this question she prompts me

this question she prompts me:

Do you want me to mourn?

Do you want me to wear black?

Or like moonlight on whitest sand

to use your dark, to gleam, to shimmer?

                                       Yes

                                       Tess Gallagher

Haven't I always wanted to find a lightning

whelk? And isn't there one just outside, lips

down to the mound of ground, whispering?  And
hadn't I imagined I'd find it where it really be-
longed, and on its own terms: the water it was

cauldroned in and among the witches

squeezing their tits for libations into the grin

because see? the meat's gone I mean something's

eaten it or plucked it from its knuckled grip,

something has insisted, beak or finger (do

octopi (it's not octopi is it, it's octo-

pusses) like whelk do they snuggle the shell

up to their beak and sucker it some with one

of their eight arm 240 sucker cups or even

fleecing with one of their three (it's not three?

it's two?) different hearts and innumerable beats 

to work the bellows of their gills and do they ink

a little for sweet measure and does the whelk let

go I mean let itself go because there's

a difference right, on the way something lets 

go, it's the force of what's tugging right? something
like gravity or something charismatic or something
that's just the right amount of invisible or the right
amount of getaway pressure or get away come to me baby 

pressure and the muscle either flexes or relents, right?

Am I right to say that after, and I mean long after it's all

done, the shell's left barren and bereft

of itself (the shell is bereft of itself, right?)

because here it is in New Hampshire face 

down in a garden I inherited in the winter

and this is my first spring here, and only now,

because the snow is mostly gone, have I found 

it which takes me back to my first question but

not the one I asked, it's not my question about

whelks, its the one she asks in the epigraph 

(won't you read it again) (won't you?)  or shall I

press it against your ear with my lips and the tip

of my tongue before you abandon me for once
and entirely?  But what's that you say about the lightning
whelk?  That what I found isn't lightning? That
it's knobbed?  Like knuckles coming up
from a fist?  Isn't that what you said, finally?

when prompted for care

when prompted for care 
you choose:

cashmere: cotton: merino: because weather (sky/otherwise)
red: yellow: black: because visibility (need/incognito)

jeans: skirt: bare naked: because dressed (the last never/otherwise)
always: once upon a time: because pleasure (comfort/overrides)

kissing: hugging: distance glancing: because flirty (married/otherwise)
pucker: stiff: swift: because aroma (habit/foreplay)

talk: whisper: hold my tongue: because keeping peace (blood/otherwise)
lie: truth: implode: because nevernever (always/all ways)

whiskey: gin: hot brew: because never mind take it all (neat/otherwise)
water: tonic: self-ground whole bean: because stomach (moaning/morning)

fish: chicken: nothing at all: because hunger (teethtongue/otherwise)
trout fillet: breast and leg: empty plate: because uninspired (flesh/bone/no)

wake up: sleep late: never sleep: because blink (pillow/otherwise)
blink: dream: blink : or or or sheep: because counting (hoof/hoof/ boy
                                                                                         down the lane wool)

fiction: mystery: sci-fi: because facts (stated/otherwise)
western: Scottish Highlands: Venus: because sit your ass (or stand/genuflect)

stay: go: waver after her latestlast extubation: because who knows (dying/otherwise)
pull up a chair: I got to get home: I don't know how long (it takes/it takes)

write this: type this: say this out loud: because instructions (follow/or other wise)
ball point: qwerty: tongue and teeth: because: eat ! eat! (starve/no don't, please) eat.

Looking Up

Total non-retention has kept my education

from being a burden to me.

                                                 Flannery O'Connor

                                                 The Habit of Being

It's winter trees that seem (or seam)

against the lilac

sky (I've made off

with that from someone else but God

for the life of me I can't tell) branch

and twig and picked

and puckered shut rhyzome

that, now you have to look up for it,

call to mind the central nervous system

(like it's some train station

like if you think about it it kinda is)

I saw on exhibit last fall, the tall

rigid Plasticine filigrees reaching

out placating or supplicating or I mean

it seems leaves falling and rotting on their own

on the bottoms of swamps on the banks

of streets or country sideroads,

how those old stone walls have come

to be covered by winter after winter

of salts and sands and resilient 

varieties of moss or this one leaf

I saw yesterday it was a butterfly it was

a chipmunk with a hunk of something

on its tongue it was a nose or a throat

and it was what it was: a wintered

over oak leaf roan and not so

fragile as you may think and still

ain't it something under this sky ain't it

something lookit, aint it some

crisp and biting morning come up

whole come up from the bottom

how the pain starts in the toe

but you don't know it until the nerve

says so, until it runs all the way up,

up and breathless, until it says so,

until it zips all the way back

like a sizzling hot rivet tossed

and caught on the dead center chest

pocket on the top of the mop of hair

and aint that blaze a sun you've aw hell

Christ falling from the sky all been

looking up the whole time for?

