Rice

Rice

There are countless variations in a life, endless

leaf-strewn paths we might walk to our end,

but what we choose is what we endure.

                                                Angel and Apostle

                                                Deborah Noyes

I never pour a cup of rice but that I gather

each grain that spills out with anxious care--I press

my fingers into it each and am impressed:

it has imbedded  a purpose--which is nothing

other than to grow.  It sits in water

in the lap of blind mercy or grace or just plain

circumstance: of rain of yellow heat of hands

and feet moving through anonymously.  Tend upright

uproot glean…all the way from there to me

it made it to the counter only to tip off the lip

of a steel measuring cup whose handle

is ready to fall off completely.  I can’t stand it.

The water it wants or wants it is boiling its buttered roil.

Each white hard seed is sufficient unto me.  Each

like the 400,000 I’m given in my mother’s blood--

Jesus!  So many!  Maybe I’m too much of myself. 

The thin give of the husked bleached grain.  The grind

of the salt, the beef bones I boiled for the broth.  The finding

each spill and tipping it into the mouth of the waiting

wet furnace--and then the cover-up.  The slow coming

back to simmer on the low heat.  Rice.  Once one

undercover of its mother’s sheaf of green and all

that hard time done, comes to soften after all,

on my tongue one and one and one each unto each

until it is enough to please.  Maybe that’s the peace

I mourn to see, when I see, in the crack of creamy

grout, beside the ivory counter tile, one I’d missed

and it’s waiting for me.  Patient.  Silent.  Nonchalant.

Sits.  Then, indented in the pillow of my thumb.  This one

I eat, hard, starch unyielding as dry pasta, all on

its own.   I think we know one another better like this.  Single.

We know more now than we could have otherwise

for my missing the cup, missing the first and second

and third sweep through.  The passing night.  My blindness.

It’s waiting.

Rescue

Rescue

What then?  To pull you through after all these

years on such a narrow bed that can catch your death

so effortlessly, as though the whole time

its locked wheels are the one

object in the room that waits outside strength

or doesn’t even need it?  Earlier, because there was nothing else

to say or nothing else heard (what with the tubes

through your nose, the anchor against

your cheek to secure your breathing)

I’d imagined your coffin with such ease I spooked

myself.  Yes, it’s come to this.  And so

to beat back the blows the way

day after day you taught me to

and day after day I failed to learn I finally

stood up inside myself and said: I’ll take that

now, I’ll take that stick that belt--or, when it all

came down to muscle, your tongue

pressed to the floor of your chapped and chaffed-

scraped pitiful jaw.  I saw now

the bed and the head in the bed and the fading

buoyancy of your face.  Grey as your driftwood

cane.  Grey as your make-up removal clay.  And

because standing up on the inside means I lean,

almost lying inside you again, into your face, I saw

the way you flicked your eyelids at the close of it all,

and the way (maybe it was relief) you cried

as you died while I threw your tools, your guns

and glass, your thumbed code of crass,

into the furnace of each of our old selves.  I saw you sigh.

I saw you sigh the way that old cow maybe sighed

after my father’s accident maimed him beyond

repair and she, hungry, standing for days and days

unmaintained, at first the balloon of her udder

a curiosity and then, as though she had dropsy,

she cracked and oozed and leaked, she bellowed

alone.  When all she needed was a salve and hands

  

and a soft song the man with the rifle

came instead and the stall was empty after that.

I wonder now, looking at you, after I’d whispered

what I’d whispered into your ear and you cried

if she looked into him the way you looked into me:

a relief just after the flash.  And maybe he prayed for,

if not her end to her suffering, the four kids in the house,

all under ten, playing with their Christmas toys

while the chimney smoked too close to the roof

and the snow fell hard and the people came in and out

like someone, a human this time, had died

and was gone, finally, for good.

