

crumbles

                     

even though your breath’s held, under your nose,

close, slow.

And those times the old worshiped notion seems less

solid, as though not stone at all but temperate clay

animate,

on it’s own going where requirement takes it right

on the chin, the cleft then in the cheek, the socket,

all those orbs:

the nose, the open (though slow)mouth—

when it turns its face in just enough water

and mud.  See:

a whole new day at the wheel: when sitting down

in a well-lit room means tearing the shit out of it

and rolling

it all out flat again and starting fresh, starting

new.  The thought you've honored and idoled

for all

these years has come undone.  The trouble,

you see now,  isn’t in the clay.  It’s in the faith

of your own

two making hands.  It’s in the thin arteries come down

from the brain in the blood.  What gets through

these days

is hoary with age..  It takes its time.  Lost faith means

ignoring  time, believing you don’t have it. 

Ha!  Time!

It’s all you have really, or the labor

you do in it.  Too late to make new now?  

Listen: Ageless as

it is, God made shapes out of the tone

of time.   Whatever’s spoke to your own 

formless lump

it becomes.  Hold out your hand.  The small ball

of river-bottom becomes the throb your life is 

built on.  

See thought curled humble on your life-line, 

between the heart and the arc?  Shape it 

with your eyes 

closed, hear it, hug it, open your wordless 

mouth to it.  Smell it live?  Come, 

take it into you, 

your new, Phew! (after being

so, so old) wonderful thought!

Soup Kitchen

Soup Kitchen

Clumsy as a fat thumb rubbing

the crumb up from the ivory

linen, what once, when thumbs

weren’t dumb, spoke its own snow,

a pope-worthy glow only if only

the chasuble hem didn’t grope

among the mud and bums, our

priests of the brown paper

bags and street strobes, the only

altar light they know home by,

see, and the tree it illuminates

squeaks in small winds and a time

or two this guy’s got his back

up against her trunk like he’s biding

more than time, because he’s still

sharp enough knowing the wait’s in

the waiting, he’s going to scratch

a while under this dead tree 

and sleep through that yesterday

when hard-hat men came to

see and leave their pink come on down

tape to blow in that same whisper

like it’s got secrets it has to wait

in line to speak.  It’s this tree he sees

home by.  Home of his bread and cream

of chicken soup.  Tunes in the other

room.  Lemon cake…that crumb

he thumbs, one humble crumb in

a spot all its warm own, and the old linen

a hint in its crumple

of the before Good Will

used to be’s.  That brief sun’s not

down yet boys he winks, all swill and dregs

before he has to shuffle out the door

to step on that pink tape that,

when he lifts his foot, blows

up the street, past the tree, it’s pieces,

tipped over like the only thing ever

on the board were these abandoned kings.

Sisyfus Talking at His Stone

Sisyfus Talking at his Stone

What should I say on the shore of

a small dead sea

slowly the water fills

the shapes of feet which have vanished

                                                “Episode”                                               

                                                Zbigniew Herbert

Even here there’s routine

especially here I suppose

when a hole dug is a hole

you're hoping's undug but

since that’s not possible

the post hole tool, the one

leaning against the stone wall

that poet said would come

undone and it did and

shit if we weren’t sur-

prised even though

we’d been told even though

we’d been showed. 

Until the twin handle is

gripped and raised up

and all’s been plunged into

and spread, until the mouth

and jaw rise drip-dribbling

dirt some will ceremoniously

save in their own sacred pile

and some will throw aside

and scatter like winnowed

stones, until then you don’t

know you just don’t know

a hole a round perfect and

with each thrust deep (through

water sometimes, depending

on her season and how winter

kept her) the smooth handles

of the tool: post hole diggers

don’t grow, but you do, and o

how fluent.  Soon enough,
and in this place, listen, 

you’ll be in it: the tough

staccato of digger on stone.