Self Harm/Power of Autonomy

Self Harm/Power of Autonomy 

Maybe what happens inside us maybe

what feels tragic exists in those vague rooms

those mute outskirts of shadow     not one

pathetic shred of prayer reaches us

                                                The Unknown Pain

                                                Stephen Berg

Afterward we had to sue for power

of attorney to take away your rights

to govern yourself.  Between the hospital

and the courthouse, maybe, what? five

miles?  a thousand?  The length

of an umbilical?  We rehearsed

words just in case, laid them in our laps

with copies of your charts detailing 

your traumas.

Officially it was a seizure induced by too

much tranquilizer.  Later on you’d proved

a loose cannon and you needed decisions

to be made for you now that you’d lost

control.  You weren’t there in your head
to fend

for yourself.  That was the day

you ripped off the intermittent pneumatic
compression devises to prevent DVT.

(deep vein thrombosis the nurse said)
They constricted and relaxed your calves

for you, after the emergency splenectomy.

(how hard were you kicked, how long

how many times?) but the worry

is oedema, is blood clots, Still, you

were lucid enough to rip them off

and had to be restrained.  It’s one of

the hundred proofs in your chart,

one of the death by a thousand cuts

that seem cruel and callus after what

was done to you.  And I wonder: 

when the judge opens the folder

will all of you fly out like pigeons in

the trenches, messages strapped to

their bony little legs?  Shit, I know it’s the wrong

metaphor but listen, I’m trying

without much success to say you were just

insane, that you’re sole self was

somewhere else, that somewhere beneath

the hematoma pill swill you just can’t reason

straight or be expected to behave

safely on your own and no I won’t

read them all I won’t read any of them

here, your traumas--it’s sick what they did

to you.  And listen, this next step, I know

seems the last blow to your thin dignity,

as though you’re naked again and on display.

Explaining it to you only makes you

lean away from any hope.  I don’t deserve

this you know is all you can say.  It’s only until

you’re well again I say.  But you’ll

never be well again.  I know as you try to roll

over and away and the Velcro restraints make

their little crinkle ripping but ultimately stay,

soft chains that they are, softer than

the judges voice giving you over to me

softer than the quiet of the house going down

into ashes (that’s one of the lines I wasn’t going

to read, about the fire three years earlier) softer than

when the nurse looks at your blacked out

face with the face of, well, I don’t know what,

not shock, something else, not dismissal,

not recognition, something like what I see

on his Honor’s face as he reads through you

and quietly closes your folder

giving your life, once more, into the hands

of strangers without ever bringing his gavel down.

feb 16th warm up:

warm up:

 

today’s

snow and wind

is  warmer so some rain

mixed in.  it’s like

the dog’s paws are deep

beneath his breathing

out in out in chest

his ribs stick out

I noticed that yesterday

when I checked in

his breath was in the air

I could smell it still

when I walked near

and then away

it keeps close on my coat

collar

it whimpers some

when I get in

to warm up 

Valentine

Valentine

moon,

after the storm

you  were a radio voice

in the trees.  I saw half

of you on the dial of branches. 

The other half

had already gone on

to the next set

of songs,

jazz

I bet

given

the tempo

of the wind.

February 12th: Thoughts While Shoveling

February 12^th:   Thoughts While Shovelling

I wanted to marry you like the light

and forget you like the dark.   I wanted to promise you something,

                then give you

A thousand times what I’d promised, then take it away,

Then give it back again.

                                                “Letter from God”

                                                Ruth L. Swartz

Maybe that’s what goes into the making

of a man and woman: the carousal demands

the caress of desire that raises hips to lips

that ends in the arch of a spine aching to the scalp

It’s physical like this it breaks like this:

                it’s pollen in the deepest basin of the bloom

                and the bee needing it all gets lost

                in all the folds of flesh and vein

                and suffocates while the bloom blushes

                in what? shame? victory? we know

                honey bees we know even if they beat

                the rain only some of the time--we know

                coming back with their life in their crop

                one drop is dying one! is like the weight

                of knowing it’s gone

                too far yet nothing at all except dying

                stops it

and in the meantime babies

and they live

they nearly die they thrive

they are open mouths

and two sets of teeth they are mountains

and floors of volcanoes I don’t know how to follow

or even if I should or am meant to

while I was getting sick yesterday while my coughing brought

my nerves out like a brand while the cold boots

on my feet sealed my fate for the day

while I moved the snow again to make way for more

while I scooped what I could away from the stone Buddha

I wondered:       what’s driven me to this? All these years trying

                                and I can’t

                                slow down my heart I think too much I don’t

                                think enough I shouldn’t think at all

                                I should be instinct homing in to the brief foam

                                and fly on through my sins

                                are too many I’ve never sinned I’ll never repent

                                I’ll neve be able to repent

                                enough

                                if I could turn the snow into an apple orchard

                                or an orange grove and choose the lupines

                                instead but I don’t even know do lupines need bees

                                I couldn’t save my mother I was saying to the snow to the shovel to my back to my hips

                                throwing it all she didn’t reach  for my hand when I knew enough to reach

                                for hers and when I took my hand away...

                                                but I never took

                                                my hand away

                                                it’s hanging there still

                                                it’s a branch on the one tree in the yard

                                                it’s twigs in February

                                                it’s pieces of bark flake lifted by the wind

                                                it’s gloveless it’s not ready

                                                                for the blizzard

it’s only ever known blizzards

                                                I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about

                                bee blossom spring the nub the full on erection

                                the taking it all in without guilt without burning without thinking

                                surrounding it with every soft part of me willing away the broken window

                                shards that call out whore or mother or drunk or

                                                let me touch into you enough to suffocate

                                                all but the basic bone all but what you’ll need

                                                to carry the shovel back to the house.

February 13th: Getting Out While it Snows: Thoughts While Shovelling

February 13^th: Getting Out While it Snows: Thoughts While Shoveling

I came to crush time to study you to teach

Like a cloud drifting above you I darken everything I hide the sky

Crowned with lightning I save you with rain

                                                                                Like That/Buddha

                                                                                Stephen Berg

It’s been an inch an hour

for the past eighteen hours.  Maybe

more.  I’m nervous where to put it all.

I want to get out before the wind picks up

(or get in before the wind

picks up?)  Before it picks up everything

I’ve moved and makes of all

the work my work a useless bread

dough that rises and falls

rises and falls and will never be baked.

How sensible is that?  And

how sensible is this interruption:  my footprints

are all filled in and I am the burnt end

of a blunt once again.  I sleep during the worst

of it, the way any good apostle would.  But let me

defend them, please, in their garden

of oil.  They were in a blizzard too, weren’t they,

though who among them had shoveled such snow?

Below the least branches

in that olive grove they put out

their eyes to make it

all go away.  None of them

could tell you what they dreamed though

it was nothing

destructive: it was a man

at the end of some road

and it was snowing.  He’d gone

out early ahead of the plow.

He’d made his way

on foot.  It took him a long time,           

his entire life.  His neck was stiff

bent against the wind.  He wanted

a clear path

to do the work he’d always done

for her.  There’s no way

to know if the road goes on. 

There’s a boy beside him in the end

and when his heart opens

the boy lays him down

and it’s soft across it all.

The veins and capillaries slow down

the plows turn around lower their blade

and make a different way. 

This is an apostle’s dream and

men who’ve never encountered such snow

are cold in their robes in their olive grove.

Their shoes have been stolen.

They have no knives.  They are at the mercy

and random whim of bandits,

and are unprepared for walking. 

They push their shoulder

into the trunk of the dream

and their master

the one they’ll swear lead them here

the one they’ll swear they never knew

is kissed

and led away

the snow fills in his footprints

or was it sand?

It doesn’t matter. 

What’s gone is gone

and what falls today in February

may stay

a day

a month

but eventually it evaporates

or sinks into the ground

the place where roads,

ending,

don’t do that at all--yet they don’t keep going either.

Nothing is certain

even being nailed to a tree

even cupping the falling sky

in bare hands in the warmest of mid-winter rain.

Even these lines--

if I look back

I won’t know my way

if I press my chest with all this snow

I may, briefly, see the good

in what I do before the wind blows it

randomly full.

February 11th: Options

Options

I divested myself of despair

and fear when I came here...

                                Contrition

does not exist, nor gnashing

of teeth.

                                                Notes from the Other Side

                                                Jane Kenyon

Not all day and not even most

not even a good part of it but

some some of the morning

and past noon I was moving

wind driven snow to make room

for more.  That was yesterday.

