Dear Sam

Dear Sam,

In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.

                                                                    Wendell Berry
                                                                    The Sycamore

This is the seamless pass of time—how it trucks

with and in light and water, high river water

after a blast of rain all hurry hurry in the foam.

Hurry hurry on the surface.  And though trout wade

in the shade of a boulder, their gills work

a different fury altogether.  Here it is nearly

near the end of May.  The lilacs are bursting 

out with their mute purples, the birds are plugging

their babies jaws with grubs and necks of worms.  It is 

this slip from one cloud embryo to the next that's kinda

like hammock watching.  Ever lay on your back

on a hammock?  How after that initial thrill/terror

that something’s gonna give it all settles into

a pouch of netted tension and then, once it’s at

least trussed to the weight of your arms

and legs, your face is up and under the most glorious

canopy of blues.  Or suppose it’s anchored between

two trees, that hammock, and you see

oak leaves or maple leaves, or, screws bolted

to any hardwood tree, that sort of canopy.  And

then, settled, you give yourself permission to just

watch and make shapes and feel absolutely ok

that those shapes, pushed by the wind, merge

and change and create fantastic beasts

or form crosses or moons or some Japanese

character for oh who the hell would know

but those who read Japanese—and all the while

you watch from your hammock under

the tree, under the sky, the way it all goes by

but always comes back around too—just in case

you dozed a little or full-out slept—it all comes back:

the leaf of it has only drifted while you’re distracted

and it’s green and waxy, and it’s a gleam beam

you see and are glad to see.  I’ve had moments like

these, but only alone and never in a hammock.  I think I would

like to have a quiet lie-in in such suspension.  I think, too,

after all that green and blue, after the brief sleep,

I’d like a velveteen mist to glimpse what I’d brought out

to think about, to polish it like rivers gone to summer's

reduction, slow, and quiet, the way the trout we protect

are quiet, how we know they are there but we never cast

our fly by.  To keep it and know something profound

rests there while all the clouds open into days.  To be at the end

of this May and gaze in the calmer pools and not go

all wonky in the faster goings on, too fast to even

gather bugs or bottles or other stuff floating by.  Like that,

while we rest, suspended, still a few feet above the ground.

Using Under Moon Glow

Using Under Moon Glow

Pocked and pied, alive

To our eyes by spying by

Taking it all on the way

Straight to the face—even turning

Cheek casually mad—

You add at a glance fury to my

Rough iron-liquid skin my

Crimson sin hashed and hacked

Day after day in a way only

A vein can take, and only then,

Slowly.  I guess when this river’s

Seen from the hill of my memory

And in a morning without

Cloud you and I can rise

Together—liquid gravity—

And know but never speak

Or be needing to, our binding.

Like Samson’s hair rooted

To his brief cathedral.  Razors

Look then glint indifferent.

And smoke, close too close

To the tallow and wick, pool

A spoon of animal fat grained late

Slaughtered in haste, who

Coming into the room in this

Sad gathering of ghosts could

Ever find their way to the window

And look out to see you?  Lucky if

A mirror.  Luckier if a mirror,

Ancient as greening brass,

Passes back anything or can

Of love that melts and smelts

Such desire as this and cools

In an ooze only the patient

And the penitent wait for:

A hardening.  A hardening only

Like those hoofs of lambs,

Sponges in the womb, that, taking

To air quicker than lungs, go to bone

To take the earth under it without

Collapsing.  Like a God.

Why We Work

Why We Work

Young deer standing in headlights

in ditch below cliff

cars coming both ways

                                  W. S. Merwin

The day the news came about you

and the way you died we’d just made

the hay begin to make.  The sky

was quiet, the way a guy would want it,

and the field was dry enough and the sun

was come like some controlled reply—like

it has to happen this way., like once the match

was struck and held out to the fuse

there wasn’t a boot heavy enough or

a foot fast enough to make it go out,

to stop the first pause, you know the one

I’m talking about, once up and under

cover it’s as if some decision is still

being asked to be made: are you sure

you want to do this?  It’s how I imagine

pilots flying high over Hiroshima, so

high they don’t know anything but plots

and clouds maybe, but not people, not

people who are going to the barber, people

who are going to the temple, people who

are going to work going to war and do they

do.  Once the grid’s in sync with their belly

do they hover over the release button do they ask

what happens after I light this match?