Self Portrait I: Point of View Shift: Considering Rothko

Self Portrait I: Point
of View Shift: Considering Rothko

for Dylan D.


Maybe today's the day to make something

of Rothko's blocks of falling or coming up
from the bottom swatches of colors maybe
that's what I need to decide when I stand or
sit or lay beside the broad wide blocks
and mull and study and weigh the race he had to have made with his rages and the shades
of his plagues and the great pace or gra-
dation or taking away spaces to make
an engagement of waves say a ravishing
layer and layer and layer and layer
of radiance break through but too if you
the you that wants to opens with him
the intimacy it takes the ecstasy it takes
to cut the tubes of paint into and away
from the palate and scalpel and slice
and divide and find behind the "White
Center" and  "The Untitled's" the long
possibles, of structure  of turpentine
of the nebulous edges that dampened
his morass by all means please
by all means

In Your Anxiety...Remember

In Your Anxiety...Remember

for my student Summer W.

In your anxiety you still
have your eight
fingers and your two thumbs in
your anxiety you still have

to open them remember
they are like the wings
they are remember when
you played

them against the light
and they made shades
and became
in flight in that light

a type of bird right
at the pause of your wrists
bird and bird they moved
you and you were

moved.  And the wall
and the spotlight was enough
in that moment and in that
the moment was
enough.  You played

and made yourself
laugh: a rabbit a panting dog
a bird.  And lately:
thumb to thumb

the C'd letter the deaf
recognize so well as one
of their own in right
and left hand they come together

and strike up
a conversation in love.
If the fist of your heart
is rigid, undo your digits

and put them right
hand first over your tight
and throbbing losses.  And with
what you have of your left palm press

it against the strumming
knuckles
lay them flat against their kin
and let them become

your stethoscope
let them pump your wondrous
shadow with trickles
of light let the fire

that flairs and dies and flairs
and dies only subside just enough
to calm you and to speak to you
in tongues

in your tongue
as though you were your own
mother and your own baby
calming one to one in the storm

percussion percussion

percussion percussion

if echoes were touch they would be

a too early garbage

truck whose back-up

lights slide up the ceiling

and the warning

noises of reverse become a hospital

concert competing for all the other

street sounds

we trade in and carry up and down

endlessly inside our flights

of stairs

in our brain like bricks like cedar shingles

like slate making itself into

slate and making itself into

every place we want to stay either briefly

or for a long long forever long time

at ease or in our snaking aches

that claim and reclaim

that summit without us (though

its our own body and we carry ourself

and ourselves like take take-away

these days because that's what's gone

and is remarkably simple: a single

one finger digit you choose 

your favorite and your favor

and one wrist or one lip to lift to the collarbone

unzip with permission without permitting again you

choose the whole throat exposed

oh 

and consider this:  its only half a touch

if there's no groan no low moan

that opens those lonely homes where a she

a she a he a they sit alone unclothed and only a radio

and only the snow and only they are told

how slow it's all going 

to go like a stone on furlough forever forever from

the tone of throats hoping that the only

grief stationed there will stay at least until 

the wind at least until the next stone usurping

until listen to it fall that noise

between top and bottom like reach like see

Keats and his Grecian Urn believe me we see we see

but do we see because touch is as much

an utterance its this that lifts

the lips from the skin that insists the hips

and the wrists are instant and in

we've become this haven't we: museum pieces

reaching for museum and even in reaching

we are receding and sweetly easing 

into alarm

bridges

maybe some of the difference is
what it spans: water drawn
seduced if you will and regurgitated

in a horrendous flirt that the moon
makes us, because it's the moon
and it can, succumb to or turn

our back on but unwittingly.  Hart
Crane's Brooklyn Bridge swallowed
him the way he always wanted

to be swallowed the way he always
wanted to swallow.  And Oppen's
Golden Gate, the famous cables

of each knitted by hand and dropped
and drawn and quartering
the sky, if you look up, and cutting

the water if you look down,
if you fancy yourself, if you don't,
falling and falling.