At Sixty Nine

At Sixty Nine

She kept her songs, they took so little space

                                                                                Philip Larkin                                       

                                                                                “Love Songs in Age”

Today you would have been sixty

nine.  I break you there

because that’s where you were

when you died.  You’d gotten through

until then though the scythe, if not

your friend, at least your third twin,

swept at your feet like the hem

of crinoline or the pleat of wind

in a dervish skirt.   Always, always your

dying lay quiet at your feet, waiting, 

faithful.

You know, even though I could

spend a good part of my day every day

in dispute with you (though now

especially because the sound

of your voice has never changed

for me), it’s as if nothing else is ever really

still, like records in their slip

cases, how all that sound is

paused and now all we need is speed

and a needle and a couple

of speakers.  Believe me when

I say I don’t think I need to

play a single one.  I’ve kept them

all, I couldn’t turn them out,

and suppose I never would for love

or small bills.  But listen.  Even today

or especially today, the scratch

is still there in the air, the crack of static

settled in the worn grooves

of my temporal lobe.  The needle’s blunt

but there’s another sharper tool on the roof

of your mouth, going cold as you go

cold, losing it the way bowels are lost

in the end, and then how they settle against

the pelvis like the cradle it is

and like the baby you began as sixty

nine years ago.  Listen.  The tension’s

blown out like light, and now not so much

blown out as gone too low, how the way

fuel in the globe coats the tongue of wick

and even as we spoke our least real

words nearly two years before you

died the edges were gone dry, were flying

off and if not flying then drifting

and if not drifting than hovering

like that fire between us in the lamps,

you know, when the power went out

how we heard the hissing, how we’d sit

at the kitchen table, your knitting

the sixth pair of winter mittens, the cuff

alone a miracle to me, how you’d learned

to gather that one string against all four

of those needles and square off

and pull and slip and bore down on us

like a mother who, exhausted of her cubs

come lately into her coveted dark,

would growl or hiss or whisper  

and spin, just spin, in and in you’d spin.

Explaning Rape Culture

Explaining Rape 
Culture

After Philip Levine’s “Desolation”

For you would hardly care

That you were less deceived, out on that bed,

Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair

To burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic.

                                                                Philip Levine

                                                                Desolation

This last stanza after an epigraph of an account

by a ruined woman who wakes up concussed from drug

I want to catch you off

guard I want to feel if you really mean the man’s desolate

after he rapes the girl and is forever after a waste

or if he was already desolate and waited

for her with his syringes and pills and bottle of booze?

I tell you, I didn’t need any of that--all I needed

was a mother who wrapped marriage up in two silk words:

I DO.

It was duty and I took it from there.  I thought nothing

but laying it all down no matter what where why

into the (let me quote you) unanswerable light, tall and wide.

Let me say too that shame begins a long time before

the beds, a long time carding the shorn wool before the garment,

forbidding as it is, is worn.

I guess, yes, I get that.

I guess I can put that on

like a thick skin in August

but what I’m saying is the line’s crossed

when the fuck who fucks you without you there

(listen you’re there, but you leave, you know?)

without your hands and feet

without your teeth

is excused is curtsied to is Nose to the Toe examination afterward

come in the back door

and he’ll make it all ok again.  I ain’t buying that.

And don’t tell me he’s a damaged little boy

inside the biceps and calves of a man

who’ll hold me

down and swallow my nononono

like it’s vintage

like its his first time

like his ass has never been grabbed

by a guy like him

man I want to understand this:

               

                why I have to, twenty years on

                get out

                of bed

                wiping this shit

                up

                out of my head

and he’s pushing himself into a new pair of boots

and a new wife.  I’m saying this: 

Don't make excuses.  I’ll take it if you don’t take his

desolation as more costly on his soul as mine: ---

Yes, like you say: my mind does lay open
like a drawer of knives.  I'm willing to say I've taken it
out of context, but not today.  Maybe in another twenty
years.  How else???

Despair

Despair

A friend and I

talked back then about a tree

whose branches were the choices that we

had not taken

then she chose not to be

                                        W. S. Merwin

                                        Choosing
for M. W.

