Before Winter, and Then...

Before Winter, and Then...

…it seemed to me that there need not be

relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento,

bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace,

if only the darkness could be perfect

and permanent. 

                                  Marilynne Robinson

                                                Housekeeping

This is the way it works for her:

first the seed and then the sowing of the seed:

                the split husk and then the shove

                up through peat  (or vermiculite

                if it’s rumored to come on dry)

                and the vines reach sky-

                ward if they’ve been given a climb

                or scutt among the turned up

                stones and last year’s fish bones

                and if they've been trained to lean
                against the pole--

               

                and up they go and out no matter the press

                of the sky or choke of the root. 

And she’s among them every day, a nurse between

the beds, an ear for each new plume

                and a pocket notebook to keep it

                and a sharp pencil to mark all the agree

                or disagreements.  And once summer

                has wrung out it’s wardrobe on the neck

                of everyone, what’s got plump or even not

                with blush or glow will come undone

                like pins in the bun at the base of her

                scapula after the dance: it’s all kept

                tense until that first finger then two up

                through into the dark to loose the teased

               

security and one by one the locks fall…it’s like this:

come early or late, Autumn is the rush of it

                all: the plums and wheelbarrows

    in another country are her apples

    and bushel baskets and ladders she’ll climb

    into, a canopy of finding and each to her cheek

    she’ll ease into a linen bag and to descend

    two rungs at a time and walk a mile and a mile

    and a mile in her kitchen between sink

    and knife and paring, pot and water

and simmering to put it all up.  It makes me

wonder:

                under the surface of a winter lake, when in spring

                the green is its own mud brown beneath, and through

                the next three seasonS the surface can only show

                the sky the high track of everything passing by

                while the bottom settles it once and for all, a thick

                grip only it can need come winter because all its top-

                side green is decay, so to save it the lake, from the edges

                in, begins its own slow closing, a cold cold colder still

                than closing until the whole surface is snow and what’s frozen

                beneath it, and I imagine, it’s here that I see how a soul

                floats in a body without getting completely free. 

                It’s like a season of three: the growing up and out

                of the dark the climb and creep, the reach of a hand

                and then to save it all from that decay the madness of

                                sugar

                salt

                                vinegar

                pickle

               

                all ladled after their grate and slice their marriage

                into the glass row of winter infantry and the boil

                to seal them shut to cap them and seal them, their

                briny life stilled in their light.  Isn’t it like this

                in the winter lake?  Isn’t it like this in the living

                body?  Something of irreplaceable value sealed

                shut?  And shelf after shelf of labor to see?  And freezing

                February morning, the reach for it, the tap

                on the seal, to see it stayed, and then, decision made,

                the sweet under the rubber pry, the ssssssspt!

                Free!

Loyalty

Loyalty

Michael Collins, ambushed at Beal na Blath,

                                                                …falls again

Willingly, lastly, forknowledgeably deep

Into the hay-floor that gave once in his childhood

Down through the bedded mouth of the loft trapdoor,

The loosening fodder-chute, the aftermath…

                                                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                                                “The Loose Box”

I don’t say anything about you other than

you were tall: 6’7”.  And you had that flatter

than most babies face my Aunt Clara would say

was whiskey sweet.  And you packed sardines

with acute ferocity, weaving each headless fish

into their can like some grass and ash basket

a cousin tried to teach you to make.  You spoke

as though you were born with a marble

in your mouth and it clicked against your palate

and words sometimes competed to get out, like kids

at the school recess bell and the bottle neck

of bodies pushing through the double doors

into mid-January’s false thaw.  I saw you

day after day a boy before you were a man

my grandmother’s cousin’s grandson and we played

in haunted attics and under skewered alder

branches and swam in that Bay of Fundy

and you taught me to hold my breath and held me

floating the way the salt in the water never could. 

I saw you day after day before you were a man. 

Day after day.  And then I didn’t.  Maybe once.  In

your father’s restaurant.  A bus-boy rushing by

shy, another person all those years later.  Stained

apron.  Glassy eyes.  Dirty dishpan.  I’d heard

you were in and out of city shelters.  You smiled. 

Same smile.  You went into the banging kitchen

and I never saw you again.  When I heard you’d been

murdered for putting your hand on a boy’s knee

in a public park I put my face in my hands and felt you

against my ribs in that salt water, your hands

under the small of my back, holding me up to the sun.