A Storied Hour

jalopy
peterborugh, nh

A Storied Hour

“When the doctors came they said she had died 
of heart disease - of the joy that kills.”
― Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

 In an hour Cormac McCarthy will walk us in
     the Orchard and tell us he sees
     three thin skins of ancient peach
     take to their each and own beds and close
     and fold the cold over them like men
     with no teeth

In an hour Flannery O'Connor will till her hill-
     billy tongue with an Aquinas claw
     cultivator and let him take her
     to bed and till her until she glows from Vespers
     to Matins, and inside her bruised biceps are
     finally unclasped from the red wolf's jaw

In an hour Rita Dove will thumb the curios
     in an ancient case after case of
     relics of capital land and velvet kneelers
     slumped and dimpled under a Bronto bone
     while some one's on their way through
     to whistling Dixie through squeezed

     cheeks, their molar bones a forensic
     dentist's (years on mind) butter and dough

In an hour George Oppen will sing his "Ballad"
     and I'll tell you I know this one I know
     it and I'll tilt into it like I was born
     there like I was home and like I was 
     kinda kin to Bishop stripped from her Fundy
     people when her mother's jaw was zipped
  
     shut in the madhouse or Oppen gone some
     to Mexico a long long ride from the Island
     and the lobsterman's rotten teeth

And Jesus in an hour a girl will shoot her mother
     (accidentally she'd been led to believe)
     and black honey will cure her every disease
     and Eudora Welty will cover her grieving 
     mother with a green curtain and in an hour
     a mystic Siminopio will let his bees 

     breathe for him and be his lipless upper lip
     and he'll keen for them when they leave and they will
     they will leave and not discreetly and he'll forget, 
     for the love of them,     how to eat
     
     

Half Moon Morning

Half Moon Morning


Years back in the slack of the path
to the apple orchard after I'd come up from
the gathering at the lesser creek when bats
almost half had gone back packing
their abdomens in their flat and grabby
geometry I'd wanted to watch the moon
go down through the bones and shoulders
and ricketic elbows of the crones

hunched low from their constant coming through
who can remember how long they'd been
rooted yet another lock-jawed winter.  Once
when I'd walked the orchard before a clean
thaw I'd slipped and skidded hip to hip
and ended with a rash unforgiving kiss
on my chin and the wind insisted

the winter wasn't finished and I limped
twisted as the row on row sisters and I didn't
believe after that in early spring only slack
black coal and enough of a knowing of a glow
of cedar and pine and apple and the humble
hunch  and meager thumbs-up crumble of icy mud
and the almost audible ritz of the Eastern screech

quitting the mid-branch to then get to
sifting the still hillocks where voles or moles
or who all's been told to go home though took
their time took their sweet ole time nosing
the slip thin tongues of green beneath
last year's leaves shy as novice penitents
and new and virgin in their starvations

coming out of their first winter numb
and hungry and the bird curling around
them from above and lifting them and some-
thing somewhere sounds and something
somewhere rises and pines for them
and the cedars light up and the trees
beneath and above me and winter is giving
way like she does and has always done
to apples and, owls and some anticipating,
and select, to May.


Easter Saturday Moon

Revenant

Revenant 

Depending it could be an ambry or a stow-

away in tin or mahogany it could be it could be a recess deep

enough to keep peace and feed by a certain priest though 

it's too dark to tell still I bet don't you it's

blessed nonetheless this hand 

a tabernacle of one way or transparent

glass you tell me if God lives there and the coniferous resin's

  a chrism whiff  in this reliquary if God

lives there and is still

 lit and ciborium stiff and the veined 

leg of the Lamb's  Gethsemane

is given a leg up rolled like tailor's stitch

marker for the two stiff as starch raised sky

 and bell celebrating high thumbs as suppose

a revanant walked once up the old meeting

house pulpit steps in Amesberry and watched

the congregation of three asleep against their debted

membership dens like the small hunks of vermin turds firm

and scattered in the organ bellows where once the breath

of God lived and was pumped by foot and those same

thumbs as broke the host if God lived

in this place and in the forged key one of three

or four come down through the centuries to still

lay claim to the cylinder, bolt, box, and strike

plate in the aubried ambry where

the sift  and silt of talked on

bread where the blasphemous tabernac

where flesh and purulent wine where 

God lived and once was the lost

and gone prodigal come back

and benevolently

tugged from the peg

Add caption

and hug/lugged to the pub

and the keep's greasy fingers reached

in to squeeze the new flesh living

there since the top's been propped

on the pulpit rail

and sweet as you please

as small as his pinkies baby snakes

(it being dark in the meeting

house much of the year)

when the preacher's kid

pranking and turning loose his trousers 

before the key's turned and the congregation's

led through the front

door peep hole where bending a cupped unblinking

eye on either side see the rise of the pulpit

and the high well lighted windows behind

are a sigh and by what else

but a revenant God a sigh nigh 300

years wide and ossified.

