A Brief: On the Side of the Highway 95

A Brief: On the Side of the Highway 95

farewell to an idea...The mother's face,

The purpose of the poem, fills the room.

They are together, here, and it is warm.

                                                        Wallace Stevens

                                                         The Auroras of Autumn, 1947

On the way, when arriving was

parenthetical and the time between
the departures and the arrivals, I saw
two crows alone on the highway

pecking at whatever anything they were free

to cull.  How like Naomi’s

Ruth to come when all the rest were through

and be content sifting this Boaz

gravel for what of winter or spring

had laid down there: stained remains of headlight

froze doe maybe or the shells of a seasonal

entomologist’s silica once it’s ground

to chaff.  And salt.  Always salt.  Maybe
they require, such authoritative

birds, nothing of me at all except my seeing

and I’m happy about that, to see them,

soaking up the road and all the rest that’s on them.

It's the way grain soaks water, how it pulls it

back into itself like a memory

and swells with only one goal: to negotiate

the dark it dried itself into while

saving the day or a lady or maybe

two crows who grope for it on the side

of this road, who may drop it, completely
cocooned in the avenue of stranger

places, between, maybe, if they’re going

that way, a live oak and the pine-

cone split half open, a beetle

on one of her hundred brown, pine-sap

glazed tongues, and not knowing it

but owing it all to these two crows and a drive by

on the way to arriving.

About What's Decent

About What’s Decent

This luscious and impeccable fruit of life

Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.

When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,

Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.

                                                                Wallace Stevens

                                                                LE MONOCLE DE MON ONCLE

The faces of the pipe-fitters, in broad day color,

I wonder if they’ve seen themselves? hung

in this museum rejoicing the work of their dust- rusty cough

their rivet driven whole hog son-of-a-bitch

whisper when they duck deep between the ribs, under

the pitch thick cap of the ship they’re building.  Today is

all weld and metal, (though there’s the Mary E in dry

dock) and a century and a half ago it was all pitch and a whole

country of soft and hard wood shipped

(there’s irony there) and logged out

to this river spot to be cut and trimmed

to rise out rib-spread to soon (months? a year

or two) take water, break it on her face in any wet wind

or foul or fair sea, coy tip of the cheek to the men who

made her.  Do they ever know her life afterwards,

were they ever invited, to watch her slide from the dry

dock into tidal river water, toward coincidence of sinking

or sailing, now always sunk some in salt’s wet bottom:

bones and old rope or guy wire or boys faces

hanging (coincidence?) next to the painting they could

maybe never name but could I’m not shitting you

tell you the inside out of because they made it:

the boat: and they made it out of every rib holding

true up to the sky of quitting time hoping 

for something decent, like she'll be the one, 

she’ll  spend her life taking on

nothing but mild boys in the belly like any expecting

and respectable mother.

Walking Under the Eastern Magnolia

Eustis Estate, Milton, MA

Walking Under the Eastern Magnolia

for Tommy

Too late I think maybe I should have taken

it up to bring home, the blossom fallen

from the Eastern Magnolia, how we came

upon them on a dense bath broad only

near the pond and even then soft-

and- stay- clear- of- the- bank- narrow.  I thought

I’d dry one between some book pages

I mean to read in the future and when I finally

open it I’ll remember everything about this

day which is to say there was an abundance

of sun and we walked in it all afternoon

and looking up into it through the green

leaves of that Magnolia was like going

under water unafraid knowing this time

I’d want the surface again.  Instead of taking

the great saffron centered bruised and buckling under

drops of the morning fury of rain

and putting it into my notebook I carry

it, like a lily that belongs there, to that pond

and set it one or two lengths out and watched

a second two, not more, before I turned back to you.

The Call

The Call

Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

Rilke

Suppose the silence you pass through

were incomprehensible to more than you,

and suppose you knew

who wrapped at your window

were hungry and you flew instead

to your inner rooms to shut out

the noise to close over the hand held out

as though it were a wound and in the place

of alms you have the spike

of your rage...suppose the woman asking is

me and my dream is just

to sit near to you and be

wanted.  Suppose that your pocket

change, what remains of what you’ve spent

stays there still, jingling away

like wind against the now loose glass.  The rattle...

it haunts, and no matter how far go you

into the murk of your spirit’s house you’ll hear

it you’ll hear someone with their knuckle

beside the one top to bottom crack,

holding out, penitent... but not knowing why.