You never let go, even after I touched bottom.  I read

that the man who killed you was a stranger a vagrant

a booze-hound from South Dakota just passing

through who’d thumbed his way all the way to Maine

and this fate: five gallons of gasoline and a dug-out

under a bridge.  One match.  By the time you were found

you were smoke and bone and nothing but

a cast off shoe and a winter coat and a business

card with the hours of your AA meetings, your sponsor’s

number smudged by the snow.

Gossip: Both Sides of the Mouth

Gossip: Both Sides of the Mouth

For the Ones Who Claim Jesus But Scream “Barabbas! Give Us Barabbas!”

Planet earth like a teething ring suspended

Hangs by its world-chain.  Your pram waits in the corner.

Cows are let out.  They’re sluicing the milk-house floor.

                                                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                                                Bann Valley Eclogue

Tell me stories are borne another way and I’ll tell you

you never labored one day in your entire life.  Never

a shovel or a belching cow.  Never a bucket at your boot

filled with snow before you even make it to the barn.  Shit.

You’re only lips and tongue and a thin alley throat.  A street

corner at night to five a.m. whoring your lie for a pack

of smokes and a clumsy stroke.  A plucked game bird. 

A tabloid cryer.  A pew-stainer.  Gasoline in your gills

when good men walk out and past you and sigh at what

you might have been.  You hack and cry and light yourself

on fire you ride their coat-tails and when you arrive

you wrap yourself around them like a contamination vest.

You try to snuff them out.  You reach into their jeans

and squeeze.  Jesus you seem sweet, the way, before all this

you’d sneak peaks at the grocery store, at the man

and his wife and their happy life and you’d almost

shit yourself wanting it.  You’d swallow gobstoppers

and near to choke yourself to see him rescue you.  You go down

to the cold linoleum and open your shirt and spill your privacy

into the isle with you and let the tantrum you’ve given birth to

run wild pulling everything off the shelf, every can of soup

every bar of soap every block of cheese every banana ripped

out of its bunch every bottle of top shelf merlot and loaf

of bread and quart of milk the whole store’s strewn

with you.  Your loose untamable Satan.  How did you make it

this far?  Whose clothes hid your growing belly?  The story?

It’s back at the corner of the house.  While you, and in the blizzard

waiting, stake a claim on surveyed land, while you, unbooted

and barehanded open the door to make your path to the barn

the snow you never prepared for falls and falls and falls. 

It belongs to no one, even after landing.  Wind’s still gusting.

Goading you.  Up by the side of the barn the drift’s hitting the roof.

You break through the crust with the wrong socks on.  Fuck

if you know how to live a story.  You can’t even lift your foot half-way

into the yard.  

Who Knew New Grass

Who Knew New Grass?

When impact is

                instant when it is

                in the bone like a post hole digger

                raised high as the sky

                of wrists and torso

                to come down into it all

                at one precious point

                and the surface is pierced

                and the soil is suffered

                separated falling into the jaws

                to be lifted out and sent

                sod side up

                to its new uprooted thirst

                                

The first time

                you touch a girl it’s this

                hydraulic rift from shoulder

                to elbow to wrist to finger-

                tip

                in the cautious but not

                hot air it’s up

                and not meant to hover

                under the weight

                and the burning is loud

                as a basement draft

                pulled up the wall by only opening

                the door who knew

                in the box of old books

                beside the furnace a careless

                flint is ricocheted

                off the old tool he’d used years ago

                to set the boundaries

                rust thin now and dormant

               

                who knew touching

                who knew raising

                who knew new grass

                who knew he slow slow

                                then quick coming down

                                and the blades buried        

                                unseen

                                cracking

                                on impact 

Fall Sweater

Fall Sweater

Dry clean or hand wash

use warm water

do not rub wring spin or bleach

dry flat

warm iron

Particular to the garment and fiber:

cotton or wool or silk, on a tag

at the back of the neck--for the sweater

from Carraig Donn--and maybe

because it took to the earth

in a different way, was plucked

and chewed and ruminated, was first

sod, yes, like cotton, was spit, yes, like

silk, but when the black belly, when

the catacombs of viscera, when

the squeeze and the sheer weight

of its final removal, a whole

coat or two maybe in this case, a

cream colored sweater so much at home

the way it’s worn and so thoroughly

warm, it belongs

on my skin the way it belonged

on the sheep’s skin.   Is it blasphemous

to want it in cotton?  Because

honestly the itch is more than I can take.

