Mother and Daughter

Mother and Daughter

Now in the blessed days of more and less

when the news about time is that each day

there is less of it…

                                                W. S. Merwin

                                                Dew Light

Days when your dying strikes me

as the oldest thing that has ever happened, or that

after all these years it is as if it has

never happened at all, that I never

watched it all my whole life, the aluminum can 

of it, the steep steep stairs of it, the height of the low shed's

hayloft of it and the trapdoor in the middle

of the floor of it where I only ever saw, come

November, a buck or a doe or the old

cow split wide as that Bible story about Samson

and the lion’s jaw all hot then all cooled by the time

it’s dragged out into.  

And the woods of it, and strapped to the sedan of it, windows

rolled down as much for the rope holding it all on

as for the Pall Mall smoke of it, the only way,

city girl you were, you could see walking

through the world of it, with blood and flesh as red as that,

to dull it to the color of it.

Days when a window conch in the curiosity shop

you’d seen once and wonder how they coaxed the animal

out of it all together and once and for all forever because days

you'd say you would want to live in such a deep

curved peace hard as teeth the whole way

around and only feel and grope in the most

unassuming thrill, you’d hoped to live like that

one day if you let yourself feel anything at all.  You’d said

you can learn the most remarkable things

from the dead:

the fragrance of daisies after dark after walking out

on him

the flavor of sea salt water after walking in

with him

the feeling oh Jesus the feeling of descending stairs after you pushed yourself

away from him

and it’s the fog of it and it’s blood of it that came

afterwards and the texture of the cloth you washed your crotch with

was like that doe’s hide the first time you’d touched

something as dead as her, something awful dead,

the red the white the honey brown

you’d later hang your own self from,

allegorically of course, in your head and on your tongue

in your longing in your stories and you’d tell me

every day every day you were alive or barely

a fight with nothing at all but everything, everything after all.

This Sort of Tending To

This Sort of Tending To

“Remember when you talked to me about your soul, about

saving it?”

                                Home

                                Marilynne Robinson

I’d wanted to write about the two flies

I’d shut against the screen and window

yesterday--two dirty old flies I pulled

the ivy away from the window frame for,

two creatures buzzing on the mesh.

There happen to be three candles on that

sill, as though I’d hope some vigil of mine

would be seen from the road by some passer-

by, another soul on a night like tonight

with the rain and the thunder and the lightning.

Even though I don’t write enough about

the souls that like wind blow around

on my insides, that try like those trapped 

flies to find a light and a small place to hike,

still, somehow all they are, all we ever are,

is on or up to our knees like all rest, quite like a prayer.

Even though I’m the one whose shut them up

to die against the streaks of rain that arrived

last night instead of going after them with the thick

extended end of a napkin to beat them

mid-flight to death, still, I’m glad I didn’t

kill them but left them to die two together.

I can be glad about that later, can’t I?  When

I finally open the window and their little

bug bodies will have been sifted through

and brushed against and sent away as though

their only purpose, after their maggot

selves sucked on all that was rot around them, 

was to live against this sort of dying, coming in 

from the cold too soon gone too soon left to what rain

at this very moment brings them to their knees

if they have knees, yes, if they have them

and can use them at all.

Benediction for the Sinned Against

Benediction for the Sinned Against

(three)

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you,

and when they shall separate you from their company,

and shall reproach you, and cast out

your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.

                                                            Luke 6:22

the baby in the brown

paper bag may have

raised his little fist

before he died before

the noise frenetic

and cold closed over

his body like a caul

noise that unstiched

him noise that scalpeled

a glide on its own

thin life down the belly

of his mother to open

and spill his universe

into the basin

of this ER trauma room

to pull him out of the bath

at the wrong time no

towel no holding

after the heat lamps

and weighing cradle

after she loads his clay

face and hands

into the paper medical

trash absorbing the gall

the nurse’ll say that later

she only glanced

when he rose

when she goes out to the dark

on all the rest of her 1 am days when

she moves the cat aside 

after he’s reached in his sleep

his paw to her underarm

it’s wind in the siding

it’s skunks or fox or any

crinkle of scream in this kind

of dark he may have she tells

herself he may have

after his street junkie

no ID mother ODs

raised his fist

he may have

Litany for the Sinned Against (one)

Litany for the Sinned Against      

(one)       

I

want your blessing,

whoever you are who

has the power to give

me a name for

whatever I am. 