Before Peonies

Before Peonies

It takes, some days, getting another second

cup of coffee, going down

into the variegated dark to stub

my toe the way you’d stoke

the stove, the coals so

red at the tips of your fingers

it looked like you were blooming

into a peony right there in front

of me.  Your seasonal freckles were illuminated

when you’d lifted and tapped the poker above

the lid and cinders took flight, looked like

the last little bits of snow-globe

snow moments after the shake: little

winged things drifting with purpose

to the ground.  I was remembering how

I’d read somewhere that the ants

that attend the knuckle, the first

rising up out of the stalk on our varietal

peony, are entirely the point--they soothe the dropsy

oozing through, look how they take it

into their body drop by drop

how they gain each folded petal

to coax them out into the ruddy May rain.

(it’s been a kind of October spring, won’t you

agree, late days of cold wet sky, and still,

on the mountains, a couple inches

of snow) Don’t they remind you,

those little black ants, of a mother

whose cool palm soothes the baby’s fever?

Wordless the two of them, they each

stand stock still in the black

living room night both exhausted from the heat

the defeat of it and the constant way it spikes

an eruption, blooms hives on his skin,

and then, almost without notice, drops.   Neither

baby nor mother will give up

until it’s all passed through.  And they won’t

let go of this moment ever even though

years will spread wide between them

some living vigorous, some awe

struck with fever.  They don’t and can’t know

how it will all turn.  The instinct

is to brush the bugs off, send them

to the neighbor’s patch of grass.  And if one

crawls up our shirtsleeve don’t we (I did

once) break into the tremor of some Saint Vitus

dance until it drops next to the stalk

to take up the job again, when the well-

intended’s back is turned and nature

carries on with her work?  Maybe the peony

will open in a day or maybe it will go

slow, unfolding late 

into next week.  Maybe the glossy

globes of water, aloft on the still

unopened blossom will, but slowly,

slip through just like it had planned all along,

like a coal settling into the ashes,

banked, breathing easier now after

such a fever, easy and, we’re so glad, alive.

Seeing Between The Space of the Blossom and Her Falling Drop of Water

The Space Between the Blossom and Her Falling Drop of Water

It’s hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more

I believe that our lives are not built out of time,

but light.

                                                Colum McCann

                                                Transatlantic

It’s not so much shock really but resolve

that makes us, or me at least, pause

when the news has finally landed

with grace, or not, caught in the tire

or feather and cutting it shorter

than it may have wanted to have been

delivered.  As if such news were a machine,

or a rabid animal.  I take it

with me into what’s left of the rain

and I make it perch with the drops

of water on the blossoms: opening,

going by, or still in a fist and a tight

as jaw buckling from the blow,

the knuckle still clenched, both,

after the letting go, drifting off like pollen

when the sun comes back, and the wind,

to gather it.  I take it

out the way Frost may have when he

sweeps debris from the spot

he’ll dig for his first son and the work

you know it’s the work the digging

is what saves him.  These timeless

deeds see us

into the next and next and make us

ready to hear about it at last

when the time comes, isn’t it just

like this on the Tuesday I’m called

and my son’s just that morning turned

three and my daughter’s turning one

in two days and they called to say

you’d taken

too many pills deliberately.

I poured milk

for my son and I watched it

bubble as it rose in the cup and he reached

for it but held back his hand

and I said not yet honey,

not just yet.

The Sea of Trees

The Sea of Trees

There’s so much else---our life.

At the sick times, our slashing,

drastic decisions made us runaways.

                               

                                                                Robert Lowell

                                                                Runaway

And in the end that’s all you’d do anyway

or could do as though the path had calcified

had become a one way a penitent road you’d

resoled your worst possible shoes with.

I’d never know how to follow if it weren’t

for the blood.  Because for some flagellants

the shoulders the torso are the landscape

they paint their sins on (or the sins

of others they take on) they escape

into their clouds almost at once and want

to be seen, a fevered masochist.  But others

like you take the wounds into their feet

and walk between the rhododendron

and myrtle.  Twisted and sometimes low

to the ground they remind me of an old

dowager who leans into the conversation

only to be polite not to brag about her upbringing

by a stern nannie dead now sixty years.

These brief moments the light slides--if there is

a light--beside the blooming myrtle

I make good time and don’t fall.  You have two

years on me though.  In your silence.  Remember?

Those last twenty five months or so

you turned down the offer to make words

meaningful or at least less painful.  If you talked at all

it was kitchen knives.  By that time you had

good aim and I was always the perfect

bull’s eye.  If not the red center then the ribs,

where they would wait between the bones

like the mouth of a trap for small game: open,

open, open for seasons at a time and the rust

setting in the jaw.  By the time I make it

this far I’ve forgotten where I started.   You’ve

run away and I’ve lost your trail.  Yesterday I began

to wonder if I’ve been following someone

else’s blood.  It’s viscous thick, a texture

like gunpowder.  I don’t eat much, and only once

in a while.  the trail’s going out and I don’t know

my way.  Your last words were a gurgle, a stream

off course, a garter snake startled in the grass.

