What I Saw

What I Saw:

I saw him, shovel up on his thin 

right shoulder,

going to the edge

of the road and then

into the woods.  He was alone. No

animal in a bag or bouncing

at or near his patiently lifting over

and around the rocks and frost broke

asphalt.   

I saw him and I thought: it’s a good

month before any digging

thaw.  What causes a boy

to disappear

into the woods with a shovel? 

The socket on his collar

the cutting edge

blade-end down?

Or, seen like this as I drive by:

the back up so if something started,

rain, maybe snow, the bowl

would be another hood, could, if ballast

shifts, take his back in this

or that spot as he rises

and falls all motion all steady self

walking in

to the woods with a shovel

and nothing else.

How to Become a Buddha

How to Become

a Buddha

Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.

First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.

                                                                           Jane Hirshfield

                                                   “All the Difficult Hours and Minutes”                                      

Benevolent don’t  you

                like the quiet of that word it’s almost

                                intention how it’s nearly an unheard

sigh and how unintentioned a monk

                dissolving in the morning

                                smoke listening listen she

keeps her spine aligned

                breathing she keeps railings

                                raised allowing

the lowering like ropes

                below the coffin their

                                strength is in their wait

their weight is in the fist grips of

                stoics-for-the-day who un-

                                able to stay step

back walk away palms red

                as tiger stripes in the dusking

                                grass or as saffron as the sleeve

of the Buddha who

                before he was

                                the Buddha exchanged

his rich robes

                with the homeless man

                                and before he strode

off (the homeless man or

                was he dead or does that

                                tell me matter) took up

the rope on the side

                of the road took it up

                                to pull it through his palm

to feel if it was all real to feel

                the fire raise the skin when it all slips
                                through to kill himself again

and again a naked

                rich man standing

                                under a sun a moon

a set circulation

                of blood and stars and began

                                to walk, for days then years

toward the Banyon

                the benevolent waiting

                                for him to come and become

Migraine III

Migraine III

                the power of the visible

                is the invisible, even where

no tree of freedom grows,

so-called brute courage knows.

                                                                Marianne Moore

                                                                “He “Digestheth Hard Yron”"

Maybe today abating finds its way

                to the other side of the brain,

                                maybe it’s left the temple entirely

and will genuflect to the back of the head

                where the bone seems keenest to

                                resist a second blow you know

how in the dark and walking by

                a guy might swing coward high

                                and late (in baseball it would

fly foul and he'd take to the box again

                and wait for the face to make it-

                                self clean between shoulders/hips.  

The light’s poor though and watery as a rain 

                that takes over the way a visiting Lord may 

                                when the true Lord’s a week in the highlands

hoping to spot that stag.  It’s best

                going slow to the blur the way it does

                                to wait it out to take it to the knee

and maybe not turn around at all

                to see who threw it who didn’t

                                have the balls to step out

before the rain came to say “hey, let’s

                have it,” and hold their left hand

                                (bat’s in the other) palm up

casual.  Almost friends.  It could’ve been

                different.  If he’d asked.  If he didn’t

                                wait till that head passed by, if,

(because this is a migraine remember) they

                sat down like old friends who hadn’t seen

                                each other for years and years, friends

who left clasping hands, who despite no

                calls, no texts, no “stopping by on my

                                way through” will smooth every ripple

over, anticipate it even, the way any great

                medic might in the late of night seeing two

                                shadows on the street, who will

intervene, mediate, before he has to lift

                the face off the pavement, anticipating, the pain

                                not arriving yet but soon, the mugger

running off mumbling something to the

                slippery road still squeezing the bat

                                like he’s the one in pain and always has been. 

Dharma Talk I

Dharma Talk I

I caught a tremendous fish

and held him beside the boat

half out of water, with my hook

fast in a corner of his mouth.

He didn't fight.

He hadn't fought at all.

                                    Elizabeth Bishop

                                    The Fish

snow maybe

                this late in the season

                                fall on the exposed shoulders

                                                of the stone Buddha--

see him there

                beneath the tree

                                (she let go, recently

                                                a limb, amputated

by the cold

                it seems, and age,

                                taking the plastic picket

                                                fence points all the way

to the ground.)