I’ve gotten used to the weight but I know

I know I’ll never wear it bare.  But I want to!

And caring to starts with taking it

down at the start of the fall--

lacking all the ceremony of how it should be

stored to prevent the lips of moths…but God!

it’s on my mind now and needs cleaning

like the days remaining before you died

how you could never get, to your liking,

clean enough or warm enough, how cotton

was not enough and for sure not silk,

and I had this sweater for you, even though

it’s heavy and itchy, and I pulled it

up to your chin like I were tucking you in

for the night and look down at you in a moon

or the glow from the open door

and see it fuse into you it’s animal self

and you’d cough a little and spit and that’s

the small stain on the back of the collar,

just above the cleaning instructions

and for all the while you wore it I left it

there and now, now that you’ve died

and are buried my only like to you is this bile

stain and how absolutely at home it is there

how it took to the wool the way grain

takes to oak.  What you’ve pulled up out of you.

What grew from you.  What was cut

and spun.  What was knit then spit

to keep me warm.

What If, All Along, You’ve Been Hating the Wrong Man

What If, All Along, You’ve Been Hating the Wrong Man

There is so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.

                                                                                    Home

                                                                                    Marilynne Robinson

What if you’re hating the wrong man?

What if Jesus, the Jesus you know is the God

            your father knew and you hate them both

            because they are the same
            paradox?

What if the Jesus you heard in church is the Jesus

            your brother cups in his hands, priest’s oysters

            he’ll call them later because clutch is money

            and he'll be ok until he’s twenty and is told

            to be ashamed but it takes a while, a long while

            because it all tasted so good and still does

            even though there are no other men now.

What if it didn’t start with a priest, maybe it never was

            a priest, maybe it was just discovery discovery

            as though all along it had been waiting on nothing

            special but came as a simple light a thin sliver

            picked out of the bare foot that makes a man

            stop and pause and pull it away and walk on

but not before he looks up not before he sees a shape

            lift itself up a man among men who desires

            who is gentle who will love him who has been

            waiting to love him but neither knew it and won’t

            know it until the stone until the dark until the priest

            until the brother after you refused the job

all those years ago who sent your beloved charge instead

            and never not really how could he after all that

            forgive you?

            

After Extubation

After Extubation

But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released

and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills…

                                                                                                                                Homecoming

                                                                                                                                Marilynne Robinson

I’ve known all along her accumulation of used

and tired things was a staving off of all

the used and tired things she’d thought

she’d left behind forever but were really dragged

in a sack that never lacked for holes and yet

performed miracle after miracle  by nothing ever

being kicked or elbowed or pushed out or through

for space or love or neglect.  In deed, her sorrow was this

sack she dared and mended when the dark closed in

and she needed it’s ironic space.  It was like the space

a baby makes between the wall of the uterus

and the placenta, a constant relying but never

throughout all those rapid  heartbeats living like

it could all end the moment it prolapses

and all the lights and sounds, like the abrupt

shutting down at carnival are suddenly stuffed

into a hole and closed, just closed, forever.  I suppose

she gathered her sorrows that way, her whole life

dragging.  And the day she opened it the creatures

all her stuff had become at first wouldn’t move.  Couldn't.

They were by now something else entirely

and the light hurt them enough to shrink them.  

Still, they knew her by her smell and recovered

enough when she reached in to bite her but only

out of being cold, because the space was small,

and as she pulled away the blanket of her life

got large and she waited and watched as it drifted

up on a wind and all of it, every small legged thing,

nosed in her lap like puppies just born, wet and eyeless,
and soon throughout the days of intubation, a knee was gained

and soon an ankle, as they made their way out, off

into the wide wide furiously wide free dying.

Poverty--A Triptych-- (Panel 2)

Poverty--A Triptych--

(Panel 2)

Because the partridge breast was shaped like a heart

when cupped whole, and it’s open cavity was

a tiny grotto the saints             may have known rapture in,

I forgave the lice and mites and all kind in the wing

span of the one grouse my father lent me.