Before I could put my finger to your lips, before

I could step on the one square of light, you were

gone.  Not ahead to light the way, just gone.  And I’ve

been all this time walking.  I can’t help myself.

Of Beauty

Of Beauty

for Mrs. E. Couchman

   

everything else is provisional,

                                us and all our works.

I guess that’s why we like it here:

                listen -- a brief lull

                                                a rock pipit’s seed-small notes.

                                                                                Kathleen Jamie

 Fainuis

                                                                                 

In this, and every spring--late--the clematis

climbs her laddered trellis like the sky

is where the gravity is, like light

writes her name in dust and wind

and she must summit to see it

for herself.  Every day I watch

the way her blossoms, once a green

pod, (and before that, I imagine,

in winter,

beneath

the frost

and sod)

unlock the sarong and tip out

into the day the way a fawn may,

brand new to this perilous world.  Looking

close, the delicate petal resembles,

in vein and patience, a dragon

fly’s wing, taking all the sun and rain

of the day and night this late spring doles

to everything in my meager garden: it

makes me wonder, and don’t you

too wonder, if the bloom needs to know

it’s beautiful, like a girl sitting at her vanity

who composes herself and straightens  in the face

at footsteps, who tips her ear the way

that diminutive deer tips his little hoof and his own

little ear under the warm crown of his mother’s

belly and how her nose comes round

to lick that flicking ear, to taste

the fields of his small exile on her tongue

and breathe in her absolute

devotion, isn’t he more beautiful

in this halo, isn’t the girl more

beautiful knowing she is loved

and doesn’t the clematis bloom

with absolute abandon BECAUSE

someone has tipped into its light

to say so, to lean close to its vein

and rain soaked face and say

You are!  You just are!  And thank you.

thank goodness

thank goodness
there's always a flaw a precious Persian flaw in my ludicrous logic.

Consider the Gull

Consider the Gull

I wake with my hand held over the place of grief in my body.

“Depend on nothing,” the voice advises...

                                                                                Jane Hirshfield

                                                                                One Sand Grain Among the Others in Winter Wind

It’s boats I know nothing of though the cast off

is so much like the sound a knitter does

in their head when things they’re counting on in the dim

light of an after supper evening begin failing.  I know

somewhere back in my blood a grand or greatgrand

father of my grandmother’s fell from the crow’s nest

and was never again and I imagine the men on deck going about

the ropes and the nets and almost not

knowing and seeing a peripheral flash and thinking

gull and its close to the banks and don’t we

have to cast off near to,  hear that? and not

until its too late do they think to consider the gull

was a man falling from the sky like Icarus only

without his wings.

Those boats I watch all summer tethered

or tendered going out into the sun and coming back

after the traps are reset are solid enough

for me but only when they’re pulled up on the lawn

the way my father’s is moored in front of the living

room window.  She takes on the water

of winter like Grace O’Maley.  Queen, she was

all I’d ever want to be in a self who wasn’t

afraid of the water.  And honestly, listen, I’m not

afraid of it: graceful as she is at her most

charming and seductive, she’s more than I know going in

I could never be saved from, and no one

would ever know to look up from their work

to watch me fall or know I’d needed saving

after all.  And if Indian Red were the last color I saw

or knew, on the tip of the gull’s beak, if it got close enough for me

to see before I went beneath the one boat

and then all the rest one by one bobbing on the bay

waiting just waiting in all their paint and patched decay

I’d say is it enough? it would have to be enough.

Before Peonies

Before Peonies

Can one bear it; in nature

from seed to chaff no tragedy?

Folly comes from something---

the present, yes,

we are in it;

it’s the inflection

of things gone...

                                                Robert Lowell

                                                We Took Our Paradise 

It takes, some days, getting up for a second

cup of coffee, going down

into the variegated dark to stub

my toe the way you’d stub

the cigarette you smoked, the coal so

red on the tips of your lips

it looked like you were turning

into a peony right there in front

of me, illuminating your seasonal freckles.

When you exhale and tap it out in the wind
cinders took flight, looked like the last little bits
of snow-globe

snow moments after the shake: little

winged things drifting, purposely,

to the ground.  I was remembering how

I’d read somewhere that the ants

that attend the knuckle, the first

rising up out of the stalk on our varietal
peony, are entirely the point--they soothe the dropsy

oozing through, look how they take it

into their body drop by drop

how they gain each folded petal

to coax out into the ruddy May rain

(it’s been a kind of October spring, won’t you

agree, late days of cold wet sky, and still,

on  the mountains, a couple inches

of snow) don’t they remind you,

those little black ants, of a mother

whose cool palm soothes the baby’s fever?

Wordless the two of them, they each

stand stock still in the black

living room, both exhausted from the heat

and the way it constantly spikes

and then, almost without notice, drops.   