                Isn’t it though,

                                snow this late, what

                                                cools the crocus

lips as they open

                their throat-hold

                                on spring and swallow

                                                like a dehydrated

child come in

                from an all day

                                play, all day trenches,

                                                hands

sometimes bare

                sometimes fists

                                inside the sog

                                                of homemade

mittens, whose

                cuffs, even stretched

                                ride up the wrists

                                                toward the palm that,

if lifted up

                to the sun,

                                pulse a deeper

                                                blue, a blue

Cezanne would

                give birth to on his palate

                                mixing, mixing, mixing

ignoring the stones

                the other children

                                throw, sometimes

                                                hitting , sometimes,

like late spring

                snow, missing

                                that open throated

                                                crocus, that silent

beak-wide crow,

                just arrived on the broken

                                fence post, his thrown down

                                                throne, the stone

Buddha, knees

                bent like the bird's tucked in

                                wings, sitting, just

                                                sitting the winter through,

and now how the spring

               all falls around him

                                while he smiles

                                                a stone cutter’s smile

while we see

                beneath it all,

                                some-

                                                things in us

                                               

hardening,

                some things in us

                                going soft, pushing up

                                               getting free all this time

               

                               

                                                

What Brands Us: Buoy

What Brands Us : Buoy

The cocks are now almost inaudible.

The sun climbs in,

following “to see the end,”

faithful as enemy, or friend.

                                        Elizabeth Bishop

                                        Roosters

We have that at least and the sea

the foam feet cold as the untold

egg I found (how lifting up her skirts

the hen doesn’t walk off in some trance

but today’s dead right there on the nest

and her friends bob and blink

and say nothing.  A weasel my father

may have said) as I held the cooling shell.

The morning was thick with warming suet,
his new Styrofoam buoys, he was guiding

the Bunsen flame point, the rub

of the igniter I loved the sound of,

and in all that wind his lit pencil melted

each place he stayed, like flesh

maybe, or wax a the lip of the brass

bobeche.  I loved watching it all

part so clean at first and pain

free--the way an egg is laid away

through the cloaca and then has nothing on it--

yesterday that hen bragged and blew

her hymn snubbing my hand between

under... and such warm!  Have you ever

felt the unassuming love on the straw?

I’m sure she had another beginning

even as I eased my hand away full

of all that her body

could manage.  Today her sisters had

clucked and gawked at her breast

feathers lift without her.  And that egg,

cooling, going out, I imagine, going solid

like the reverse of those buoys

that don’t know, in their stiff ignorance,

the ocean yet, or rope, or the wooden

lathe driven through their throat

to float for a cut of water then caught on

the hook as the boat goes by,

and they fly, just once, then come down

near the bushel basket with a hen

in the bottom of it until farther out

on the last trap of the string

he’ll fling her ceremoniously:  maybe

she'll lift up with that buoy and warp, 

maybe she'll float beside the cedar

lathe for just long enough for my father

to look and then look away, turn

his bow and boat to home, to one barn

one rooster now one less than several

hens and a hole to shingle.  The night’s

minus a throat; but still: listen: fog horn:

cock crow, hens, those left, like cattle, low.

after Jorie Gram's "The Marriage"

after Jorie Graham’s “The

Marriage”

I’m taking the ashes/

 from the woodstove out

when I think

I step on something

in the dark

when I hear

two floorboards rub

together like always

when it feels

soft and the bulge

reminds me

(it does, sunk

stomach,

of the mice

under my feet

that time,

I think I saw

their breath

before I saw

their small

break-open-seed

hull teeth)

when I have to

say again:  it was

dark and cold

when walking back

to the light is

three steps away

when before pulling

the switch

I don’t want to know

when I know

the floor is bare

always squeaks there

when it’s Orion

all along

I was after

over the neighbor’s

foreclosed

house

when I’m prompted

to wonder on the edge

of forty seven

(maybe I did it

yesterday too,

to think of my first

husband how

in the poem

the poet talks

about a woman’s

marriage

night and the groom’s

no place to be

found I wander off too

on my own

knowing it

myself.

when there are

no mice or ever

were, not there

when the prince

skedaddled--hat

and tackle

when after the fact

he’s not a prince at all

it was the wrong breath

when undoing (she was

taking out the ashes

the poet)

(I’ve done that too)

when voices vanish

and the hands that sign

the bottom line--

when I’m out

of my mind on that

wedding night

in Colorado and he’s

beside me wiping up

laughing--his strategic catastrophe

when ass blood...there is nothing
as black that  I swab and see

shades for days and days

didn’t it all begin, all this

with two mice

a charm?

a turn over this won’t hurt

at all?  Didn’t it start

at Orion’s belt?  Is

he taking out

his sword

or putting it back

in? 

