Stairs

Stairs

I was trying to remember what birds did

before there were telephone wires.

                                    Marilynne Robinson

                                    Gilead

Turns out I’d taken down the wrong thought

all along. It was too small and spine broke,

like the water pump in the pantry of an old

house I grew to love when I was young.  I knew

it long after its majesty had passed and forgave it

her staircase, heavy and only all on her own

and forbidden to be climbed on.  I’d wait

at the bottom for friends who gambled and listen

to the sigh of their creeping, the shine

of their defiance a sweat I saw as spotted moth eggs

on their upper lip and how they grinned

when they made it back with nothing

but their own daring.

Later I’d see that staircase as a Miss Haversham,

when I was in high school and knew

who she finally was.  I would hide beside

the broken tub and toilet and wait for the boys

my sister knew to leave me alone (I’d only come

to write and be alone) to go

into the mildew all on their own.  It was enough

she’d led them there with me as lookout,

enough she was never

afraid of those stairs, enough for me while she,

while they went away, to frame the sea with the glass-

less window and see it all outside of me, a trick

of the light.  I had come to be good at that

departure.  Still, I’d hear them laughing

and imagine their lips.  I’d hear their sneakered

feet sweeping debris and while they thumped

the plaster dust puffed down through the ceiling

laths and fell all around the hip of the broke

in two toilet bowl, whose tank was in

another room though I could never guess why.

I loved the house, especially in late winter

when was too cold for her and her boys,

when it spilled my sister into cars.  I never

wrote about how, until now, thirty plus years,

on paper I would want to daub with light as honest

as Catholic windows at Saturday afternoon

mass, that west facing cathedral end cupping

the thorn-crowned bleeding heart of Jesus,

the broadest pane of all.  It throbbed

in my open notebook, fraudulent, a cock-tease.

The day she left me there alone I stood

afterwards at the bottom

of those stairs and pulled myself together.  After

he'd opened me up like lemon pie and gave

a slice to each finger, after he said relax, relax,

lay still you’ll like it I promise, I thought

but Jesus those stairs, I wish I’d learned to dare

to climb those stairs.

                                                                                               

                        

Clemency

Clemency

Do you want the earth to be heaven?

Then pray, go down on your knees

as though a king stood before you,

and pray to become all you’ll

never be, a drop of sea water,

a small flame hurtling across the sky,

a fine flake of dust that moves

at evening like smoke at great height

above the earth and sees it all.

                                    Ashes

                                    Philip Levine

What if it is?  What if clemency is

farther than your eye can see, like the trick

of mountains that seem to be

right at your lap and knee to stroke

or choke but really are days and days

(and a good pair of shoes)

away by foot and at best hours

by car.  And the closer you get the less

you can see.  Then you have to come

by touch alone, because under the hem

of the canopy it’s a different world entirely

and it's hands and knees from here on out.

Who from the top of hill against

your life's horizon would have imagined this

for you, after all your shot in the head dogs

and used up fetal women?  Who, smelling her 

cervical sorrow on your thumbs, would have received

your ravager heart with the fortitude

of a saint but this mountain?  Truth be,

you have already tried the sea, where it was

a take your pick long-line of hooking

yourself with your Sisyphus stone of atonements.

There was too much sea to see anything

but yourself and the all their names

cast in the polished molasses black, 

look, it knocked you through the way you knocked

your first wife, up through the cellar

door of her spine and out, her carapace,

a crude selkie skin, getting brittle, going to crumb

behind the door.  Because you never let

yourself make love you killed everything you screwed

and took a bow in the locker-room of your sixth rib.

All that’s done with now.  On the run

you’ve made it to the bottom and you think you can

finally be glad.  Still, all the women, all the boys

and girls you broke have assembled like a quilt

at your feet.  Each square has a story of reach:

you touching them and then how they had

to touch everyone else ever after.  

The saints say you must love them before you can pass

through.  You must let your hair grow

to your groin and wash and oil their feet

            the way the penitent did in scripture

and kiss and wipe through all your crime-grime.

You must become as one of them

before you can climb.

John a-Baptist

John a-Baptist

An old man by the time you were twenty

five, lung of ash, stomach of ulcer,

you’ve picked and dug and hauled

your way into the deepest depths of the bay,

pulling back the sand-sods to crucify

the rage or pain in a way that takes

on water the way penitents would under

the hands of John.  You slosh with boots,

and the thumbhold of the brim of your hat is 

muddy No different, in this moment, than a man

ankle to knee to hip come to have a Baptist

pour water into your hollow cheeks

to take you under that water the way

all the men who taught you how to

            thrust the clam hoe went under, until a bushel

            take in trap slack until a bushel

            drag slack until it's in a winch, not warp

            groan or scream

            piss over the side of the boat into wake

            foam

anything this place could thrust up

or you could dig out was up for grabs

            shit thin and toothless grin you said

                        and laughed because next you braced

            yourself against the car door and looked

            at the new memorial in the fog and said

            what it was like for you to see seven names

            on the rough rock, all lost within

            a month, seven family members you said

            again, yup, all within a month--

            one fully recovered after floating from bay

            to bay face down (the snag in the gear you said

            came after the snag in his heart).  And so.

            Floating, cold dead, over the stones

            and through old coves, miles from where

            the whole shebang went under forever,

            and a long time later, the crew came up

            in pieces.  But you liked that your step-

            father still had that smoke in his pocket

            you like that he was all intact

            when his friend pulled him over the gunwale.

Now you’re waiting for low tide, drinking a coffee,

facing the sun.  You say the price of clams has gone

down.  But it’s still good.  It’s still good.  You say I’ll stick close

to shore today.  This shit fog I aint going out too far.  Nope.

Not today.  Not too far.  Woke up to a sunrise.  Did you

see it?  Sure was pretty.

Quiet

         

Quiet

           

…I want to take

a vow of silence, every word

is a young mouse growing in my throat

stretching his paws

trying out his pink nails.

                                    Philip Levine

                                    Ask the Roses

Silence the way the maples, early or late,

            and for no reason,

            let go

Silence the way the cloistered, her thumb

on the last sorrow,

            goes into mystery

Silence the seeing an old dear friend

            look in to the twenty gone years

            to rock the newborn

Silence the ash that falls open in last night’s

            fire, and after a heavy rain, is still

            dry

Silence the way today, and every day,

            a baby, solid on the bed, falling

            to sleep.

Silence the three piano feet pressed

            against the key, to be felt

            and let into the room.

Silence in the lips silence

in the fingertips silence

in the areola

in the thigh-sigh and spine

in the story-stone in the sacral bone-bowl

            the subsequent yoke in and through that bone

                        (the first is the clavical you’ll agree)

            whose hips between is a loose sewn fillet,

            opening like a rosary, or a spile tap

            and that first drop of sap

            like it all was all decided 

            ahead of time

silence between the years we’d left

one another and then, yes,

            yes, met again when the tree

            the rosary

            the baby....