What the Seeing Think They See

What the Seeing Think They See

As fragile as it is, it’s glass that,

even though it has the most

to lose being broken

protects us the most as we look

out during the rise and decline

of our day to day, hour by hour

(yes, for some, the dying

or the about to be

born, say) second

by second lives.  How, as sun

rises above this stand of river

pines or that line of cove

spruce we watch the water pull

herself up like pants after a long

time off or if not off at least below

the knee, the spring life plea

purged (for now) and the cuffs

like leg irons chuff and rattle

as the sexed wander off to meet

the tide and try to beat it.  Don’t we,

looking through the glassed-in view

of our own lives, corneas pupils

irises the broad sclera, feel somewhat 

apart from or even above it 

all, watching what comes and goes 

without feeling

it on our cheek or hearing the rut

and grunt and don’t we look partly

away, piqued all the while saying

not me, not me?  Who first,

and who can say, is going to break

the glass?  The watched or

the watcher?  Are the watched too?

in some way, (maybe even sneakier

because of the fee) voyeurs, giving

their thrust their pent up sarcophagi 

sweating ll for the audience?

I mean listen, authenticity alone

is at stake.  We make the most

of our glass no matter what side

of it we stand on, even when some

anonymous bird, shunted by the sun’s

glare, sees nothing and at her best

possible speed flies straight into a wall

of air breast first and plunges

as far down as the ground can go. And

having met so, this glass spreads the way

webs spread when a body just begins

to fall or be shoved through them: 

they stretch and hold on, stretch 

and hold.  And the light that falls

through, beginning at once to be 

blotted by a coat 

pocket or lip is Noah on his boat,

dry land all around, the immensity

of a blue too much blue, way glass has

of keeping it, secretly, briefly, in the 

gasses of the between

               

A Leap Year Day

A Leap Year Day

                Open the hurt locker

                and see what there is of knives

                and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn…

                                                                Brian Turner

                                                                “The Hurt Locker”

Next year today will be the last day

of this month.  And for the next three

years.  But then another one more

day in February.  For balance I suppose—

someone somewhere maybe a lot of

someones in a lot of somewheres,

what for growing things in neat

little rows and boxes?  food and low

income row houses? 

I don’t know.  I don’t care really

and I suppose most days go like that

but tomorrow, the here and now is 

it means I got

one more day in this month, here

in this tiny room to shut my mouth

to walk solo, slide when the lights go

on and the door clicks the lock lets

loose.  And you know I bet that’s the one

noise I’m taking out of here, I bet

when I’m fifty something  a little

click will make me stiff, whatever

I’m doing I’ll stop, the way I’ve seen

guys in movies stop before they step 

down on solid ground and then just 

like that the whole world

is in the sole of his left boot stop, 

like in that movie,

Hurt Locker, remember?  I watched it

before I came in no shit it has got to be

the best movie I’ve seen

in a long time though right now

I’m thinking about nothing,

nothing in particular but that click

when something’s coming and closing to

and I’m just waiting in the in/between of it

and the dust the skin of the guys

who were in here before I was and left

whatever it is of themselves, when they 

scratched their balls or 

their heads, or the spaces there are 

between them and one last

mother-fucking gloriously mundane

day.

Finding a Dr. Swets American Beverage Bottle Empty and Whole

Finding a Dr. Swets American Beverage Bottle Empty and Whole

The tiny skeleton…

remembers the falter of engines,

a cry without

answer, the long dying

into

and out of the sea.

