Triggers: Still Reading Your Books

Triggers:
Still Reading Your Books

I went ahead and had the children,

the life of ease and faithfulness, the

palm and the breast, every millimeter of delight in the body,

took it all without you as if

in taking it after all I could most

honor you.

                                                Cambridge Elegy

                                                Sharon Olds

Reading through you

            line by line spine by spine

binding after binding

it’s quick sometimes like a smear

on his cuff after he’d stuffed

it all right in
to the elbow

into the front of my pants

in the kitchen while the raw

wings and legs and thighs

spread their wide plucked out lives
clean as new skin

in the roasting pan.

Almost free of this life,

this is their one final leap,

to be eaten after they’re laid

down, eaten now because

they’d missed the egg stage,

the shitty in the nest and cooling

off stage and risking it, (she I’m saying)

because there’d been foxes

and coons in the henhouse. It's
the last straw, it will see her
gone after he rolled

over in bed and grasped that soap

opera cliché of empty

sheets: there is nothing left

to do but pull them up

to his mouth and nose and breathe.

It’s fresh clean and bleach

and she’s free as bubbles

and sunshine.

When your books finally came

                to me like you said they would

                I was surprised at how few

                there were because I’d remembered

                a whole library of spines

                carefully organized by theme

                on the shelves you’d built

                that were so sturdy

                they could have been the bed

                we’d made to love and wrecked

                if we had ever made a bed to love and wreck.

                But it wasn’t like that for us--

                two married people who’d sworn other aliances:

                                you to a lovely (after the first harpy

                                                but the sex was great you’d said

                                                after you’d known me for years,

                                                anytime I wanted a piece

                                                of ass…and you apologized

                                                like you wanted me to see

                                                the gallant you you’d become

                                                but I could guess and I did but

                                                tenderly at first, the way a nurse

                                                would move an elbow with

                                                the same curtesy as she would

                                                your testicles after your bath

                                                after your first stroke

                                me to a boy really (a house cat you’d called

                                                him) (but not my first boy

                                                and the sex with him was dirty was

                                                a cesspool I’d said after I’d known you

                                                for years and after that I could tell

                                                you wanted to

                                                show me it wasn’t all like thighs

                                                spread wider than the sky

                                                his flight coming in but deliberately

            changing course without telling me

            and for a while your quiet  

                                (because I’d said I was days
                                alone in my room, there was a lot

                                of blood and shit

        like that and after that…well)

was the only balm I would have

needed to get me to walk straight

again if you’d been there then---

So now when I’m reading 

                your copy of Sharon Old’s The Gold

                Cell I notice your highlights and those

                you want to come back to later on and they’re

                the poems that remember

                Firsts:      First Boyfriend

                                First Sex

                                First Love

                And now, because I know more

                about sex and dying and find it appropriate

                                an Elegy.

After all, where else is there to land

                after you fall, after the stars go out

                after they’ve been stirred from the bottom

                of their cell and played

                up and up and up and maybe

                they won’t make it maybe

                they stand at the bottom of those stairs

                like you did

                and feel the bottom rise up

                and the top fall down

                and the squeeze of the veins

                and the quickening  

                and the ecstasy after all these

                                celibate years

                coming alive while all you can do now

                                is die.

And these few books I keep repeat us

                somehow, even after your ten years gone:

                                every time I open one I smell:

                                                your mouth after three whiskeys and a big cigar

                                                the breakfast you cooked for me

                                                when I told you about the repeated sodomies

                                                and the pine tree sweat falling on us

                                                while we walk and walk deeper and deeper

                                                we walk.

Clay Baby

Clay Baby

The delicate clay baby has your thumbprint

under the chin, its hair and eyes are fingernail

thin.  When you brought it to me, cupped

in the palm of your hand I thought you just

wanted me to see.  You’d been working

at the dining room table all afternoon, rolling

and squeezing, the ball of the head flat

enough into the pine so it didn’t roll, and it’s

a wonder it came up like it did without breaking

thin as it was in spots.  It’s great clay you’d said, it doesn’t

dry out.  And so you gave it to me, the face

an eerie mirror, and let me feel and look.  Solid

and soft.  The wonder of your thumbs

are all through it: calf muscle, cheekbones,

and look, an all the way around the waist sweater-

cuff, tucked at the hips and ribbed, pleated.  Even

up to the chin, John Lennon in a turtleneck you said.  He is

fabulous I said and handed him back--are you going

to fold him up and roll him up and take

his snake arms (oh, look at that, toast

crumbs on his bum) and that made you laugh, but

in all seriousness you said He’s for you Mama.

And you flounced away like any God of Clay would

while I held your tender baby who I have to say

and may tell you later resembles the Bog

Men sunk thousands of years in the peat

sod gone all leather black, a badass in the mire.

