seeing

Seeing

Maybe we should spend more time in the ought-to-know places

in our brains, the way just a couple of seconds ago I saw a star

in the sky coming bright with sun and then all the sudden while I’m still

looking it’s gone out.  But it hasn’t.  I ought to know it hasn’t.  The sun’s

coming up is all.  Isn’t it still there and wouldn’t I see it if I put money

down on a good telescope whose truth never runs off to blind you,

like the ones whose poles yawn for quarters and when the tongue’s

plugged and the wheel’s spun we tip our faces to the rent by the second

binoculars and curse ourselves that it takes too long to pan the sky

to rest one more second on that desired site, a star for me, but maybe

a seal for my daughter, and a moored boat for her father who knows

just where to look, who doesn’t need to spend the 25 cents, who turns

his pockets inside out for her to see and see and see the whisker’d snout,

the liquid glint in the eyes, the slip and glide and rise through the incoming

outgoing tide, her mourning they’ve gone forever when the shutter

closes, the glee when they come back after she’s fed the meter again

It's Settled Then.

  

It’s Settled Then.

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air---

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.

                                Robert Lowell

                                Skunk Hour

But only on the rim where the dust butts

up against the edge of the doily whose thin blue

border was crocheted in the early evening

hours by my grandmother.  Now, her dust, or ashes,

have been laid--to rest? who can know--only of

what all’s been sifted of her and poured

into a pink (pretty I have to say, she’d’ve

liked it) box.  I have no aversion to dust

only that it’s always an always, a con-

stant falling thing we breathe, that we

settle on, that settles on us.  It’s all our days

and our ways of getting there.  I have some

of my friend Roger’s library and I know when I open

one of the chosen he’s there and all the people

who walked through his small cabin on their way

to the bathroom after their obligation of two

or three Seagram’s right?  What he used

to drink?  With what? club soda?  But.  Next

year he’ll have been gone ten years. His

ashes scattered, some in a little paper boat

I made with a poem he wrote years ago about

a boy and girl being turned loose from the furnace,

from “the distance from the tiny/hateful

meagerness of our origins” and he floated

finally, on the water, with one button in his bone

and ash.  Oh if I’d’ve known it was appropriate

I would’ve plucked that button up and taken it

home with me even though it never could open

or close anything ever again.  Maybe though it would

justify the lazy way I let all this dust settle

around me and wait sometimes months

before I take it all up into a cloth to wash

to send finally out of the house.  Mostly I’m

content to let it rest, my own little burial ground,

like my grandmother’s handiwork draped over

dressers and nightstands--to wake up next to it

to sleep next to it--to breathe where they have

breathed and maybe this is all the closure (at

the moment anyhow) I need.

Chasing After Monet's Ghosts

Chasing After Monet’s Ghosts

And so.

I go out among them in all

mists of light or dim

                (even if I never leave

                our house for want

                or can’t) spreading

the blanket

in the best

I- can- lie- down- on

and- talk- about- it- ground:

the Jesus moments of my day,

                how coming up

                to the dammed

                pond when it was all blossom

                and Monet, every pad and lily

                lifting and lowering in the wind like a Palm Sunday venerate,

thinking how

                if I were more

                trusting than the apostle Peter

                I could’ve walked on it all but never need to

                not touch sniff or lick

                                the water or the marsh bird’s dart, --or

                                coming on the kill site later (because this reminds me)

                                of a scattering of blue jay feathers

                                and collecting them one after the other

                                smoothing them against the broken shaft

                                after their chaos of letting off (what led it?) the wing

                                or breast, collecting them with that mix

                                of grief and gladness we’re supposed

                                to get when something is fed,

                                when what’s left is the scrapped pallet

                                of a god coming on

                                through the brush of a hard packed path

                                just to see who

                                would notice.  Beaver.  Maybe

                                we see them, or think we do, and the roads

                                their noses make when they take to

                                the water above their lodge

                                how naturally all the lilies part

                                maybe for good if the wind, if the current,

                                if the root to the pond floor is pulled loose...

I think just at this moment it’s all about old scrapes

of beavers near the lilies and stubs

of trees all lean and quiet in their rot

in the water, how simple it is

                here on solid ground

                and mud in some spots

                I slough through

                to bring home on the bottom

                of my shoes, shoes I kick off

                absently, thinking nothing of

                that mud being the last scene

                or the first

                of some lovers kiss or fist

                or how that jay may have gone down

                in hawk sound while the beaver glided through,

                that absent beaver and the long dead

                Monet who would’ve walked  

                in a place like this and wet his lips

                and glide his hand across the bodice

    of his cloth and been suspended on the water

    it would become, and he

                never would have sunk

                but instead slipped his fingers in

                to the mud and rested them there against the hinges

                of the lilies, kept them

                until they were drawn and puckered

                only pulling them out unwillingly

                and only after they were up to the cuff in cold

                revolt and rancid muck and slime.

               

Lying In

Lying In

Scars have the strange power to remind us

that our past is real.  The events that caused

them can never be forgotten.

                                                                All the Pretty Horses

                                                                Cormac McCarthy

Afterwards, we take our rest anyway we can

get it: exhausted as nostalgia and grit mixed

in a highball glass, swallowed with false

wit and bravery, believing it all like no one’s

business, staking the claim and rubbing

ourselves off like beads at benediction

our lips and tongue rote thick, our drifting

to wind up at another station different

than our favorite saddest one to know it all

moved on without us.  We shouldn’t sleep

during devotions.  I think how much different

it is to stand in the dim window light

of the bedroom night after night, to listen

to the wind blow the thick and winter-ripped

plastic against the window frame, the solid

crinkle the only thing against the long broke

storm windows, and the sound, it’s like

a sleeping bag I’d’ve had once  and kept

because it reminded me someone took me

seriously when we slept together in it

the inside lined with flannel the outside

a loud polyester something or other

I’ll have to look up the name of but always

think of racecar drivers or windbreakers

a sailor might wear all billowing out in

the wind, arms straight out the boom.  It’s been

years now but I found that sleeping bag

in the basement and if it had been

metal it would never have opened, and as it was

the zipper was corroded, somewhere down 

the line it was missing teeth and the seams, oh

but couldn’t they just say it all with the strain

of coming loose: he’d crawled in one night

while somewhere else in the world a girl

unhooked her bra for herself and let it fall

to the floor of an old bedroom and it was

only her not even a moon and the house shook

and in the cellar some small animal

nosed the bait-plate and moved on

without taking it and got the hell out before, as it

would happen sooner than you know could

imagine, the whole house went up in flames, the room,

the sleeping bag,  coming up for air only

when nostalgia, a naked man, crawls out

but not before kissing her, no, not before that.

Messenger

Messenger

running the pages of that new book

                of poems under my finger I’m sounding

                like a horse blowing through her teeth when she smells

                the shadow creep from up behind her

                like (second time up and down) a cat in a window watching

                the head of a jay in the dapple birch stand

                and too, (slowing) a friend pulling in while I’m bathing with the window

                                open or pouring coffee or turning on

                                the news and she comes to me

                                before I can hear it anonymously but I don’t know what

                                I don’t know so I hear the tires

                                slow I hear a bird fly low all sift and scissor

                                I hear far enough I can only commit to

        a guest a pause in the water and take a minute

                just a minute

                to remember is the tide is going

                out or coming in?