What of It?

What of It?

What of it?  The grain

bag limp in the middle 

half gone invitation

to rats if it weren't

for the sentry tom, his

knotted paw (caught

in some trap or shot

and all the more caustic

for it) and the dust

coming up in the mote

of sun early enough

from may on through

who needs the brief

kerosene limp in her faux

crystal base and teetering

fingers filling her in

the dark after the globe's

come off and laid new born

baby like in the dry

sink clean of the weeks

of keeping the wick just

clear enough of the draft

burner to see what all

of the buckets and the odd

missed thus unmilled

kernel picked up by the hob

of his boot and left off

on the way to the coop what of

it easing itself in the mud

if there is some and it 

dulling in the rut before

some dove comes to

sooth the view into 

a descending fog in front

of the sun and what's already

come and gone and done

its dust job on that grain

bag, heavy enough fog

that won't burn off.  And all

that walks in and out 

of ill or good will be omens

will be thrown some briefly some

forever by the jittery needle

excited by the iron shoved

in the fire to light the pinched

end of last summer's news,

the come and gone of men

and the old hen on the block.

as, presumably,

as, presumably 

(believe with me)

for jessie t

made of marsh or creek

grass or river reeds

or even some pieces

of each - see her reach

between the brief

breezes (and see)

they lift the wispy sheen

of her feathers between

her wings, above her knees

of dragon-feet green, her eased

ability, scaly wefted see

her reach for ophidian confetti-

trembling- moon-steeped, beak

cleaved memory.  then see each

writhen twist need

to leak free of her, 

cleaved in two, in three, daily

in legions, heaved, but discreetly

see?

seeing christina

seeing christina

barn
from wyeth's grave

hard to say which way she's facing

back to any gazer who invades her

world easy as walking in for tea

assuming thee's plenty of cream 

if it's taken that way or something

sweet if it's handy or even necessary

or water drawn up from the pump

and sitting still in the kettle 

on the burner plate.  Ignore her

stench. Ignore the loose floor

boards or the obvious worn to gloss 

spots she's as acquainted with as if

they were her lover, and her hip

bone and tipped lip of pelvis bone

honed as on a stone (though if 

you go to the barn you'll know

such a stone) go barefoot in the close

of the morning in the close 

of the noon hour in the close 

of the whole length of the day

and evening and caress where 

her body and the grim grip of her

fist is a heron on the thin barren birch

limbs sticking through the river

ice in winter.  how do we know

it's the old house she's seeing tell me

what do you see?  fields like wheat?

really blueberry beneath.  Wheel

tracks thick as troughs muddy pot

holes doesn't she have to slide through

on her way across the flat horizon

the painter has tracked you to?  Or

the sixteen windows facing 

the sea aren't there sixteen see

the deep receding nearly green 

matte sans sheen.  The one economy

of a frugal rag the shifting from

house to barn and the swallows 

against the lift of the different

wind in this acre of field the ascension

of her coming chignon and thin

thin aggression of the ladder 

against the rafters  

roll call

briefly

roll call

to explain grace requires

a curious hand.

                                                Marianne Moore

                                                the Pangolin

These days and days we’ve stayed

in place and yet stray

from the grace of immaculate spaces, 

the dogged way of tracing

the abeyance of dates,
their traceable

fingerprint places: how their being
there is a shape how their not

being 

there is 

a 

shape: how

they have names how

they have places how

they have cravings how

they have made ways of how to be

named aloud and not dismissed

because listen, when you call them
out  they’ll stray back into their throat.  
Like ticking the roll with your mechanical

pencil, quick check quick capital
A into the string of teeny
squares that for now will run
the full twelve weeks

blank and clean to the coming end:

weeks and weeks and in my tired

dated way, a paper layout

to make it all keep up and in place

keep it easy,

keep it being

keep it needing to be

seen. Take heed:

lean like you used to

lean, each of you: how you

listened, remember listening?