I mean, the turtleneck!  Peel it back, lift it up,

and I bet the hips and ribs are if nothing else

copper bone.  The locked jaw of the last crone.

But not your man, no not your man.  He’s got me

loving ugly, and not the cliché ugly, but the under-

appreciated ignored subtlety of ugly, homely

let's say because of the way

this ankle bone is as noble as the chin, his

petroleum black skin he’s in and been made of is ageless

in the palms of your hands, and could speak

and think the most crazy wild bewitching things but

just doesn’t need to because being made

was enough.  Is enough.  Shaped and unbetrayed, 

breathed on, kept warm in a turtleneck sweater! with thumbnail cuffs!

Ohboy! and handed to me, for keeps, is enough.

Stairs

Stairs

I was trying to remember what birds did

before there were telephone wires.

                                    Marilynne Robinson

                                    Gilead

Turns out I’d taken down the wrong thought

all along. It was too small and spine broke,

like the water pump in the pantry of an old

house I grew to love when I was young.  I knew

it long after its majesty had passed and forgave it

her staircase, heavy and only all on her own

and forbidden to be climbed on.  I’d wait

at the bottom for friends who gambled and listen

to the sigh of their creeping, the shine

of their defiance a sweat I saw as spotted moth eggs

on their upper lip and how they grinned

when they made it back with nothing

but their own daring.

Later I’d see that staircase as a Miss Haversham,

when I was in high school and knew

who she finally was.  I would hide beside

the broken tub and toilet and wait for the boys

my sister knew to leave me alone (I’d only come

to write and be alone) to go

into the mildew all on their own.  It was enough

she’d led them there with me as lookout,

enough she was never

afraid of those stairs, enough for me while she,

while they went away, to frame the sea with the glass-

less window and see it all outside of me, a trick

of the light.  I had come to be good at that

departure.  Still, I’d hear them laughing

and imagine their lips.  I’d hear their sneakered

feet sweeping debris and while they thumped

the plaster dust puffed down through the ceiling

laths and fell all around the hip of the broke

in two toilet bowl, whose tank was in

another room though I could never guess why.

I loved the house, especially in late winter

when was too cold for her and her boys,

when it spilled my sister into cars.  I never

wrote about how, until now, thirty plus years,

on paper I would want to daub with light as honest

as Catholic windows at Saturday afternoon

mass, that west facing cathedral end cupping

the thorn-crowned bleeding heart of Jesus,

the broadest pane of all.  It throbbed

in my open notebook, fraudulent, a cock-tease.

The day she left me there alone I stood

afterwards at the bottom

of those stairs and pulled myself together.  After

he'd opened me up like lemon pie and gave

a slice to each finger, after he said relax, relax,

lay still you’ll like it I promise, I thought

but Jesus those stairs, I wish I’d learned to dare

to climb those stairs.

                                                                                               

                        

Clemency

Clemency

Do you want the earth to be heaven?

Then pray, go down on your knees

as though a king stood before you,

and pray to become all you’ll

never be, a drop of sea water,

a small flame hurtling across the sky,

a fine flake of dust that moves

at evening like smoke at great height

above the earth and sees it all.

                                    Ashes

                                    Philip Levine

What if it is?  What if clemency is

farther than your eye can see, like the trick

of mountains that seem to be

right at your lap and knee to stroke

or choke but really are days and days

(and a good pair of shoes)

away by foot and at best hours

by car.  And the closer you get the less

you can see.  Then you have to come

by touch alone, because under the hem

of the canopy it’s a different world entirely

and it's hands and knees from here on out.

Who from the top of hill against

your life's horizon would have imagined this

for you, after all your shot in the head dogs

and used up fetal women?  Who, smelling her 

cervical sorrow on your thumbs, would have received

your ravager heart with the fortitude

of a saint but this mountain?  Truth be,

you have already tried the sea, where it was

a take your pick long-line of hooking

yourself with your Sisyphus stone of atonements.

There was too much sea to see anything

but yourself and the all their names

cast in the polished molasses black, 

look, it knocked you through the way you knocked

your first wife, up through the cellar

door of her spine and out, her carapace,

a crude selkie skin, getting brittle, going to crumb

behind the door.  Because you never let

yourself make love you killed everything you screwed

and took a bow in the locker-room of your sixth rib.

All that’s done with now.  On the run

you’ve made it to the bottom and you think you can

finally be glad.  Still, all the women, all the boys

and girls you broke have assembled like a quilt

at your feet.  Each square has a story of reach:

you touching them and then how they had

to touch everyone else ever after.  

The saints say you must love them before you can pass

through.  You must let your hair grow

to your groin and wash and oil their feet

            the way the penitent did in scripture

and kiss and wipe through all your crime-grime.

You must become as one of them

before you can climb.