They won’t give up

until it’s all passed through.  They won’t

let go of this moment ever even though

years will spread wide between them

some living vigorous, some dumb

struck with fever.  They don’t and can’t know

how it will all turn.  The instinct

is to brush the bugs off, send them

to the neighbor’s patch of grass.  And if one

crawls up our shirtsleeve don’t we

break into a hilarity of some Saint Vitus

dance until it drops next to the stalk

to take up the job again, when the well-

intended’s back is turned and nature

carries on with her work?  Maybe the peony

will open in a day or maybe it will go
slow, unfolding late 

into next week.  Maybe the glossy

globes of water, aloft on the still

unopened blossom will, but slowly,

slip through just like it had planned all along,

like a coal settling into the ashes,

banked, breathing easy, alive.

After Reading Robert Lowell Asked Helen Vendler:

Appeal to the Great Spirit by Cyrus E. Dallin

After Reading Robert Lowell Asked Helen Vendler:

Why don’t they ever say what I’d like them to say?....That I am heartbreaking.                

I willed it, planned it so

when you set out for home---and to tell you all

the trials you must suffer in your palace...

Endure them all.  You must.  You have no choice.

“In silence,” she added, “you must bear a world of pain”

                                                                Homer

                                                                The Oddysey

Rather than saying Isn’t it so? I’ll say It is

so! I only have to move an it and bend the questioning

ear straight as the ram-

rod it is and has been.  The last time

I sat in to listen I doubt you

even knew I was

there--some cataract had fashioned its thin glass

statue over the lens

of your eye and to save myself from being myself I imagine

what it’s like to see through it

from your eyeball: the way maybe you crawl

to the bathroom in the dark

because if you’re on your hands

and knees you told me once

you can’t fall

off.  It’s a small space and not at all

pliable not at all accommodating to

the shape of my fingers the way

latex try to be if I am given (chosen?)

the right size.  Maybe that’s the start

of what’s wrong with all of us: we sit

down to the potter's wheel and are afraid

to touch the mud and water.  It’s enough

to grasp it with a thin partician

sterilizing our palms protecting

our fingertips from the grit that scratches

our print.  I think that

when I try to look through

your eye if I can stand

tall enough to roll the shade up (remember how the spring’s broke

the pull cord’s missing?) I might go blind

as you--and so I scratch

at the surface bare handed and it flakes

off like mica.  When the sun comes

up enough to brighten

your courtyard and it’s as sad

and broken as your interior I begin feeling myself taking

my leave.  But not before I see the head

less statues and brown grass hail-size mothballs scattered

and the acne of combat

or target practice today I don’t want to remember

which.  Is it

a graveyard?  Is it an sculptor’s castoff

of arms and faces, all those false

beginnings?  Is that what you see?  And look--

since I stepped inside

of you that exclamation has bent itself

back into an ear.  I’m not getting anywhere

near to where I want to end.  It’s a Ferris

wheel ride.  Maybe it’s enough to sit

in the question, to touch your hand

while you die for forever this time

to sit inside your lowering closures

and slip out like a possum, stuffing

my pockets with enough memory as I can carry

as I can sneak out with without

being noticed or seen, or if I’m seen

given a curt nod to be (like Judas maybe)

on my way quickly please,

and quietly.  

Fidelity

Fidelity

When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body

caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,

the glassy bowing and scraping of my will...

                                                                                Robert Lowell

                                                                                Dolphin

She was the only woman I ever knew

to hover over my illness, to cover and lift

the shades, the blankets, to shine

a flashlight to see if the measles

went down my throat, in my vagina.  I

was fever and wet bed and through it all

I don’t remember my own

mother anywhere near maybe she was busy keeping

all the rest away.  The hand laid

on my sick face was another woman’s

hand and it was rough-honest and guided,

it was scarred with the scars of her own

childrens' fevers and fits of deliriums.  For weeks

in that dark room she was there

when I woke up.  Not my mother.  Your

mother, for all her ferocity I’d know

later on in life, she raised her hand

to my cheeks in a way no one ever had

or ever has, even when the alcoholic
priest blessed me before he went away

to learn to take antabuse.  Today I recreate her

gesture:  to cool the fury or warm the shock

of others and think how God, as a man,

touched mud and made it break open the dark

vaults of blindness, or how his mother,

as a woman, stood burning in thy will be

done and her husband’s dream of falling

rocks, of running for their very lives 

into sweat and desert dust and, ultimately, after

weeks of being battered and unquenched,

this is theirs and my road to loyalty: who holds

the cold compress and hums some wordless

lulliby is, always will be,  the hero of a seven year old.
Who cools the coals of demons with one lip

on top of the other, pursed like a kiss, saying:

shhhhh,                     shhhhhh will have me

forever.  Yes, forever.