The wind gusted and when

my back was to it it was beautiful

and in a peril to persist

all hoar and fury.  When my heart

beat too fast I stood still but pushed

back against it pushing into me

lifting my small enough body

wondering what difference

does it make why and what?

Tomorrow it will be up to my hips

again.  It will settle like arthritis

a swell where my pelvis heats

with each swing and glow.  I’d made

only a one shoulder path to the door.  I

wanted to feel good about it

all.  Some difference.  The wind

blew in my tracks like I’d never been

there--and I thought: how so

like the ocean, this wind and snow.

I remember deep enough to see

and feel the frozen flats at home

where I once walked on in some

February and I fell in the frozen

clam holes, their slow thin twist

of air a brief pretty crystal I wanted

to be inside of.  I was

near a stream of stones, the salt

was thinner there but the water

just as cold.  I’d hoped to go

out into it all where I imagined

some myth in kelp held my purpose

in her fist.  It’s all because of wind

that I didn’t and here, walking back-

wards with a shovel full of snow

I knew if I fell right on top of

all I’d piled I’d be grateful I’d say

like a habit of memory the Act

of Contrition I’d have it on my wind

bled lips when I kiss my son under

his ear when I go in out of it all

and I’d leave a mark of it there

and I’d see briefly why I turned

around thirty two years ago and,

dripping wet, a cut across my dog

bit face, walked home alone to my mother’s

banging doors and ghosted rooms.

Purpose, the myth told me then

and tells me now, is boots you choose

to do the job is doing the job

in the boots you choose--she said

that when I shoved my double

socked foot into my son’s outgrown

shoes.  They’re two sizes too big

for me now.  If I tuck my pants into them

if I move through the wind and lift

my feet carefully, something ,

briefly, seems to fit.  I hear it in

the snow.  But it whispers.  It makes

my eyes ache and water.  I throw

the snow.  It blows back at me

and past me.  I throw it again

and again.  I don’t know any

better or any different.  

While Reading Levertov with a Ladybug in the February Snow

While Reading Levertov with a Ladybug in the February Snow

I want to know where the ladybug goes

when she drops off the light and into the snow

of this white paper--a book of Levertov’s

poems: Breathing the Water.  Maybe to the glow                                                                                                                   of the one close light and the black and white

photo of it: a car maybe and a hand

reaching--the negative of a positive, it’s hard

to know what’s going on or the motive

and maybe we’re only supposed to be provoked

because who aside from fish (and do

they? Really?) breathe water or even

want or need to?  I heard her, the ladybug, ping

against the light and then fall and she’d not any-

where but I’ll thumb up that title poem and if she

were a person I’d read it to her--no--maybe  because

she’s not and it’s so quiet--and I’ve been sitting

here for three hours anyway I need to so let’s see:

there’s the one about Jesus on the cross, she’s

weaving him into a Julian of Norwich world of thieves

and diseases and the lengths of sufferings

six hours of hanging versus days and days

of a little boy’s cancer ward, or a story not

in her life but in her memory of her dead sister

born cold and still or the one of her seeing the body

beautiful of her friend in the steam of a sauna

how naked she seemed a saint in all her nearly

fifty years of lines and sighs and cries and closer

still in the ecstasy of Caedmon out in the barn

with all the rest of the struck dumb and how he

glowed when the angel or some random ember

touched his tongue--but not one, not what I skimmed

and walked on, was of breathing water.  Air, fire, steam,

close, but no.  Maybe the ladybug’s disappointed--

she’s nowhere now.  She’s tired of being

too big on a too small copper doorstop of Moby Dick.

She’s found someplace else to breathe.  Maybe 

she knows more than me, how because it’s only

February she shouldn’t be here, only see

there’s been this warm spell.  Yesterday it was 55.

But dawn--I hear them starting now, is plows

and engines and a hunkering down for the blizzard

coming.  It’s dark out and still. It’s early.  A long

time has gone since I read Levertov the first time.

I bet two decades or more.  I bet I was coming into

February that time too. Today something is too familiar.

I can’t be sure; a lot of water’s gone by since then.

A lot of spots and hollow carapaces .  A lot of living.

A lot.  And maybe, occasionally, because it's all about

art, a naked lady beautifully wide.  She’s in the shell

of a boat.  She’s idle.  She’s moored and it’s beginning 

to snow.  There’s some kelp on her bow, on her 

battered cuddy.