Was the boy who fueled you head to toe

with some unknowable immolent as random

and homeless as he thougth you were?  Did he 

come on to you

like regret, cataract blind and out

of his mind?   I want t think that.  I want

to think I have faith enough in sanity

that her hands are clean after a good day

of honest work pushing like I do through tall grass

making hay.  It was just a foggy enough

morning—burning off by the time I let down

the first circling blades, their spin set to taking

it all down.  What was now waist high had started 

in May and now into and past July it was flat as battle-

field dead.  Quiet aside from the swallows and crows

glowing black against the gold.  Truth be told I remember

them the most—those crows—their thermal

circling.  I hated knowing a group

like that is called a murder.  I hated knowing

intelligent birds are herded into imagined facts

by men who know nothing but fear

and fire.  Noting but laying away charred

matches whose heads still glow

with their brief requirement.  Like yours had to

have.  If, sleeping, he poured from toe to brain

he held to your feet, and you, heroin asleep

only dream now, never seized another awake

it stands to it your face goes last.  We cut everything

off below the knee and the lips that touch

the dirt that made them glisten with melting

fat.  Is this why we work?  To walk out after

the cruelty of such news about you, to finger the grain

in the hay and have faith that this dying—this one—

will be put up and seasoned, bale after bale

to be chewed and regurgitated, chewed

and ruminated into anything other than bile,

that the purpose of your life was more

than a random man lighting you on fire

under that bridge and another random man

finding your smoke, your coat, your one

cast off unfillable shoe…

After the Mastectomy

After the Mastectomy

Let’s have the honest muscle

of it, soft or not.  It all depends

on how you bend to get to work:

the curve and turn from the inside bi-

cept to the slackening lack of breast, the chap

at the center after days of cold.

Let’s remember the first time it’s

touched vs. the first time you want it

to be.  The way he’d said thrust

is all need and I said no honey, it’s more

than that.  It’s something that steadies

the intention and it’s what you see, really see,

when you peek into the bucket: is it

water or stone, oats or the barren alone?

I know my spine will zip the vision in different

places along the once fast now slow nerves, knowing

what it has left to lift.  I know that zip

looses a few teeth, has a few pulled,

chips one or two,  coaxes the rest

to hold on, like a lover’s insightful stroke up under

the bone as if there were no skin.

God help me these days getting up

is barn work, is hauling the eighth set

of lobster traps before I even put my boots

on.  Is the grind of the tractor seat

or the sigh/glide of the biscuit cutter

in the dry dough before breakfast.   And although

the first time I saw him seeing me seeing him

I was afraid, after all this work it’s come

now to this: the curve now’s as straight

a line as sky, straight as the i.v. tube they use

to keep my blood company.  When, under

that breast I touched and touched

a stranger found the small round ball

I thought God I thought but that’s mine

I left it there tucked in the dark for his

lips to find.  How is it fingers, cold impotent

tips, insist its theirs and lay claim?

Shit.  I can’t say.  But not it’s gone it’s given

me more this way anyway.  It’s moon always

dark.  It’s Jupiter’s swirling cataract eye.  It’s

the tip of his tongue coming up to the ridge

of the fault and not pausing not one bit when

it’s all gone.  It just keeps on keeping on

getting going, over the leveled

chest and into a new, different, calmer

barn, where the hay’s fresh in and warm

and the shit’s cleaned and out and we’re all,

both of us, ready for a lie-in.

Taking It In Means Feeling Your Way

Taking It In Means Feeling Your Way

Speaker and hearer, words

making a passage between them,

begin a community.

                                    Wendell Berry

                                    “The Handing Down”

But no shoes of course,

nothing with strings—more like they give

slippers.  Shit, most things about this

cell is cliché except how the way

through each bar in the window

a shaft of light comes right

up to my fingertips and then

past them, like warm dry water,

and then past me entirely, and then

stunted or just put out all

together, or depending on the time

of day,  crawls down behind

the bed, a deep creep,

a Quasimodo grope for the bell

rope, the breast feather ends

of it tuff on his cheek.  Like my love’s

braid end on my lips just before I came in-

side.  See where one shaft of light

will take you?  If you listen close

the poet said you could hear

each flake of dust collide before they settle

forever together on the floor

in the corner.  About as close

as anything will ever get in here

and as mute as a barefoot hunchback

pulling that rope and that pause before, 
before the clapper and the iron and the weight
strike each other like the planned impact

and the sound hasn't made it out yet,
it's still inside his tendons, buzzing
like blind things hitting the unfamiliar.

aging

Aging

Is aging is the length of time it takes

to get from the belfry of your own heart

to its very threshing floor (or is it

the other way ‘round?) to find

the fix there?

Is it’s height, the measure

of stacked bales or casks, that each year

are a thicker pick

                                (if the crop’s been good)

and it’s depth, a darker stilling

                                (if the sugar’s sweet-bitter

                                rock gone sand-granular)?