                                                Donald Hall

                                                The Blue Wing

I pick up scraps of glass and say they’re

beautiful.   But only if the edges are worn easy,

and forgiving them if they have a lip especially or a letter,

if (because I need an imagination for this) when I took

to the sea I’d be looking into

settling down here again in a place that claims

great heaps of people and land without partial

prejudice.  It breaks everything against the cliffs

like ships at war.  I don’t take it up,

though later I wonder, should I

have, the whole hazy with age and tumble

bottle of Dr. Swets American Beverage.  I walk out

instead into the tide where the living things

are.  I walk out into the sunrise.  I walk out

where men and women and children have

died.  Somehow though I’m never close

enough to that lighthouse no one can ever touch unless

they’re at the year’s lowest tides.  I’ve always wanted

to lay my hand against her, maybe even

my cheek.  I’ve always wanted to stay off

the shock of getting stuck out there and no way

back on foot.  She saves most people, right? The light-

house?  Those going by in their fog-choked boats,

ignoring her, though maybe that’s the whole

point.  I want to walk out far enough,

to be able to, and taste the corroded iron

and hope if it even comes close, it's what I want

or what I think I need.  I don’t know.  And I won’t

this year.  Instead, I push back at the sand and noiseless

waves and find a favored three or four sand dollars—

and somehow taking them home living and unbroken

is the only thing that matters—all that walking out

and holding my own, past the clammers and that

one antique bottle I could’ve sold for fifteen

bucks in the Clutter Shop, past the battered lobster

trap with all her catch gone out of her, past the salt

marsh the Passamaquoddy come to

when their baskets need grass (South Lubec’s the best

stretch of beach for that) past he Ferguson boy’s last

breath in the black dark, his body heaving to days

and days later… scraps of them all.  Worn by what’s struck

them, licking them clean only after they’re broke

open or left whole but hollow like the bottle, like that Hopper-

painting-sky changing behind me, like the sand dollar

dying in my inner pocket while I outwalk the tide 

that's always behind me but not that far, no, not that

far. 

And It Is Written

half moon reflecting

And It Is Written: 

                The

Least Among Them:  

                Small Stones

Her one worried memory at hands she takes

the natural breaks in stones and places

them here here edge to middle to make

a solid mobile without a string.  Once,

above her son’s crib, she turned the wings

of the music box and watched the plush

toys twirl in the absence of his nap in

the absence of him then and ever after.

She’ll never again say that nothing’s

solid.  Not the water we boil soon solid cold

in the dog’s water bowl, not the stall

in the barn where in a different spring the un-

restrained body of the bull surging into his yearn

not the hole in the stall wall all bawl spit and horn

not the lawn on an October morning her

hoarfrost her rough tongue not the rocking

chair where she sang her baby her baby after

tomato picking before not after the frost after

apples after a sudden no breath at all and never

again and dust she comes to this and that

place where she’d've taken her baby she follows

the natural breaks and makes his grave day

after day because going up like the swell

of breath is only momentary coming down

six months old or twenty two or seventy

nine why this making is in the blood and stone

erecting it in the middle of a girl’s earthwomb

only eventually it all comes down what hour

what day the breaking when the boy’s mobile

wound up and when it wound down

still, birth

Still, Birth 

For they were deep in the earth and what is possible took hold

                                                                                                Orpheus and Eurydice

                                                                                                Jorie Grahm

Something of you has to die to go down that far

into the basalt of a dust so dark so thick it numbs

the lungs, it presses on the back of the tongue

like drying lava in the throat of those who don’t remember

or know enough to close their mouths.  I’m in

my first and really my only labor and all

the months coming up to it, the swell of my belly so

white and tight it reminds me of an antelope

in mid flight where all that could be

seen was so hollow it was sahara camouflage.

and once my son’s ball of a hand brought itself

across the sky of his red room as if to say LOOK!