to the whole

goddamn list predicting (not

really) it

your name

what pen or sketch of serial

will has nested there

between two others (unless

you’re first unless you’re

last)

and you wait it out until it arrives

like every soothing routine

it arrives somehow

in time.  But now.  See? see?

see that Friday doesn’t need me

to say it’s Friday

to be Friday.  It’s all honest

and arbitrary but for the pure

dependence of it, the box

on the calendar

and what’s inside

to tell us

where and what we need to

see and be and re-

member              .

before it’s all thrown off its delicate

metronome in the midst of a plague

in the midst of a quarantine.  Tomorrow

the calendar says

I’ll be fifty.  Today it says

I’m forty-

nine.  I’m counting.  I have been

counting.  I’m right

where I belong, pausing all

that stalled indulgence like when,

when, when will the delivery come,

when will I hold it out and not

open it and not put it on the table

or the vanity or the porch rail if

the sun’s out

and watch for the weather to turn

watch for the afternoon to come on, watch it

March watch its sun come closing in later

(incrementally) than it did yesterday.  Or like phases

of the moon.  or illnesses.  But truly, whose

looking?

Before I reach for my darling

knife to open this gift (not the sun and not the moon

but if I could, now’s the time

wouldn’t you say?) I think of slitting

the edges on the ends first

and do, to ease the middle forward

and toward my rib and count

the seconds it will take to make it

finally

after all this gone by time,

see the light I have to light

if my fire's bright and not all that guardedly

or needing to be seeing

as what’s being

lifted or

poured or

tumbled . . .it’s been

a long, long time coming  up

or down or staying the same

marked or not marked Friday come Monday

or whatever day makes me

say today today

today is the day the last

day in this day and age that I’ll be this age

and I take it out for a walk

like it was a dog wanting

green grass or wanting

another dog’s pee tree

or even sweeter

like it was not any one day at all

you feel me? and being

such creatures who move as clumsily

or as gracefully as Marianne

Moore’s pangolin, depending

on how it needs to utilize

its armor

or its tongue

or its teeny eyes

or its absolute

vulnerability . . .tell me who?

you? needs

names for days of the week to be

boxed and shipped off

to the roll call to be stuffed

by incurious and injurious hands

so that by the time we arrives to be

opened we're all in shards or sand

or chunks some as big as my hand

some ground down to powder

some just relieved of its one small handle

now in three pieces

now resting in the bottom

of the vessel it was meant to be held,

light of the world it is, up with.

clemency

   

 

clemency

                                    It's not

about the light - but how dark

        it makes you depending

on where you stand.

                                Ocean Vuong

                                Eurydice

 

if i could pause in this fixed spot

i could watch how the drop of water on the top

of the birdbath's brim will

cast back the moon, falling half full. watch

her revolving on the olive branch

of morning. watch the water in the bowl,

cracked and compact with mid may's still

icy night, stay calm enough

to splinter her setting reflection. if i could

stop in that fixed spot or yet let

myself move with the moon i'd tell

myself she would break out of that drop

of water and slip from far to the lip

of the bowl close to me and let herself 

in or at least spill on my knees in the draught

of wind, the coming sun, before

she slips and slips under the gazing

ball in the shade of the brief azaleas  

pause

yesterday we watched a fox

stalk the goslings.  the pond

their world.  the field beyond

another unmarred nebula.

everything is still winter

gold, the daffodils on the hill

rogues.  who knows

how they came to be

that far away from the road

the border garden our neighbor's

property line.  free

as they are  and as seeing as

they can be leaf

green and briefly pink

in their middles like vixen

tongues they know nothing

or everything about

the hunger of pups

or goslings.  and brief

the black paw raised

and brief the black foot

paused, grass, daffodil, water

and too

The peasant families have to work 

hard. The woman next door keeps pounding 

rice in the cold. My hostess 

kneels to serve me wild 

rice, Moonlight shining 

on the full white plate.