When it was finally my turn to tack the spread of feathers

            to my wall (all the rest went to my sister who rubbed

            each plume against her cheek like they were

            fingers, like she were counting, making lists, eyes

            closed) instead I meant to keep it safe in the paper

            box I hid all my treasures in.

This time it was only one wing--the other sprayed through

            with birdshot my father said and because he’d plucked

            it on the road and gutted and cut the heart and liver

            at his buddy’s house, all that could be saved

            was this one small wing. 

It’s hard to imagine a bird flying with only half its balance

            but I did and I made it work with pitch and precision

            and string and a secret stage where all the half

            animals I’d ever known would hop or crawl or limp

            across the floor and spotlight their qualities.

                        Legless rabbits who could lay eggs.

                        Wet kittens knit and knit and knit mittens.

                        Piglets rolled out blueprints and stacked bricks.

                        Dogs took up the dishes and washed them

                                    in milkmoon light. 

            And the grand finale, the strut of birds, their wings

                        entwined like women arm in arm, spread

                        straight and lift their legs

                        at the cue and dance until it was enough

                        to lift them off the floor entire, right up

                        and out into the world, the sky, the pure

                        pure unhunted blue sky.           

Poverty--a Triptych-- (panel 1)

Poverty--A Triptych--

       (panel 1)

Poverty is grass attacked at the flank,

            thrummed to the root, choked to

                        so low a barrenness only snow

                                    will know enough to mourn

                                                what was once the whole

                                                            of Persia and now, after

two weeks, is thin, the tongue of a young

            mother who alone and on her own smokes

                        a slow jerky of her lung, into the lung

                                    of her new son who blinks in the blur

                                                of blue gray two packs a day and later

with his other brothers, occasional sister

            will make his way out to the mud next         

                        spring, barefoot and breath-heavy, and not

                                    know, ever, why his milk is blue or why dogs

                                                move slower in August unless they’re off

                                                            the chain and then bolt fast away to piss

on the green tuft thrust up by and through

            the throat of the mailbox pole-hole, the only

                        color that ever forgives here, that waits

                                    at the edge of things, like foxes, like hunger

                                                at best the only adult in the house and too

                                                            the only baby, born old every day, tottering

to the cupboard, to the window over the sink

            needing a wash, to look out at the kids smear

                        themselves, and eat, occasionally, their pretend

                                    pies, look at the sky, look at the drive, look at

                                                all of it as far as their ends can take them,

                                                            the frayed fade of Mama’s red bandana,

her now brown, once white, fraying lace bra.

Mother and Daughter

Mother and Daughter

Now in the blessed days of more and less

when the news about time is that each day

there is less of it…

                                                W. S. Merwin

                                                Dew Light

Days when your dying strikes me

as the oldest thing that has ever happened, or that

after all these years it is as if it has

never happened at all, that I never

watched it all my whole life, the aluminum can 

of it, the steep steep stairs of it, the height of the low shed's

hayloft of it and the trapdoor in the middle

of the floor of it where I only ever saw, come

November, a buck or a doe or the old

cow split wide as that Bible story about Samson

and the lion’s jaw all hot then all cooled by the time

it’s dragged out into.  

And the woods of it, and strapped to the sedan of it, windows

rolled down as much for the rope holding it all on

as for the Pall Mall smoke of it, the only way,

city girl you were, you could see walking

through the world of it, with blood and flesh as red as that,

to dull it to the color of it.

Days when a window conch in the curiosity shop

you’d seen once and wonder how they coaxed the animal

out of it all together and once and for all forever because days

you'd say you would want to live in such a deep

curved peace hard as teeth the whole way

around and only feel and grope in the most

unassuming thrill, you’d hoped to live like that

one day if you let yourself feel anything at all.  You’d said

you can learn the most remarkable things

from the dead:

the fragrance of daisies after dark after walking out

on him

the flavor of sea salt water after walking in

with him

the feeling oh Jesus the feeling of descending stairs after you pushed yourself

away from him

and it’s the fog of it and it’s blood of it that came

afterwards and the texture of the cloth you washed your crotch with

was like that doe’s hide the first time you’d touched

something as dead as her, something awful dead,

the red the white the honey brown

you’d later hang your own self from,

allegorically of course, in your head and on your tongue

in your longing in your stories and you’d tell me

every day every day you were alive or barely

a fight with nothing at all but everything, everything after all.