Complexity in the Silhouettes of Blue

Complexity in the Silhouettes of Blue

Veins for blood but not blood proper
                                           unless you're
        an octopus and then you're copper you're all hot under
compression of the cold cold sometimes opaque sometimes not
deep sea.

And not certainly not if you're the mother
lode of gold but maybe if you're a lodestone and only if you hold it close
to your nose and open pupil and boldly, depending on
how old your soul is,

your savoring.  Or seeing as you need to be sometimes,
you're glossy as a grinding
stone gone idle where a bluebottle or two
buzzes and sometimes when time
is more than idle they light on
the slick glide/slide and make more and more and more and still

more of themselves a highway of phzzzzzing phzzzzzzzzing.    Or how
after striking my thumb and there's the instant light and instant not light I'd like
the whole mouth
of someone I love to close over
my throbbing
and allow both cheeks go each to their own
side of the arena of teeth and then once

                                                 we're both breathing
that thumb can come to ride its bluest light
inside my hiding

like how in some nights
the blueblack seems its own line of Fugates
or if you're enough
of a non-believer those shadow dolls
all our limbs become and because we want them to last

forever

we cut them

we cut them in
                              to

     silhouettes into dependable paper retro-
                                                                    spections
from the time before
flashes of light and daguerreotypes were burned
glass before dark and darker rooms

we'd you and me caress the cameo of our very own
sideways
faces and watch the drops of our want
raise the sahde from black to blue-
black which is the color of our hunt
once we are out from under the ageless
wreck the color of our grab and capture
the color of our pressure
the color of our possession but only after
we let go.

30 Day Leave

30 Day Leave

That night we drank warm whiskey   

in our parked car

beyond woods now lost to the suburbs,   

I fell in love with you.  

                           Bruce Weigl  

                           Elegy for Peter

Once, smoke rose through the close-strung one hundred

to a rung herring posted on their own stake hung rafter high to steep

the dry heat and make the fair or unfair exchange 

(depending on yours and theirs childhood desires) 

complete. Months after you died your mother accidently burned

down the family herring shed you'd set back above the tide

before you left the first time and while she’s forgiven especially
even the loss of the entire dory load of the glossiest-

goddamn it-by- Jesus fish she’d ever been told

to stake, gill to mouth to gill to mouth and up to pine smoke

once they come from the brine soft as your soon blue cheek
only three weeks into your 30 day leave.  She sees their blood

and grease and scales stuck on your jeans and you seemingly
asleep beneath the steering wheel she bent beneath to see you

and past you and the end you came to after come twenty some

odd days of before ending being a three-year tour.  Home by

Christmas 1968, a changed man from your boots to the spooks

and lost gouls shimmying through entire two or entire three nights

lighting small fires in that shed and closing the wind in

on them and subduing them all like a mystic you’d read up

on some months before your complete break

and how you’d come to see yourself only ever leaving

the living and their villages and smelling instead of them
their every day lamps within them like dinner invitations,

surprised by the quiet Buddhists and their shy obliged

smiles while rice hoards were turned over by the stock

of your gun and into the sky and while some French Catholic
crucifixes and their last-to-collapse-brass (sifting through  

you wrote home once how you thumbed the verdigris
rib and abs and throat of the God you wanted to take

as your own hope or as that open invitation hospitable as smoke
the way your mother stoked the smoked bone you left off

tending that last night to go for that last drive a quick drive
and she pulled the stakes down onto her face and opened

every smoke-stoked bone and showed your ghost and the both
of you left off knowing the other so closely then and how

you knew each other now the way fish know water

after they’re removed from it and after it’s removed

from them and slowly and all them given up to foreign places
like rooftops  like dry land or rice and then throw everything

up, everything they and you and she were ever made
for and smile a practiced, ironic smile while doing it.