                        Philip Levine

                        Words

Why is it only years later, long beyond

their levy, that sins against us feel  

like sins at all?  Fresh

in the hand they are just-pulled roots

cool with manure that’s been, after all

this time, turned into a shit that has

value, that isn’t the ass it fell out of

or the floor it smacked against, waiting

casually for nothing.  Until the shovel,

there is never caring, not ever, who

was at the handle.

Sins live in the whispers only confessional

drapes can mimic, and the pulling too,

a privacy curtain.  Have you ever noticed,

aside from its crushed velvet, regardless

of its red or black, it’s not that different,

hanging there, closed or open, than

a doctor’s office-side examining room,

and not just for the cloth?  Boxes are tight

and spare little light but the lying

down is just the same, the cut

above the lip that shreds vowels like

cheese graters is still raw.  But in this town

a doctor’s not

going to ask and a priest is not going

to judge.  They’ve got the Law and God

on a leash and the poor bastards are turning

circles at the door, wrapping the leather

so tight its choke- on-a-bone close

to dying.  It’s all quiet until they learn

(and remember because that’s the crucial

part) to turn around and sit still while

papers and blame are shuffled

like poker cards, while beef on the hoof

is made by the butcher at the edge of town

to take off her coat and her whole shitty

world is split from ass to appetite as

the doctor says about caesarians to the thirteen

year old girl who never flinches from the gel

and speculum, who tries to be cool and wipes her lip

and stares blinks at the bright examining light,

the white privacy sheet parting the air

for the priest come to take her spirit outside

for a quick drowning in the roses.

Litany for the Sinned Against (two)

Litany for the Sinned Against

(two)

Vicissitude

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the land.

                                                               Matthew 5:5

Going isn’t the only issue.  Or even choosing

to go.  Or even the road, so abundantly

choked at the throat.  Going, and on

the way who lifts their skirts high as brass

and eyes the ties any number of times

when it’s all bending at the natural

need this road once bloated with boats

and bodies oh who knows this road

this going on the road and the lonely

oil-soaked soles no shoes as though

by now it’s floating that’s required, floating

the float of pelicans or those in no

hurry their holding of the air the air

holding them solely only them their going

is no going their choosing is no

choosing yet this floating like this, no

need of roads, only the knowing the weight

of their lungs and sewn into bones…

let’s choose, yes, let’s been given to choose

our road oh and who on our road, and then,

when we are time, our own repose

on the edge of our road no glow no snow

no hollow just this my ending I have a right

this!  You may have come into me

and broken me completely but the bird

after your hurt is begun oh I choose her

I turn my face and float 

Triggers: Still Reading Your Books

Triggers:
Still Reading Your Books

I went ahead and had the children,

the life of ease and faithfulness, the

palm and the breast, every millimeter of delight in the body,

took it all without you as if

in taking it after all I could most

honor you.

                                                Cambridge Elegy

                                                Sharon Olds

Reading through you

            line by line spine by spine

binding after binding

it’s quick sometimes like a smear

on his cuff after he’d stuffed

it all right in
to the elbow

into the front of my pants

in the kitchen while the raw

wings and legs and thighs

spread their wide plucked out lives
clean as new skin

in the roasting pan.

Almost free of this life,

this is their one final leap,

to be eaten after they’re laid

down, eaten now because

they’d missed the egg stage,

the shitty in the nest and cooling

off stage and risking it, (she I’m saying)

because there’d been foxes

and coons in the henhouse. It's
the last straw, it will see her
gone after he rolled

over in bed and grasped that soap

opera cliché of empty

sheets: there is nothing left

to do but pull them up

to his mouth and nose and breathe.

It’s fresh clean and bleach

and she’s free as bubbles

and sunshine.

When your books finally came

                to me like you said they would

                I was surprised at how few

                there were because I’d remembered

                a whole library of spines

                carefully organized by theme

                on the shelves you’d built

                that were so sturdy

                they could have been the bed

                we’d made to love and wrecked

                if we had ever made a bed to love and wreck.