LOOK AT ALL THIS!   IT’S GOING TO BE TOUGH TO GIVE

IT ALL UP.  And it was.   It was tough.  Once it all

started to liquefy and stream out the only possible

end of the line I was made to lay down to rest

at the lip of it and the Orpheus in me

with my strings and winding sheet set about

to seduce the hounds of hell to let me

pass.  They growled and rippled against their ribs

and stood up on end and pawed and clawed and lapped

at, at, at, the salt and water at the song of it seeping

between my knees and rising off the lyre and finally I walked on in 

and I walked for hours, hours among and around cables

of veins and caves of all the others, babies who were

almost born, all the tried and tired who were the shades

of who would make a stay of it for ever and ever, those

unborn unformed babies (a man I’d rather not name made

one for me and he bled out of me in a public rest-

room and I knew he'd never have claimed him made

that way and razed and Fuck he tried and I was

a long time walking by, a long long time seeing 

and walking by my winding sheet my lyre my throat closing

to only the highest notes so when I arrived

at the foot of my own bed with all my dead one

was rising up one was loitering one was listening

one was asking me one was dying one was only no one

and never would be and I had a hard time deciphering

the one who wanted to be.  Maybe it was my turning

away maybe I’d come into the wrong grotto and I heard

WAIT! WAIT! WAIT! YES, WAIT!

Orpheus was told not to turn around.  It was his only

Rule.  And he wanted to he loved so much he couldn’t

resist.  His Eurydice followed voiceless as a shadow.

If only he’d watched that shadow the whole way out.

if only he’d read about Medusa.  If only he didn’t need

to confirm the flesh.  If only he’d stepped

out into the light and been blinded so that when

he did turn back he couldn’t see.  He could pour himself

down the hollow of her pupil and feel the mouth

of the cave filled all at once and all at once not empty out.

Having a baby is like this, don’t you think?  Of going

ax and shovel into the mine, of digging and lifting

and holding the light to the vein the vein that goes

back and back and back and forward and forward?  The wax

in the light in the fist is thick.  The wick is tough as cat-

gut, it is thick with song and when you come to the end?

Listen, it changes.  Some come to draw breath.

Some come oh some come to the edge and stay

still.  They’ve been seen and suddenly they can’t

breathe.  They irradiate their custom’s cold blue.  They are

held dead as hair.  They are beautiful but can’t be

taken.  And Orpheus, before he goes mad, drops

his winding sheet and goes out ahead of it all, naked,

singing, singing, the cave mouth closing over him

like an eclipse on an elliptical strip.  A Mobius. 

Planning Ahead,

Planning Ahead,

on Saturday we’ll take the kids

apple picking—it’s early

enough in the season, maybe we’ll be able

to go a few times—into the orchard’s ancient

as cemeteries leaning limbs that  year after year bring us

back to capture what’s not fallen

on the floor of grass at the base of the tree.  We’ve raised

our children this way: to wait

for the sweetness to begin to rise to fight

off that dry meat a sometimes bitter

lingering a sometimes, after the pickling

spices and the alum, I lick finger-

tips and I purse my lips—my grandmother

once told me it was good

for canker sores, alum.   Sometimes I’d

dip my finger in the can, and the wet tip of it

would pull up the white gumpowder, and singe

the open ulcer and grind my teeth.  I don’t

know if it worked but it was enough I trusted

her and remedies tell me aren’t supposed

to be sweet to the edge of deceit if they were

we’d overmedicate instead of dose we’d know

eating all the Courtland’s we can hold is

our only preservation in the glimpse of Eden

we bring our feet to each fall.  I don’t know

the orchard the way the keeper does—But I

know he’s already planning ahead to spring

and several springs, new ground new trees,

the elderly crones slowly going, but so so slowly

and in the heartwood like a grit incased in an oyster’s

wet shellac.  Even if he’s getting on and letting his son’s

son drive the tractor that pulls the trailer

with mounds of hay while other kids reach and bite

and walk in and out of a September October late

late morning early afternoon.  It’s early yet

in the season.  I want to go

this Saturday.  And too another and another.  My

brine’s been boiled for the pickles already.  Let’s

plan on apple butter, let’s plan on summer

being in our mouths in the winter in a blizzard

lets open it to cramp our jaws just by lifting

its lid and putting it under our nose.  Lets!