Silhouettes of Blue

Silhouettes of Blue

Veins are sheaths of blood but not blood proper

                                                                (unless you’re

an octopus and more certainly still under the at once steady

and then not at once pressure of copper and of water)

maybe I want to say that the veins are in some way

the same as the veins of my mother

                                                who became

maybe in her last days became a lodestone (they’re

a hue of blue, no?) for addicts and fanatics

                                                or if not that than a grinding

                stone where if she’s come up as some kind of idle,

                a bluebottle say, that can ride and ffffffffzzzzphzzzzz        hide

                and sometimes fly

                because they’re never idle ffffffzzzzzbzzzzzzzffffzzzz

                when they’re alive

                                                it comes that as they light

                                and glide/slide on the thick lip slick with gibberish side

                                aligning the stroke side of her left eye

                                I’d try to see like one or even some of them

how there was then suddenly

                                five and counting

each against my mind’s palm

my thumb touching

my talon touching

my tongue

to take me back

                                                                to the page I’m studying

                which is my mother

                who is my other limb

                or maybe simply

                my other thumb

                stuck against the sticky bun

                my tongue as become

                after the hammer’s come

and is cephalopod dumb

with pain and the ungainly

stum

ble                                         how I’d absently swung

the hammer of memory

down without

really telling                        myself                  I was still

there and it was all the gravity and grace I had Jesus

I can’t even tell you when the news came she was found blue and going

bluer

on the bathroom tiles

what I was then was two pieces of pine and I was the ballpeen

hammer or I was another sort the one with the claw

I was sending each to a meeting together

and after

long after I’ll say of the way blue

looked inn her when she was all through

it wasn’t

the kind of blue I’d ever like, I knew,

in my life

but a different blue, edging the spectrum into a hue

of cyan blue the shade of some

octopuses and  I’ll say

it’s the feeling of it I want at night just

beneath the swell

of the getting tight shock of her dying like

that and how in the light

of some kinds darks I’ve known

                                                there comes some fragile shadow

                like cut-

paper silhouettes

the ones that want me

to be reminded that before flashes

                                of light inevitably charred and oxidized

                                                                all of my life

                                before there was a

way to settle the negative

                                spaces of blue

                                                                in the dark rooms and keep them in my cooo

we’d have our quiet caresses

and the hardstone cameos of our own slanting glances,

and every drop of our reconciling

want was razed from the shade to the fingerprint arches, loops, and whirls

how yours went black to blue-to every furnace hue,

how for a moment you were the very

color of our last grab, our final possession,

the pressure of four fingers and swelling head of a thumb left hovering

under the skin of the mother I want

to pack cool clean peat upon

while her old bruises splay and migrate and stray

like furiously stirred water going whirlpool mindless

and then, just like that, just because it has to,

settling like calm, like shy and soft shelless

mollusks tucking under their dependable eight, waiting.

Temporarily Closed

Ida O'Keefe
Lighthouse

Temporarily Closed


It's a rare Brueghel without people.

                                               Richard Hugo
                                               Brueghel in the Doria

Times like these maybe we go back and maybe we are made
to go back and wish we'd asked the man or woman we can't

remember which but we remember ignoring the one on the floor
of the great gallery we should have asked just what was he trying to get

at see that slip
of shade and the way

a bird this bird of literal
paradise has taken

to the air in foreboding, see
and we know this only

for Brueghel naming it Paradise Landscape with the Fall of Man
see the bird above the people, there, see it take toward the upper

branches of the Do
Not Touch Tree and Eve

and Adam are really supposed
to be the key players here but

they're so small
they're almost

insignificant almost
people-

less.  Maybe if you had the ear of the docent who's trained an eye
away from the painting and instead has to be the lioness in the fore-

ground with her
lifted paw, or

has to be the muscled
lungs of the horse

or has to be
the bored

leopard licking
and licking...

My instincts tell me it ends here or that it should end here because
they're all gone - all of them - and these Breughels

that Hugo saw
once are now

what's among
the chaff of

the unseen and I
wonder because

both men, Hugo and Breughl I mean liked to catch an instant 
in mid air: a lifted skirt, a leg in the distant water, the arc

of a stone
in the poem

before the one
about Breughel

how it covers all
the years between

Tiberius and today and all those seven seconds they say it took
for all his enemies to go to pulp on the stones below.  Today

it's the galleries
that are closed

and the cliffs are
eager for feet.

Today we open
books  we open

packages of stale
crackers we open

old molds of cheese
and scrape them

clean of their quiet
snowflake shapes, today

we people our own brain with the kibble we've finally taken
the time to unzip from the burlap sack of our meninges, from our hoarded

stores.  Are we
more humble now?