The time you finally arrive and think:

after all these miles--miles and miles and miles

I will never laugh again or grin

or have the urge or the need to.

Broached and cold after the broaching

the slow flow unbunged when will it be  

enough to sit with your face in your hands

and soothe each cheek and bone, each eye

lid and socket each and every hair and lash

each line beside each line and every line  

a sheet of music and a meistro all in one ear

in the dark that you are now and feel

stumped under the palms of your thumbs
and fingers finding the jaw's a wadded
ball say and then to lift it with practice lift it

tooth and nail and set with lips drawn in

lift it inch by inch until it can be unhinged

again open-tongued and smoothed a laid out

path on your now ancient back that's a map
on whose skin you've born the way

and taken to the trees or the sea and the dark is all we have

in common.  This paper's been through the mill,

this paper, once of a ream, once all goo and glue,

once one of a tree among trees.  It does

not cannot recall the one true palm upon it

who meant no harm.  But there was one--

and long like a mother’s hand

on her son’s intubated lung

after the cutting in and cutting out

the arrival and exit of air between

gurgling all this life unwadded and set

flat again and sealed and bared and hovered

and a drop of ink to set the first note

in 4/3 time

or 4/4

or whatever we can unskilled make
make at the moment to be heard or more, felt

under the face under the hands, under the lips

unfurling in time once it’s all sung
in notes and drawn on the stave

and gripped and hanged

on four strings

against the cheek and called out

by wrist and bow 

and played

Alarm

When a Wolf

When a Coat, Opening

'Twas a Divine Insanity--

The Danger to be sane

                                  Emily Dickinson

                a bell

                a horn

                a rattle

                a whine

                a pause

a

                                                silence

                        an inhale                                                                         

an exhale

a phone

                ringing

a phone

                not

the skin of smooth bath water

the without a single cloud sky

the after the other hand let go empty hand

the wordless tongue

the floor of piss wet rug the undone by the foot of the tub mother

the phone again

the mouse and cat of a fussy baby

the putting him down

the finally picking up my father’s undone four hundred miles away voice

it’s early in the morning

it’s November

it’s a familiar call that's been called a lot

it’s a reserved (maybe stalled) shock

yes please come home

this time

yes please come alone

this time

no she is not here

this time

no she won’t make it

this time

Nine Years On, Or Nearly So

Nine Years On, Or Nearly So

All your life you’d made your threats,

then hedged the bets as they say, then called

and somewhat bluffed your way

day and day and day through

the years I knew you in a tranquil-

ized haze.  Having played

every card, more than three-quarters

lost and gone, all those queens

and kings you’d stood in knee-deep

in the trenches for to ante up

with deuces…

tired isn’t how it’d come to be that way.

I have to say, sober you were bold

to go all the way in until you played away

your whole life, even the low cards, fuck

if you couldn’t bluff! Aces and eights

were your favorite hand

and every time, every time! you’d clean

up and try to cash in the chips all

at once and I stashed some

so you’d have it to fall

back on and you’d be on a carousel

of winning for a while and I’d leave you

be left by you and I let you be

when I grew up and took it in the chin

your upper-cut from the hip

when they called, when my son turned

three (you’d sworn off booze)

and all that winning went down

your throat and you broke open

on the bathroom floor…

Tell me: who can gamble, I mean let’s be

honest here, who can gamble

any other way than close to the bone

when the show’s really about

to close and the toilet’s over-

flowed and the cards are sticking

to the shit and piss

of your tired untamable life and the kids

the kids all us four

come one by one to your bed

and kiss your sunk cheek and say good

bye and high

tail it home or out of our mind

but one last time I stay

I stay I stay the whole length

of the night.  Through all the gurgle

you fold you fold your old stroke-

curled hand open as much

as it can be, pinched pills a ghost

in your throat, your deck scattered still

scattering by the cold late incoming wind