Oddments and Other Means to an End

Oddments and Other Means to an End

                                                                                 I                              

...They live the lives of monks,

one revelation healing the ravage of the other.

                                                                Robert Lowell

                                                                Mexico

There were others, of course there were others and even then

I had to go back and sift out the shards and bits

of bone I’d broken and let go of, what I’d promised

to be devotional to for the next of certain years the rest

of my life, to carry a vial that will survive my falling

down the mountain (contrary to popular thought, decent

is by far the hardest on everyone coming down: fatigue

missteps almost every footfall)

And now I can’t tell sometimes the difference between

the knee you must’ve kneeled on (I’ve only ever seen you do

it in dirt, thinning new carrots or turnip greens) and the knuckle

you’d swing out and true, my teeth rattling coming undone. 

Maybe I didn’t know I’d had enough and could turn off

the mountain road, maybe I didn’t know I could choose

                                                                                  II

You’re gone; I’m learning to live in history.

What is history?  What you cannot touch.

another guide to take me between the twist of rhodendron,

one who would wait for me or simply glow like the churned water

in the slow wake  (twelve knots?)  moving ship that from our

height we’d never see in the dark but we could see deep

beneath somehow and the krill or whatever it was come to

the top and drink and slip back down beneath it all,

free.  Yes, and so of that set of bones, your knee and knuckle,

listen how they rub (once I find them again, yours

in particular, I’ll be at once penitent and pugilent and I’ll keep 

them in the leather medicine bag I tie at my throat...

And every morning is the orchestra

of birds come to set up their sheet music and their stands:

and the clanking of brass and of wood and of all the keys

of the piano: a lone dove  and one rooster, a sensuous

                                                                                    III

devotion hikes uphill in iron shoes

boost from the cardinal and sweet of the bluebird and u-

sually one or two crow.  Since you died I’ve been coming back

down with those two bones I sifted your ash for.  I know

if you ever came back to demand them I’d give you a good

fight they don’t fit you anymore, they’ll make you clumsy,

they’ll weigh you down they’re fused to my clavicle

now like a third breast, calcifying.  Instead, I’ll send you after  

geese, and watch how, startled as if by headlights,

you make them rise, how they begin by flapping their heavy

wings, how they almost run to get off the water and how what can

falls back down on the pond and what can’t gives up with them

to be dropped casually as shit.  Look, it’s nothing new with you.

Has it ever been?  I don’t know where this can ever go, how

do any of us who let go know when giving up is beautiful,

when it's illuminating, when bones and an old bag of skin
are just not necessary for going up, coming down, or flying?