Will we thumb
each separate piece

and bring it to
our lips

and let it
open us will we say

sweet God how long
have I walked

under such a bough
as this and never

once begged
or been begged

to reach to touch to fall on my knees to lullaby the resisting skin to OH GOD bite?

neglect and nostalgia

Neglect and Nostalgia

I saw stones that had come

From a great purple distance

Huddle around the front door.

                                                Charles Simic

                                                Note Slipped Under a Door

I

We moved in with drifting

snow and boxes and stones and pieces

of our old

lives stacked like stove

wood in our arms.  In all
of it we discovered a foundling,

and a new crevice or crack
needed, or an altar,

to be a god grim or grinning again

momentarily, some

of it is now being

snowed on, what was used in our last
house to prop the unleveled door

had gone and fallen again off
a small cliff
of moss again, neglected.

Some of it is under cover and still

in boxes, like feathers

of dead birds, no use at all

for what they were created

and made to do: lift the you

that was in the breast-

bone of the crow.  You know
I have a penchant for crows, don't
you? I’ve collected their feathers
for years and their caws for that
matter, caught offerings on abandoned
woods roads

and they hang some above my head

on a wall in my new old
home and make me

imagine make me regret

make me briefly insane.

II

Still, I have come to feel the terms

brief and momentarily

as shifts in definition

and being and not all linear.
Have you?

Despite that I sometimes

frantically want it to be

that if it is nothing but arterial,

that if it had a specific

beginning it could never be

pinpointed or precisely            tracked

with an eye or a finger

or even sitting close and still

like an ear?  I’ve gone

way off the rails here.  I’ve lost

some compass of my belongings,

simple as pots and pans and bedding,

simple as coffee and the kettle

it’s made in.  I can’t get back. 

But maybe my cheeks can,

taking in the fragrance of the day.

Maybe my tongue

will come close enough

to what I was aiming for though even

that is washed off as quickly

as it is set down, and the rest

of it is up to the nose, how I

draw the thing back

to my face and lips

time and time again, how

the smell of it drifts

and wears thin

and just as someone is calling

out one of the several names

I am known by and it bites me

sharp and draws blood

and I blush and don’t hesitate

to put it to my tongue and I’m

okay but am asked anyway

but can’t say why

only it’s nothing really

it’s nothing.  It isn’t anything

I packed in the van

but like a stray it followed me

and who among me can shake 
what follow them thus

and who among me trusts it

is will be there until spring

until what’s fallen on it
from the start

of November melts off entirely?

III

and I kick myself

even though they’re only

stones, oceans and oceans
of stones stowed
and stowing
like old walls
like stray animal pounds

for mine and everyone else's
neglect and nostalgia

On What's Been Erased by Flame or Blade

sunrise through the lantern

On What's Been Erased by Flame or Blade

And the things, even as they pass,
understand that we praise them.
transient, they are trusting us
to see them--us, the most transient of all.
                                                                  Rainer Maria Rilke
                                                                  The Ninth Elegy

My childhood rooms lit themselves
on fire somehow and burned and while they burned
the collapsible collapsed and the disposable was disposed and
the cats and the ghosts went cold
in the bathtub.  When it was all over
and swept clean, when the meeting of the main carrying beams
split and went down and opened
their old throats to their first growth woods songs
I wonder if it was the weight they cracked under, the weight of holding up
for all those years and I wonder if the saw
or the loggers song was resinous after being let off
work finally and the tune went from mourning
to celebration as he turned his back on everything he had
felled.  Bedroom.  Kitchen.  Woodshed.  Chicken
barn.  And all the rest
anyone would ever need to make a living
in.  When it was all knocked flat
and hauled off or plowed into the hole

left open, where when it was dark and in winter
after winter and deep into a lot of springs
the vegetable bins would get thin
and thinner still like the people
above them--and when the old dirt was bull-
dozed and before the new basement was poured thirty or so
feet back from the old cellar
it was like it was nothing, like there was nothing
there at all, not ever
like in 1848 when the land was
looked upon before it had potential
while the pines while the birches while the birds...

Listen:

What's cleared off after all
this time, doesn't it finally sigh and lift first one
lung then the other up to the bone and doesn't it coax an old
muscle to go from being cold to opening
the slow, slow valve as though a mouth were put to
blow upon it, lips close together almost like a piccolo
player, almost like a whistler, almost like
a new flower of flame.