February 9th: On the Beauty of Wounds

9^th: On the Beauty of Wounds

“It gets to be an old friend, a wound.  Of course,

it troubles you from time to time, but I’ve lived

with it so long.  It must’ve happened when I

was a child.”

                                                The Unconsoled

                                                Kazuo Ishiguro

But the poet, though, he’s talking about lilacs

how on the edge end of snow they'll open,

how, and this is me now, each knuckle

splits and each wooden fingertip, the warm

urge to open to the broad, I-don’t-give -

a-damn-who-sees-me world, and they do

it, they do it anywhere they are.  And who

are we while they are doing it but people

who are doing it too only under our coats,

absolutely under our coats, our winters we

sew and sow beneath the course spun wool

beneath the fists of feathers spread thin

in squares and stitched in sleeves in pockets

in broad backs and accommodating fronts we

zip to the neck to brace ourselves for the storm

because we know it’s coming we may be ready

or we may be predicting but for now we

wait like the lilacs wait and what I want

to know is does it hurt them the way it hurts me

to split to be split to have no say in the matter

but only respond to the warm finger of spring

to run up and down our roots to shiver us

under our skirts to have no choice but to flood

with blood to reach up to it come April or May

and tight enough no more open each fist

into the lips of a random passerby to give it

to anyone who happens up to anyone who

ignores to anyone who, scissors and basket, run

to the easiest crotch and cut on a bias

and none too soon soothe us warm and throw

(in a choke we recompose) us in a brief pane

a square of light we follow - o - flower - o -

branch - o - bush to your root it's you who - all summer

will hide maybe with pride that place

she came to with her blades and lifted

you up and whispering cut you and thumbed

the bit of clear sap and licked it and took

the best of you away--yes all summer under

your canopy you’ll let the wind blow over you

and sometimes if it’s right and no one’s happening

by you’ll part your leaves enough, just enough,

in the sun or the rain, it doesn’t matter, to be

sure of the scar.

February 8th: Diminuendo

Diminuendo

Starlings, as before,

whistle wondering at themselves,

crescendo, diminuendo.

My heart pounds away

confident as a clock.

Yet there is silence.           

                                                Living Alone (II)

                                                Denise Levertov

It’s a new word to me--diminuendo--though I know

I’ve heard it before, somewhere far from here

but I can’t say exactly where or maybe I have

never heard it only ever seen it and didn’t

know there was a name for what I was seeing.

Take murmuration: I admire the work of that word and

seeing that word work, how all the birds

show us what the air really looks like, how turning

the way they do at the glint on a pupil or beak

is really possible, and too how all the rest pick up

interpret the cue instantly and fly and dip and recover

and then all at once it’s over and they’ve found

some spot to land to huff out their lungs and ruffle

their exhaustion.  They’ve found the salt marsh

somewhere or the edge of their sea and come

to be little individuals sifting for sand fleas, they’ve

found their diminuendo, the speckled quartz of it,

the edge of a footprint of it, how at the heavy stepped

edge the sand is still falling into the heel print of it

covering what boot brand they don’t need to care

about they can just prance past it coming down from all

that fantastic air in pairs in threes and if I wait if I don’t

move something will start one farther off and she’ll

rise first and then those twos and threes and then the whole

flock and the sky is pocked with them and the air, the air

is clothed, is exposed.

an apology

Warmup: an apology 

all these years I’ve misunderstood
how fog is made,
 fog and her long skirts,

her thread and loom.   How each length

is shuttled through and the foot

or the arms are sliding the pattern

of the valley, the entire muscle

of it, how the heat of the work

is the fog.  I’ve misplaced somewhere

that it has to be warm somehow

to conjure it, the land or the water

nearby, to make visible a breathing thing .

In yesterday’s storm, I walked back

and forth over the same path.
I hovered.
There was no pattern to it.

I dropped almost everything

I picked up the first time

and had to go back to it again.  My tools

are too small I said to myself

but I kept on keeping on.  They are

what I settled the job for. 

One shovel, and it’s about the span

of my hips. 

It was snow rain freeze. 

It covered everything.

It was down my neck

and on my head when I pulled

the hood over me.  I was too

warm inside my suit.

