Dear Sam

Dear Sam,

In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.

                                                                    Wendell Berry
                                                                    The Sycamore

This is the seamless pass of time—how it trucks

with and in light and water, high river water

after a blast of rain all hurry hurry in the foam.

Hurry hurry on the surface.  And though trout wade

in the shade of a boulder, their gills work

a different fury altogether.  Here it is nearly

near the end of May.  The lilacs are bursting 

out with their mute purples, the birds are plugging

their babies jaws with grubs and necks of worms.  It is 

this slip from one cloud embryo to the next that's kinda

like hammock watching.  Ever lay on your back

on a hammock?  How after that initial thrill/terror

that something’s gonna give it all settles into

a pouch of netted tension and then, once it’s at

least trussed to the weight of your arms

and legs, your face is up and under the most glorious

canopy of blues.  Or suppose it’s anchored between

two trees, that hammock, and you see

oak leaves or maple leaves, or, screws bolted

to any hardwood tree, that sort of canopy.  And

then, settled, you give yourself permission to just

watch and make shapes and feel absolutely ok

that those shapes, pushed by the wind, merge

and change and create fantastic beasts

or form crosses or moons or some Japanese

character for oh who the hell would know

but those who read Japanese—and all the while

you watch from your hammock under

the tree, under the sky, the way it all goes by

but always comes back around too—just in case

you dozed a little or full-out slept—it all comes back:

the leaf of it has only drifted while you’re distracted

and it’s green and waxy, and it’s a gleam beam

you see and are glad to see.  I’ve had moments like

these, but only alone and never in a hammock.  I think I would

like to have a quiet lie-in in such suspension.  I think, too,

after all that green and blue, after the brief sleep,

I’d like a velveteen mist to glimpse what I’d brought out

to think about, to polish it like rivers gone to summer's

reduction, slow, and quiet, the way the trout we protect

are quiet, how we know they are there but we never cast

our fly by.  To keep it and know something profound

rests there while all the clouds open into days.  To be at the end

of this May and gaze in the calmer pools and not go

all wonky in the faster goings on, too fast to even

gather bugs or bottles or other stuff floating by.  Like that,

while we rest, suspended, still a few feet above the ground.

Using Under Moon Glow

Using Under Moon Glow

Pocked and pied, alive

To our eyes by spying by

Taking it all on the way

Straight to the face—even turning

Cheek casually mad—

You add at a glance fury to my

Rough iron-liquid skin my

Crimson sin hashed and hacked

Day after day in a way only

A vein can take, and only then,

Slowly.  I guess when this river’s

Seen from the hill of my memory

And in a morning without

Cloud you and I can rise

Together—liquid gravity—

And know but never speak

Or be needing to, our binding.

Like Samson’s hair rooted

To his brief cathedral.  Razors

Look then glint indifferent.

And smoke, close too close

To the tallow and wick, pool

A spoon of animal fat grained late

Slaughtered in haste, who

Coming into the room in this

Sad gathering of ghosts could

Ever find their way to the window

And look out to see you?  Lucky if

A mirror.  Luckier if a mirror,

Ancient as greening brass,

Passes back anything or can

Of love that melts and smelts

Such desire as this and cools

In an ooze only the patient

And the penitent wait for:

A hardening.  A hardening only

Like those hoofs of lambs,

Sponges in the womb, that, taking

To air quicker than lungs, go to bone

To take the earth under it without

Collapsing.  Like a God.

Why We Work

Why We Work

Young deer standing in headlights

in ditch below cliff

cars coming both ways

                                  W. S. Merwin

The day the news came about you

and the way you died we’d just made

the hay begin to make.  The sky

was quiet, the way a guy would want it,

and the field was dry enough and the sun

was come like some controlled reply—like

it has to happen this way., like once the match

was struck and held out to the fuse

there wasn’t a boot heavy enough or

a foot fast enough to make it go out,

to stop the first pause, you know the one

I’m talking about, once up and under

cover it’s as if some decision is still

being asked to be made: are you sure

you want to do this?  It’s how I imagine

pilots flying high over Hiroshima, so

high they don’t know anything but plots

and clouds maybe, but not people, not

people who are going to the barber, people

who are going to the temple, people who

are going to work going to war and do they

do.  Once the grid’s in sync with their belly

do they hover over the release button do they ask

what happens after I light this match?

Was the boy who fueled you head to toe

with some unknowable immolent as random

and homeless as he thougth you were?  Did he 

come on to you

like regret, cataract blind and out

of his mind?   I want t think that.  I want

to think I have faith enough in sanity

that her hands are clean after a good day

of honest work pushing like I do through tall grass

making hay.  It was just a foggy enough

morning—burning off by the time I let down

the first circling blades, their spin set to taking

it all down.  What was now waist high had started 

in May and now into and past July it was flat as battle-

field dead.  Quiet aside from the swallows and crows

glowing black against the gold.  Truth be told I remember

them the most—those crows—their thermal

circling.  I hated knowing a group

like that is called a murder.  I hated knowing

intelligent birds are herded into imagined facts

by men who know nothing but fear

and fire.  Noting but laying away charred

matches whose heads still glow

with their brief requirement.  Like yours had to

have.  If, sleeping, he poured from toe to brain

he held to your feet, and you, heroin asleep

only dream now, never seized another awake

it stands to it your face goes last.  We cut everything

off below the knee and the lips that touch

the dirt that made them glisten with melting

fat.  Is this why we work?  To walk out after

the cruelty of such news about you, to finger the grain

in the hay and have faith that this dying—this one—

will be put up and seasoned, bale after bale

to be chewed and regurgitated, chewed

and ruminated into anything other than bile,

that the purpose of your life was more

than a random man lighting you on fire

under that bridge and another random man

finding your smoke, your coat, your one

cast off unfillable shoe…

After the Mastectomy

After the Mastectomy

Let’s have the honest muscle

of it, soft or not.  It all depends

on how you bend to get to work:

the curve and turn from the inside bi-

cept to the slackening lack of breast, the chap

at the center after days of cold.

Let’s remember the first time it’s

touched vs. the first time you want it

to be.  The way he’d said thrust

is all need and I said no honey, it’s more

than that.  It’s something that steadies

the intention and it’s what you see, really see,

when you peek into the bucket: is it

water or stone, oats or the barren alone?

I know my spine will zip the vision in different

places along the once fast now slow nerves, knowing

what it has left to lift.  I know that zip

looses a few teeth, has a few pulled,

chips one or two,  coaxes the rest

to hold on, like a lover’s insightful stroke up under

the bone as if there were no skin.

God help me these days getting up

is barn work, is hauling the eighth set

of lobster traps before I even put my boots

on.  Is the grind of the tractor seat

or the sigh/glide of the biscuit cutter

in the dry dough before breakfast.   And although

the first time I saw him seeing me seeing him

I was afraid, after all this work it’s come

now to this: the curve now’s as straight

a line as sky, straight as the i.v. tube they use

to keep my blood company.  When, under

that breast I touched and touched

a stranger found the small round ball

I thought God I thought but that’s mine

I left it there tucked in the dark for his

lips to find.  How is it fingers, cold impotent

tips, insist its theirs and lay claim?

Shit.  I can’t say.  But not it’s gone it’s given

me more this way anyway.  It’s moon always

dark.  It’s Jupiter’s swirling cataract eye.  It’s

the tip of his tongue coming up to the ridge

of the fault and not pausing not one bit when

it’s all gone.  It just keeps on keeping on

getting going, over the leveled

chest and into a new, different, calmer

barn, where the hay’s fresh in and warm

and the shit’s cleaned and out and we’re all,

both of us, ready for a lie-in.