John a-Baptist

John a-Baptist

An old man by the time you were twenty

five, lung of ash, stomach of ulcer,

you’ve picked and dug and hauled

your way into the deepest depths of the bay,

pulling back the sand-sods to crucify

the rage or pain in a way that takes

on water the way penitents would under

the hands of John.  You slosh with boots,

and the thumbhold of the brim of your hat is 

muddy No different, in this moment, than a man

ankle to knee to hip come to have a Baptist

pour water into your hollow cheeks

to take you under that water the way

all the men who taught you how to

            thrust the clam hoe went under, until a bushel

            take in trap slack until a bushel

            drag slack until it's in a winch, not warp

            groan or scream

            piss over the side of the boat into wake

            foam

anything this place could thrust up

or you could dig out was up for grabs

            shit thin and toothless grin you said

                        and laughed because next you braced

            yourself against the car door and looked

            at the new memorial in the fog and said

            what it was like for you to see seven names

            on the rough rock, all lost within

            a month, seven family members you said

            again, yup, all within a month--

            one fully recovered after floating from bay

            to bay face down (the snag in the gear you said

            came after the snag in his heart).  And so.

            Floating, cold dead, over the stones

            and through old coves, miles from where

            the whole shebang went under forever,

            and a long time later, the crew came up

            in pieces.  But you liked that your step-

            father still had that smoke in his pocket

            you like that he was all intact

            when his friend pulled him over the gunwale.

Now you’re waiting for low tide, drinking a coffee,

facing the sun.  You say the price of clams has gone

down.  But it’s still good.  It’s still good.  You say I’ll stick close

to shore today.  This shit fog I aint going out too far.  Nope.

Not today.  Not too far.  Woke up to a sunrise.  Did you

see it?  Sure was pretty.

Quiet

         

Quiet

           

…I want to take

a vow of silence, every word

is a young mouse growing in my throat

stretching his paws

trying out his pink nails.

                                    Philip Levine

                                    Ask the Roses

Silence the way the maples, early or late,

            and for no reason,

            let go

Silence the way the cloistered, her thumb

on the last sorrow,

            goes into mystery

Silence the seeing an old dear friend

            look in to the twenty gone years

            to rock the newborn

Silence the ash that falls open in last night’s

            fire, and after a heavy rain, is still

            dry

Silence the way today, and every day,

            a baby, solid on the bed, falling

            to sleep.

Silence the three piano feet pressed

            against the key, to be felt

            and let into the room.

Silence in the lips silence

in the fingertips silence

in the areola

in the thigh-sigh and spine

in the story-stone in the sacral bone-bowl

            the subsequent yoke in and through that bone

                        (the first is the clavical you’ll agree)

            whose hips between is a loose sewn fillet,

            opening like a rosary, or a spile tap

            and that first drop of sap

            like it all was all decided 

            ahead of time

silence between the years we’d left

one another and then, yes,

            yes, met again when the tree

            the rosary

            the baby....      

Habit's Rabbet

Habit’s Rabbet

And why unblooms the best hope has ever sown?

--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,

And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan....

These purblind doomsters had as readily strown

Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

                                                            Hap

                                                            Thomas Hardy

Memory wears a black suit

and shores and up in the dark

when the feast is long done

and the poorer bones are picked

and licked and cracked

and licked memory takes

off her coat and shoes

and casts them across the sooty arm 

chari and floor, pocket side up, shine

of the bootblack handkerchief all

dull in the glut of frey.  The pocket’s 

the only door in the room.

And it’s this that has to open,

bring out the trinkets, although by

the end of the night they'll be 

scattered and memory will be naked

in your bed and you will have

fucked her or she

will have fucked you, or,

if you’re both on speaking terms

tonight, taken your time with

the whole thing

and started where you got

off last night.

After Wrath

After-wrath

Beautiful, beautiful

Magnificent desolation

                                Mary Ruefle

Ice is a caught frieze of wind and to see it ripple hard

in a winter day undripping liquid from the stiff-solid

rot of the eaves it's like when brief thew is pricked

beneath brand new breast feathers that cover  

the exposed yoke of allotrope a lode inside

his very own coal so thick so viscous

it would never not ever in that million

year cliché run out of rub and go completely

chaff and because of the pain of being so

long chaste to it—to sit after under the long tooth

of his pronged skies and see what’s stuck

to the roof to see it and with luck

a whole row of soldiers bared to

the only power in the world given

to reboot them thicken them with ripple

and gorge and watch that last

drop pause so long it can’t go but get itself

froze and such as these

beneath the eaves a set of teeth a son

is jealous of in his brief rage because they

are out and he is in and even jabs and upper

cuts are out of reach in this prison so only

inside is he to open the unbarred

window and pluck the thing

lovely and rather stunted too stunted

to smash and besides he is past that now

that’s all gone and been given in by whetted

teeth and tongue tip sticking to lick this fire