Li Po

and too

such a moon is a globular bowl

of rice tipped on her rim 

spilling or ever

about to.  you see

the benevolence of this, 

sunlight at night.  It is 

a cool luxury and so 

crucial to the hungry: 

at least one scintilla will

reach them we hope it will

not burn their tongue

and we hope it will

 be enough

May 11, 2020

Weathered Spire

But only a mother can walk

                             with the weight

of a second beating heart.

                                         Ocean Vuong

                                         Headfirst

For the odd five minutes or so

and depending on 

the exact angle of the sun

and depending on

the cloud cover and if

a bit of rain in the night

the sun turns the small stand

of tall pines from green to briefly

copper.  Or bronze. Depending

on your vantage or your 

astigmatism.  I know,

I said that yesterday,

in a different poem.  But it was in

a different poem.  It was Mother's

Day and i was thinking maybe

she'd been facing me 

from the ease and being so tall now

and so far gone she'd augur

my day and I'd be briefly free

of her and believe there were 

times when she was free of me too

like she wanted to be.

It's different today, the copper/

bronze, because I've waited

for it, it's not new anymore.  

I watched the compass of my thoughts

tempted by lesser magnitudes

hove on that invisible anchor

and drift finally, though still

trembling, settle true.  I don't know

how to use a real compass but I can 

say I am gravitating to the shifting

blue the sun is illuminating.  Today

the poet said it was a different blue

than the mantle they painted

on Mary and how that color came

to be coveted by Popes.  Like 

they owned it.  Like we children

of some lesser god were so hunched

under our yokes we couldn't look 

up and see how broad and free

it was over our heads.  Hail Mary.

There are some mothers your grace

can't save though maybe saving

isn't at all what they wanted and maybe

you knew that all

along. Beneath that blue robe

you're the same color

as the canopy of pines and weeping

beeches.  When the sun comes

from such a longitude as it does

along the drawn assumptions of 

men trying to get there, wherever

there is, these brief days mean

I'll see it and I'll think of you 

and her like I think without thinking

come sunup I'll be doing something

motherly but I'm not sure what.

Clouds Moving East

Prayer, 

said Mechthild of Magdeburg, 

brings together two lovers, 

God and the soul, 

in a narrow room where they speak much 

of love...

The Cloud of Unknowing

Already the moon is blunted,

a melon left on the marble

counter for days and days

in its ripening

rind, its sheer mass pressed

by gravity. The suit

is heavier than any one 

body, sentient or not, can

endure in its wild 

and flaunting ignorance.

Imagine, bereft of being free

of the tree or vine

it complined within,

that it's not 

tethered, that it's not

dependent on fingers

and palms and come-up-from-

the-bottom buoyancy

to lift it from its own 

mass and save it by making it

briefly, weightless.   Let me

ask you: 

are you sometimes covetous

of the wind that the tops

of the trees, needles and leaves

sift and sieve? Or fractured

by it? Because the sun is the sun,

because a combination of this 

and an early May 

morning when after 

the clouds going east

have been carded and thinned,

there's still

a bit of the green 

in the canopy of the king's 

pines is lit into a rust 

so like copper,

so like bronze there's been

a reverse verdigris?  And

throwing caution up you want

to extend your gratitude

for seeing such a portent

that you forget your skin

and bones and strings

of sinew and compromised

by the weight

of gravity and you fly

up to take the host 

into your own fingers

and communion dew

onto your tongue 

and for the rest of your brief

life you remain miraculous

and unpoisoned?