I thought: it’s 16 degrees.

It’s a cold heat after coming through

and I had better do with a hat

with gloves

with snow pants that once belonged

to my son.  Cleaning like this is

like an ancient at her loom

how some are held in the teeth
on the herd paths of llamas

and gravity pulls the strings.

In the valley there is fog.  I’ve seen it

in pictures.  In the driveway here

--fog--

it covers all my clearing away

work.  It can defeat my eyes

if I let it.  Yes, I’ve misunderstood

and I’m sorry.  I need to walk in it more

often.  But it’s cold and the footpath

is froze.  I need to strap my teeth

to my shoes to tell this.

February 6th: How to Listen to the Flautist

February 6^th:  How to Listen to the Flautist: A Conversation I Had 

It was looking up at something farther off

than people could see, an important scene

acted in stone for little selves

at the flute end of consequences.

                                                William Stafford

                                                At the Bomb Testing Site

I just, listen, it’s the pushing into it with my finger

first, that soft wind escaping after the flautist's low

and stay and wait lifted each note and key

and gave me the precis, her allusion of it all: listen

don’t you want the softness of a trust like that?

In the whole orchestra it's you and the musician

and after some crowd parting (which looking

back afterwards is every touch since the curtain

every bit of longing and lost along the trail

of thought of practice of warm-up breath

and the weight of the wait of it) two in the globe

green-globe sea, a belief in the power of eight

fingers and two thumbs, of hands holding

the instrument, of the muscle under the bicept

of knowing why each note and when each note

and more to want to play not just to the ear

though maybe in part maybe it begins there

but the skin, the hair and skin of the listener

who at last at long last has surrendered

and raises up to the flute end of breath a sigh

a staying and a brief (only on the upper lip) rain.

warm up: burial on a hill above the bay

burial on a hill above the bay

in wind like this it's helpful

right?

to keep walking

and if there’s choosing

to be done

the chill going through

to the cut under

the collar

under the glove cuff

the coat cuff

it’s how

it goes

right up to

then past the elbow

then patient in the bowl

past and down the spine

eventually..

in wind like this

a walk stiff

in the debris is a
 tomorrow maybe you’ll find

what you lost

grabbing then

surrendering

a hat maybe

or one earring

when you pulled yourself close

to yourself

and hunched in

to the walk

 toward it all

February 3rd: The Canaries

February 3^rd: The Canaries

He told me they heated the heads of little pins

to put out the eyes of the yellow canaries,

the miners, that somehow they had discovered if

the birds were blind in the dark they’d sing

until they died, until their silence was the only

thing the coal would absorb or could

and the men picked their way back out
half alive. In the cages the free dead rested
and were left behind and they became
the memories in the caves of men, and on this
the men were silent as the rocks

and exhausted birds.  Doing such a careful job
with their hands, their little hot pins and fist,
then holding the cage out went farther into their mind
than their light might

reach, listening, listening, the black coal the only

ricochet and the dust covering the burnt

yellow canaries eyes and their two day straight

in the dark song and maybe of gas.  But I think it’s

exhaustion they give in to and I said so, their lungs must've
been sung straight through. And though it’s nothing like birds
and those thin shafts they're shoved into, forgive me if I say I felt

like one, a canary wide with fear song in the dark

when I was walking down the hall to your hospital

room the day after they beat you.  My head felt

as though it was being pressed on the inside with

dry cotton, my esophagus was shrinking

I was leaning against the cage in a dark only shock

can create, you know, how it dims the light for us

like some benevolent butler.  And you there

on the bed looking like a bull had hooked

you on the jaw and not let go.  On the thick stitched lip

and eye a mote of light, I mean who can contrive

that, and dust when you shuffled in your drugged

nod and you didn’t know us how could you

after such a collapse and with those eyes shut

like that... I couldn’t look.  I remember though
the skin was so blue, I had to think of those poor canaries
and the burning and the song the song that didn’t stop, how the strong

ones went two days maybe and that was it

they fell against the cold fist of dark the way

you must have, eyes first or last it doesn’t matter,

crusted as they are with blood and viscosity

when they’re put out like that.  And no accident:

I picked up the song and I pocketed it, thief that I was

and stood at the foot of your bed while you slept

not exactly dead but dead enough until you were

but that was five more years in the mine five more

years songless on and on…