                But it wasn’t like that for us--

                two married people who’d sworn other aliances:

                                you to a lovely (after the first harpy

                                                but the sex was great you’d said

                                                after you’d known me for years,

                                                anytime I wanted a piece

                                                of ass…and you apologized

                                                like you wanted me to see

                                                the gallant you you’d become

                                                but I could guess and I did but

                                                tenderly at first, the way a nurse

                                                would move an elbow with

                                                the same curtesy as she would

                                                your testicles after your bath

                                                after your first stroke

                                me to a boy really (a house cat you’d called

                                                him) (but not my first boy

                                                and the sex with him was dirty was

                                                a cesspool I’d said after I’d known you

                                                for years and after that I could tell

                                                you wanted to

                                                show me it wasn’t all like thighs

                                                spread wider than the sky

                                                his flight coming in but deliberately

            changing course without telling me

            and for a while your quiet  

                                (because I’d said I was days
                                alone in my room, there was a lot

                                of blood and shit

        like that and after that…well)

was the only balm I would have

needed to get me to walk straight

again if you’d been there then---

So now when I’m reading 

                your copy of Sharon Old’s The Gold

                Cell I notice your highlights and those

                you want to come back to later on and they’re

                the poems that remember

                Firsts:      First Boyfriend

                                First Sex

                                First Love

                And now, because I know more

                about sex and dying and find it appropriate

                                an Elegy.

After all, where else is there to land

                after you fall, after the stars go out

                after they’ve been stirred from the bottom

                of their cell and played

                up and up and up and maybe

                they won’t make it maybe

                they stand at the bottom of those stairs

                like you did

                and feel the bottom rise up

                and the top fall down

                and the squeeze of the veins

                and the quickening  

                and the ecstasy after all these

                                celibate years

                coming alive while all you can do now

                                is die.

And these few books I keep repeat us

                somehow, even after your ten years gone:

                                every time I open one I smell:

                                                your mouth after three whiskeys and a big cigar

                                                the breakfast you cooked for me

                                                when I told you about the repeated sodomies

                                                and the pine tree sweat falling on us

                                                while we walk and walk deeper and deeper

                                                we walk.

Clay Baby

Clay Baby

The delicate clay baby has your thumbprint

under the chin, its hair and eyes are fingernail

thin.  When you brought it to me, cupped

in the palm of your hand I thought you just

wanted me to see.  You’d been working

at the dining room table all afternoon, rolling

and squeezing, the ball of the head flat

enough into the pine so it didn’t roll, and it’s

a wonder it came up like it did without breaking

thin as it was in spots.  It’s great clay you’d said, it doesn’t

dry out.  And so you gave it to me, the face

an eerie mirror, and let me feel and look.  Solid

and soft.  The wonder of your thumbs

are all through it: calf muscle, cheekbones,

and look, an all the way around the waist sweater-

cuff, tucked at the hips and ribbed, pleated.  Even

up to the chin, John Lennon in a turtleneck you said.  He is

fabulous I said and handed him back--are you going

to fold him up and roll him up and take

his snake arms (oh, look at that, toast

crumbs on his bum) and that made you laugh, but

in all seriousness you said He’s for you Mama.

And you flounced away like any God of Clay would

while I held your tender baby who I have to say

and may tell you later resembles the Bog

Men sunk thousands of years in the peat

sod gone all leather black, a badass in the mire.

I mean, the turtleneck!  Peel it back, lift it up,

and I bet the hips and ribs are if nothing else

copper bone.  The locked jaw of the last crone.

But not your man, no not your man.  He’s got me

loving ugly, and not the cliché ugly, but the under-

appreciated ignored subtlety of ugly, homely

let's say because of the way

this ankle bone is as noble as the chin, his

petroleum black skin he’s in and been made of is ageless

in the palms of your hands, and could speak

and think the most crazy wild bewitching things but

just doesn’t need to because being made

was enough.  Is enough.  Shaped and unbetrayed, 

breathed on, kept warm in a turtleneck sweater! with thumbnail cuffs!

Ohboy! and handed to me, for keeps, is enough.