Could be too those lean times, a scale-rusting

empty sack times, are lips pouting

out of the pile flaccid and gray and waiting

like any two year old baby to be inflated

with praise and a hand up after a fall. 

Or it could be too that the measure of all

of this is the brain unfurling its fist

slowly, after impact, after blast trauma, after

soaking it all in like charred oak barrels do to

draw the whiskey  (and then later, decades,

the wine…) the liquor that stores it

in the cooling barn of your maturity.  And from

time to time don't we uncork it and damn

does that dram go down slow as liquid

gold and doesn’t it guild every agony

every pain every delirious joy

it was distilled from.  Every fall,

when the crop’s come in, and the choices

are made about the grain

                each to their grade 

                fire and dry

                each to their crush or grind

                will either come to this amber

                sap of resined life  
                or will go to the miller
                to rub between two wheels
                high-polished as a fairy mirror
                

                or will go to the silage
                to be poked about and through

                by the noses and bare toes

                of rats who are so so much

                like our own at times

                they don’t know, being blind,

                it’s worth they’re shitting on

                precious worth scattered

                on the threshold floor, worth

                we can only see from the precipice

                of our crumbling aging belfry.

How to Measure a Near Quarter of a Century

How to Measure a Near Quarter

of a Century

The room of love is another world.

You go there wearing no watch,

watching no clock.  It is the world

without end, so small that two

people can hold it in their arms,

and yet it is bigger than worlds

on worlds…

                        Hannah Coulter

                        Wendell Berry

What time doesn’t measure, or can’t:

It measures the length of day and dark

but not the depth of it, how a child

tracing a line in the sand is later

plotting a house then a lot for ash

and bone a whole four hours

from size to open to close.

It measures this the last twenty five years

we walked in then out on each other

before and while we were married, it levels

your glance with a carpenter’s L

and tries to tell us, like an old house settled,

of the discrepancy between

the front of the door to the back—inches!

difference, and how for the length

of time we were married we accepted-

adapted to the slant until one day (I’ll say

it was you but we both had our pants

down) the grip relaxed and it was

and still is a letting go.  And see

that’s not measurable either, even instruments

as mark, needle and dark, wave after wave

of shock once the cliff (before it falls)

opens its mouth, parts its strong mossy

lips and kisses and gropes and buggers 

in every warning it can raise and see, I fell

in and to save yourself you unhanded me 

and let go miles and miles and miles

before I hit bottom.  I don’t blame you.

Even you didn’t know who you were.  Still,

in every dream I have of you, the ten years

we knew and ploughed and knew some more

were blunt shovels, toys in a dirt

pile.  Dented buckets.  Dented cars.  Scabs

and scars and under the skin ruptured blood.

It’s never been wiped away or cleaned. 

Abandoned, we turned our backs.  It’s still

there when I look.  Still smells the same,

sounds the same, tastes the same.  But what’s

unmeasureable, in all that turning and walking

away is the grip of aching to let go.

To let go and watch you watch me walk

up to you in my sleep and see how

you shift in your chair and clear your throat

and, rising, crack your spine.  It etches

its seismograph tack, its thin ink line, deep

into this still darkening dark, and I marvel,

don’t you marvel, that the distance between

you and me, these last thirteen years

we haven’t seen each other, is so close, in this 

dream, it’s so close it’s never ever undreamed.

contraband:

contraband:

it’s so blurred I don’t know I dropped

in that flat black tray at the caged-

in pane the grid glass the jack-

ass (whose latex-gloved thumbs

touched mine when I laid it all

down) a truck key maybe and he

grinned bastard licked his lips

and grinned and hung the ring

up in the air by his other thumb and said: this

pricked your balls didn’t it boy

and they tinked in the tray again

like nickels I do remember that

the dull plug enough snuffed

sound I used to drop ‘em again

just to make sure I had two

and that thumb fucker up so far

I can’t hide shit and it’s that

not the rest not the rest not his

loud mouth I legit get rigged he’s

up my ass and every time I tighten

my jaw he squeezes: keys he’ll say

thirty years he’ll say and I stay

bent my ankles rimmed red by my own

fists lookie lookie we got a packer

he says my first day in no way no way

I shake my head I back away no way

I dropped that in the gray

snow when I fumbled out of my folded

over ford just after I heard son, son are you

alright son?

Just Talk

Just Talk

He said:

you make it in here same as you make it

out there only the clothes are different have been

pissed and shit in by someone else you never would

have called your brother or cousin or uncle or any

blood running up and through from the toe

to the brain.