If I knew you in advance...

But I didn't.  You.  And me

the bride

you and me mice.

Once the step’s down

the bones are broke.

And they are
unmendable.

The Way You Said You Wanted/A Divorce

The Way You Said You Wanted

A Divorce

This should have been our travels:

serious, engravable.

                                                Elizabeth Bishop

                                                Over 2,000 Illustrations and

                                                a Complete Concordance 

                                                   It’s only 

at night I see you now and only nights

like last night that strike my face and brain

the way a casually thrown stone may.  Tossed

without thought, it would knock against

my jaw and set it rocking like an old chair

that’s been empty for so long it’s almost

rotting in its corner of the ring.  

                                                   There's an 

acrylic quilt: (you know those squares women 

make after supper, after dishes are done, the piles 

and piles of crocheted variegated frames, those soon

enough built they stitch them plain flat to event-

ually fold over the cold knees of the sitter, yes?

It’s the kind of macramé a tongue might touch

the way the soft wet inner cheek grates against

the teeth after the rock is tossed and falls, those

knots gone tough, gone into the trough that all nights 

fall into since you said what you said.

                                                  And the scum 

of pollen spread out to float

mustard yellow (though who knows in this kind of dark).

It is pulled to the bottom, is smudging up with the

others, is shoulders hunched, is this rock I’m talking

about in his pollen cape, the one tossed almost anonymously, 

the one that knocks me back a bit then forward, all stops

gone. 

                                                    Now my days are 

empty of you, thank God.  My teeth, when they meet

secretly, when I mean to think walking bare

foot, are flattening while I am on a path like that, 

sparten steps in the dark; I think: it is no wonder

the moon chooses to rise during the day this time

of year, when I see you out during a night of 

throwing stones, stones you spend your whole

day getting to know, holding them, bringing them

to your nose, closing your eyes--until the casual

cold shrugged shoulder, until the plunk it makes

after it’s tossed, waiting like all the rest for the day

to go down, the way it comes to this

so casually, so nonchalantly after all these

years of absence, after a decade of our vow

and a decade of our silence, thrown into the air

to split-second impact, to shifted jaw, 

                                                     to the bottom

of a trough, the surface disturbed but dismissing

it, closing ranks, loading no weapon

but facing always, the way they came last night

(the rocks) collected all your day, without name

or face but solid enough, always solid enough

to go straight down, knocked on its ass, stunned

too stunned to start, after waking, recovering right

away.

migraine

Migraine

The dancer, by this time, has turned her back.

He is the more intelligent by far.

Facing each other rather desperately--

his eye is like a star--

we stare and say, “Well, we have come this far.”

                                                                Elizabeth Bishop

                                                                Cirque d’Hiver

Hot and rough in the back of my head

the spot glows like a cooling coal, slow

in growing old.  It sloughs itself off, a

lobster exposed, the rigid case

it spent months staging, months in-

sisting an intimacy with, split, broke

open, a hole now alone now as an ocean

goes over it like a brothel of johns, it

is plunged into and upended, it is

twisted and carried by nausea by

wet wind by lips and skin and stitches

or (today) cod all the way across an atlantic of

mountains and dropped like nothing,

like a worm in the fold of flesh we’ll

never know until we open it, until, cut

from the bone (also thrown) (don’t

worry, another’s grown) curls in a blind

it has been all along and rears up

the way wind makes, if I’m facing it,

the sheets do before the rain, still

an hour or two away, but coming, God

help us, coming.