This Sort of Tending To

This Sort of Tending To

“Remember when you talked to me about your soul, about

saving it?”

                                Home

                                Marilynne Robinson

I’d wanted to write about the two flies

I’d shut against the screen and window

yesterday--two dirty old flies I pulled

the ivy away from the window frame for,

two creatures buzzing on the mesh.

There happen to be three candles on that

sill, as though I’d hope some vigil of mine

would be seen from the road by some passer-

by, another soul on a night like tonight

with the rain and the thunder and the lightning.

Even though I don’t write enough about

the souls that like wind blow around

on my insides, that try like those trapped 

flies to find a light and a small place to hike,

still, somehow all they are, all we ever are,

is on or up to our knees like all rest, quite like a prayer.

Even though I’m the one whose shut them up

to die against the streaks of rain that arrived

last night instead of going after them with the thick

extended end of a napkin to beat them

mid-flight to death, still, I’m glad I didn’t

kill them but left them to die two together.

I can be glad about that later, can’t I?  When

I finally open the window and their little

bug bodies will have been sifted through

and brushed against and sent away as though

their only purpose, after their maggot

selves sucked on all that was rot around them, 

was to live against this sort of dying, coming in 

from the cold too soon gone too soon left to what rain

at this very moment brings them to their knees

if they have knees, yes, if they have them

and can use them at all.

Benediction for the Sinned Against

Benediction for the Sinned Against

(three)

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you,

and when they shall separate you from their company,

and shall reproach you, and cast out

your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.

                                                            Luke 6:22

the baby in the brown

paper bag may have

raised his little fist

before he died before

the noise frenetic

and cold closed over

his body like a caul

noise that unstiched

him noise that scalpeled

a glide on its own

thin life down the belly

of his mother to open

and spill his universe

into the basin

of this ER trauma room

to pull him out of the bath

at the wrong time no

towel no holding

after the heat lamps

and weighing cradle

after she loads his clay

face and hands

into the paper medical

trash absorbing the gall

the nurse’ll say that later

she only glanced

when he rose

when she goes out to the dark

on all the rest of her 1 am days when

she moves the cat aside 

after he’s reached in his sleep

his paw to her underarm

it’s wind in the siding

it’s skunks or fox or any

crinkle of scream in this kind

of dark he may have she tells

herself he may have

after his street junkie

no ID mother ODs

raised his fist

he may have

Litany for the Sinned Against (one)

Litany for the Sinned Against      

(one)       

I

want your blessing,

whoever you are who

has the power to give

me a name for

whatever I am. 

                        Philip Levine

                        Words

Why is it only years later, long beyond

their levy, that sins against us feel  

like sins at all?  Fresh

in the hand they are just-pulled roots

cool with manure that’s been, after all

this time, turned into a shit that has

value, that isn’t the ass it fell out of

or the floor it smacked against, waiting

casually for nothing.  Until the shovel,

there is never caring, not ever, who

was at the handle.

Sins live in the whispers only confessional

drapes can mimic, and the pulling too,

a privacy curtain.  Have you ever noticed,

aside from its crushed velvet, regardless

of its red or black, it’s not that different,

hanging there, closed or open, than

a doctor’s office-side examining room,

and not just for the cloth?  Boxes are tight

and spare little light but the lying

down is just the same, the cut

above the lip that shreds vowels like

cheese graters is still raw.  But in this town

a doctor’s not

going to ask and a priest is not going

to judge.  They’ve got the Law and God

on a leash and the poor bastards are turning

circles at the door, wrapping the leather

so tight its choke- on-a-bone close

to dying.  It’s all quiet until they learn

(and remember because that’s the crucial

part) to turn around and sit still while

papers and blame are shuffled

like poker cards, while beef on the hoof

is made by the butcher at the edge of town

to take off her coat and her whole shitty

world is split from ass to appetite as

the doctor says about caesarians to the thirteen

year old girl who never flinches from the gel

and speculum, who tries to be cool and wipes her lip

and stares blinks at the bright examining light,

the white privacy sheet parting the air

for the priest come to take her spirit outside

for a quick drowning in the roses.