I said:

no it don’t start there, not at the

toe, it gets there from the start in the dark

behind bars under all my skin and I’m not just talking

ribs and scapulas I’m talking like there’s rivers

in there and if my head pounds the way

my heart does when the only way through a flood

is over a collapsing bridge you go, shit you go

and he said:

yeah, toe first, and if if if it holds you ease down maybe,

maybe to the heel and if tried and firm it’s the foot

you’ve left behind you’ve got to mind

and when you lift it, when all the weight’s

on that one foot you put down

when it holds you and you hold your breath

it’s that moment: one ground and one air

and I said

yeah and the tension wires stretching in the twisted

wind you really right there you really have to say I’m going

it’s rising, this water’s rising and what’s behind me

is this dry prison cell and it may be all I need

to live through this flood but Jesus I’ll tell you

the river, man, it is in my skin, it is choked

to the mouth

and we both said:

with my old house, and when

I watch my dirty kitchen dishes float by,

when I watch beds float by, rumpled with fuck

knows what I’m risking.  I’m stepping full down

on the bridge even if those wires scream and the sleet

boils and it’s a wet and lamenting dark on the other side.

I’m stepping.

Empty is a Dead Bird's Throat

Empty is a Dead Bird’s Throat, Her Song Spun Undone  on a Branch Above Her Young

Sometimes, seeing is more than open-

eyed leaning first slow to the left

then slow to the right.  It’s breathing

shallow, shallow, shallow, deep

the way water suddenly is after

you see silt and silt and silt

and then nothing but a dark throat

getting thick, getting tight

as you sink.  This is the kind

of drowning, waves in climb then decline,

that's like hot hair rising, and only 

ever smelled and never seen until

the heat has gone up under it all

to ignight the wax-fat and there is absolutely

no way out of the smoke.  When you’re finally

found you’re having as perfect a sleep

as you’ll ever have.  Sad you can't say

what you saw that spooked

you first, what stunned you into

not moving at all until the moving

was the only thing done for you

because it all has you now, as they say,

by the throat: one day you’ll be laying

up looking into the corner of the door

jamb and you’ll see some spider’s

got busy with what little traffic

there is here and the web she’s built

is tense and beyond itself pretty

and you know, as soft an eye as you got

you could follow that web until the second

coming, until trumpets, until the field

you’d waited after that accident opens up and all the dead

rise first just like they taught you

in Sunday School.  Here, now, you see

there’s as big an egg sack as you’ve

ever noticed.  But instead of Jesus

it’s third grade and a pig and a buttermilk

bath: a wash of all the sins any back

can carry and yet be glad to be rid of.

This web—straight from the back-

side to the corner, corner to corner, is

suspended (it seems, as you sit) in air

the way your feet were after a long time sitting,

touching nothing solid, after you rolled

straight over her, and, once out, looked back

at the red and cracked glass and its perfect

circle in the middle.  And the concussion

under your skull wasn’t blurring

what you could see but instead dampening

sound, like someone had come with a bell-

jar and you were watching it all

form patterns on the inside.  See it but not hear

it.  Breathe it but not be singed by it.  Hot

gall all around and you, finally,

pounding and pounding until the glass,

like the windshield, like the car

in the road, is cracked wide open

and all the spiders, tight in their little

sack of life, spill out of the throat

of the dead and get on getting gone.

Breaking Ground

Breaking Ground

As solid as November ever is

to dig a grave today means

freeing the bucket and shovel

of October’s dwindling green,

it means greasing the entry

of each squeak going over

to murmur, the hum I’ve come

to remember of nuns under

the summer maples, how they

rumble, not through their mouth

but down into their hips

and thighs and the dark skies

of dirt.  My machine is needed

like this.  The old girl up the road

showed me just last week

when we walked past the white

birch line I’d just cut some of.

She showed me invisibly, with

a stroke curled fist, and deeper

than if she’d had a pickax. 

I’ve dug enough private graves,

always surveyed by the owner,

to know as we both walk back

to the house it won’t be long

now—I’d best tool up

that temperamental bucket.  And so.

Open and new, the can of grease.

Clean as can be bare hands.

Scoop like Crisco into biscuit dough.

Slap against the gleam of the silver

lift unsheathed.  Rub until that can

is by God empty.  Because listen:

it’s ok to whine in the woods

and get mired and cough and spit

and shit but this—when you go up

that drive this time—when the man

of the house is out to the under-

taker to order the prettiest urn a man

can bury (and he’ll be gone a while,

but don’t wait) go slow and brace

yourself.  Raise the fork and let her go

into the froze ground without

a buck or a sound.