This Small Vacancy

This Small Vacancy

for the little girl in Elizabeth

Bishop

It’s a phrase I never liked much and never trusted

it’s this is this and what’s what because xyz: she’s

an orphan now and unwanted, she’s shuffed from

aunt to aunt she’s mostly unloved by all

of them except maybe in Nova Scotia, those who take her

in the way suffering souls take suffering souls

in: they look at the fold, like an old and cozy dog

by the woodstove, in the blanket on the bed, a roll

in the slop and another roll.  I remember myself

how in low light I used to with one eye

shut rise up and look over the length of it

all and to the foot of my bed and see the iron

spiles plummet down below the mattress, how

beneath the window and if the moon was just so

the opposite wall would be a castle and a doll

would be the girl in the tower and she’d creep

to the space between and look back at me, sweet

and angry, growling under her gills (my father’s

expression) like all trapped things do before they

die alive in their skin alive in their eyes,

the last of them to go to milk, to die, and how the skin

near to them is gently severed and in the end

empty, in the end up on some plinth or in a dusty

bucket in the closet at the crazy aunt’s.  Maybe the girl

finds it there later, tipped and vacant, and she lifts

it to her cheek, ermine or baby beaver or kit gone

missing and though no one can tell her why her throat

being choked with unsayable phrases ( they’d

told her about her loony mother her suffering heart-

broke father and given her another (the third

that day) enema) she begins to go motor smooth, she knows

finding this small vacancy wasn’t chance and

wasn’t accident.  One eye is lost forever maybe

in another house.  The remaining one is scratched

and matte flat.  Remember that.  Remember that she tells her-

self when she puts it back how it ended up shoved

from pillar to post--come all the way from Nova Scotia

where it was alive before it was trapped,

laid plain, stuffed, a puppet and trophy for only as long

as showing got prophet, money or brave praise:  Careful:

don’t end up like your mother crazy in the bin

the door shut and locked behind her forever and ever and ever.

No, I never liked it must or ever trusted it, that phrase ended up.  As if

all the successes that follow one fall somehow didn’t make it

on the ledger.  As though totals were the only score left

standing or breathing.  But even those fade, brilliantly, maybe

especially, the book being closed and all.

Opening the Barn Door: March

Opening the Barn Door: March   

after Jorie Grahm’s (Teresa: Saint Teresa of Avila)

                                                I’m trying to lean into those

                marshes and hear

what comes through clean,

                what comes through changed,

having needed us.

How to Graze:

                lips inside the slight salt the small

                spring blades blew on to the root blew

                through tide-out mud crust the early

                wader birds flirt between seen

                not seen and he (it’s just now

                spring)

                free from a December to now all

                day through high tide to low

                and shoots whose hairs resist

                to being pulled though let go

                turning (hear it?) masticated then

                to the dark throat of tenure

                owning own oh living this is

                impossible, what? owed? or

                is it going through broken

                on a winter limit line

                and eyeballing a repair

                for late spring once the snow is old

                news once the nose grazing through

                choice new shoots, new

                perks at those wader birds

                blows out short, walks on

                phased as a new moon

Said the snow to the maple grove, said the maple to the snow

March 14^th:

Said the snow to the maple grove,

Said the maple to the snow

Turn sighing into breath

                                Marianne Moore

Alone in the maple grove the snow spoke to the cold:

               

                hello, don’t you know

                me

And to the snow the oldest of the old told the snow

               

                hello, yes I know you, how

                you blow only so long I know

               

                how you flit on the frigid tip

                of this spile and can’t resist

                either the one or the untelling

                sum of those above you

                or the liquid the vein of core

                i/we all pour...

And to the maple

                but those who have tapped

                you have left you

                who but my foot or two

                to four--more

                will fall inside the nude

                of you, I’m not through

                won’t you, shoeless to

                your root, sockless still

                become the tongue

                your liquid middle

                some mild February

                rashly melted

Suppose, snow, I said:

                the wind knows although

                no that’s just not so,

                woodsmoke knows

                the whole winter

                the cold ash of last

                December all the apple-

                wood tinder that the farmer

                saw to saw

                and saw, in smoke floating

                above the flames

                then beneath the pan

                to be raked out

                in April--

                you have no idea, holding

                on brief as only you

                can you mid-March

                snow with growth

                already (though whispering

                now at your bravado)

                that you’ll blow over

                a week maybe no more

                and those feet

                or three or four will

                sink into me

               

                and like the bee I’ll make it

                another me

                I’ll squeeze it

                up and through my hide

                and heat, Heat!

                while to you it is is not

                the end of me.