Today If I Could

Today if I could

I’d lay the palm of my hand

against the face of the dog

who bit me savagely

when I was four

today if his teeth in their yellow’d

vein

if his tongue could taste something other

than blood if I understood why

his tail moved the way it did maybe I’d be

able to move away

in time maybe later we could’ve been

friends right? big as me we'd've seen

people fall down drunk in front

of us and hold their broken bones we'd've

watched them back

out of the driveway without

looking we'd've seen the animals limp

to the grass in the ditches

and stay there and not wait a

day or day after day waiting

for the school bus the dead dog

in the ditch because it wasn’t

us not that day it wasn’t if I could

lay the palm of my hand

against the chest of this Tramp

and take his heart-

beat into me

and ease it like I’ve seen

surgeons ease the heart drawn out

to the open and coax and rub it like a new 

baby being 

born like a favorite

grandmother dying if I could

look into his dreams of that day he was

a sweet dog I know he didn’t mean

it lunging after backing up

and lunging and backing up and rough

and sunk into my face and the putrid

breath

the shit in piles all around the mud

puddles no house only a rumpled rough Army

blanket moth holes bored to death

holes hot August on the edge

of the blueberry  

field if I could

lay down with him and take it

again take it so he’d be a happy dog finally

I would

My Friend's Father Has Passed Away

My Friend's Father Has Passed Away 

For Maria

Lately, at the Shaker Village in New Gloucester

Maine, the way looking ahead was looking back

like how a white door on the clapboard house

was off plumb how the sunk granite step left

one foot heavier in the rise up how the twelve

panes of glass grasped what was in back

of me: all red/black barn and blue/white

sky and the defying of it all the cumulus

rolling roiling and back to the rub in the middle

of the step the work of all those going

into prayer all those courting God touching

their lips to the lintel before they clear

the threshold completely a warm pain

in their pocket: a newly picked

from the tree beside the meeting house

a pair of pears heating their palm and their hip yes

lately at Shaker Village in New Gloucester

Maine, even the seeds of all that is unseen 

are sown. 

If You Have a Lazy Eye

the rise

If You Have a Lazy Eye

have you ever noticed when you focus

on resting the eye in the socket

looking down at nothing

or something the grain in the wood

the desk is made of say

waves in some places feathers

in others, a whole grove of trees I

think may have been laid

flat to create this place where I lean

my elbows every day where I drink enough

to start my day but its not enough

never to sit long enough then be

to be not the sudden shock time’s

betting bald and still

there are towels to wash (on with the bleach

but whose blood and why) and

yesterdays jeans and fleece, the lot got off

to wash at two a.m. before I sit

here before I lean into David

Whyte and Victor Hugo and William

Faulkner and Edgar Lee Masters

and Henry David Thoreau and Donald

Hall and shit where are the women

(oh but don’t you worry, I’m saying

Dickinson I’m saying Dinesen I’m saying

Arundhati Roy I'm saying Anna

Akhmatova) and I want

to remember something they said

                (which they?)

I want to remember now but this

lazy eye blurs now like milk thin ok

but enough to plug the duct to rub

and rub and rub and rest

I say what did they say I saw it

didn’t you see it isn’t it cold

right now I’m distracted by my feet

I brought the space heater up from the base-

ment I’m so much cold and have a knit

hat on and I dreamed I ran out of gas

as we rounded a tight corner and it was

a half a mile back to the gas station

and I said I’d go alone

and I got lost and someone pointed

through a gate at a horizon and I started

to walk there and I woke up wondering but

how was I going to carry

that gas in my hands? and let me just stop

in here and buy a coat I’m going to get cold

going that last half mile through

the trees through the gate the waves

the feathers the pitch 

of the sea increasing

coming to white each crested lip

an old man’s mustache from where I’m sitting

staring and resting this goddam lazy eye.
and who, because the frost on the window
reminds me i wanted to know and remember
drew in the attic at the Old Manse
and why those particular things
a bee a rat a lady they'll stay
until the sun rises and pulls them down
(my images aren't safe, but thankfully theirs are)
into the caulking that's cracked that's failed
but it's all we've got to get us through
to get us into but through what
and into what I want to know and really

who can say?