It's Rare

After Surgery
19 days old

It's Rare

after reading Cherry Blossoms 

by Tess Gallagher

but sometimes first reads are so stunning

  and cast such a spell they beg to never

be read again

 and only in the very least held

held in the taut bowl of the tongue

like the uncasked whisky

after its waited the way

whisky waits for years and years

in the hidden billet

of its maker.   Say you were charged

with waiting like that, all that time while  

a favored tree comes to flower, say

that such an orchard was

planted as a chroniker

and it made modesty an art form

and every year refused

a really big show.  Say the bees

alone appreciate

its unfecund beginnings

and take the news

back to their hive as their own

devotion.  Say the only way

to know it's all ready -

the poem - the spirit - the honey

is to watch the way a word, a breath, 

a hive comes alive at precisely

the right hour and time 

the queen gets briefly loosed of her duties

and bivouacks into the crony

undergrowth and some of her all  

ten thousand virgins girdle her

while the far off efflorescence,

sssssshocked with all that calling,

is song drop song drop song drop 

on and along their petals in a sort 

of May squall that to watch 

in the debouching heat of the morning 

is to unbung the abiding into the copper ladle,

to sniff with the expertise

of a goddess.  And because

the tongue is always the last to know,

if you think about how

breath works, how taste

works.  Try this: breathe. Breathe

all the way in to where

the tremor begins

and hold it there.  Hold it

while all around the outside of you

knocks and knocks to get in.

And it's days (and by then

it's changed and changed)

before you can

let it.

Translations Maybe the Most Arduous of Berths to Attend to

Translations

maybe because they are the most

  arduous of berths to attend to,

in deciphering a tongue do you coax it

over the roof of your own mouth like a heavy stone?

Do you choose the texture and do you choose

the if it will conduct?  Do you then choose the current

and the voltage you ramp to pass through it?

and is your own breath the conduit of speaking?

Tell me,

isn't the first an act of listening a tip of your

head and ear toward mouths of strangers, supplicant.

Isn't it a courtship of clime and season, isn't

it reading of all that's barometric at the time, and spiritic, 

isn't  it a betrothal of treasuries, of lexicons and those

enunciations coaxed from the mute or not so much

mute 

as new to the music new to the thew new

to the movement of the jaw and the cheeks

how each squeeze receives the spleen

before releasing, breathing out all they'd held

in the cauldron or crucible (you choose

if you're listening) of their translations,

in the museums of the compilation of all

their worlds and it's then they know they have

the right word 

the one that's been misspoke

misheard understood, misused, mistranslated 

accidentally or purposely perverted all along,

when the audience en masse lift  their ears

up like something's being poured 

into the precious grail w

complete with handle ear

grips and allows the new translation

to be poured, a lost wax relief, and be

rebuilt reshaped renamed the way the poets

the way the Desert Fathers and Mothers

the way Avalokitesvara and her cask

of pure libations ease the beaten skin

of the dragons all the lost souls kick

in her direction until she's a pillar of dragons,

until she's the brief and eternal ear

and tongue of the masses, until calm

they come to search and take up their own

argot and waltz it to bed to do with it

what they will.

little spark

little spark


benign enough i suppose the mud
dauber pauses and crawls pauses
and crawls along the carrying beam
of the ceiling batting its body dropping
rising doing what spring bugs do
who are caught in the house with
something new to ponder.  earlier
i swatted it with a rolled up
pennysaver and it occurred to me
to consider there are only one or two
uses for a rolled up newspaper:
to light the end on fire so as to
lean it in to the fuel you've tee-
peed in the bowl to open the most
opportunity for smoke to go straight
through the roof and open flue
(depending on your purposes right
romance warmth possibly food)

and dogs.  the only other member of
the family who's not reading
the news or seeing cheap meet
my needs please and for pennies
please see i've scrapped them
and buried them into the hollow
bodies of pigs (or not to be out-
done or undone you choose) some
container less its cliche: a little
boy's lasting fascination with spider-
man or the square ceramic story
book not really practical for
the intended audience to grip
but it does tell a story and if
there are coins in it all the better
for sound effects about getting
lost and then found again or
if you start in the other direction
and depending on the way you turn
it of being found and then lost
again.  like this poor mud

dauber.  Lost.  come in on a coat
or an open door.  there's something
lazily furious about her search
for the way out.  the predictor
in me wants a heavier daily news
the new york times maybe to wack
it squished against the plaster. 
the guilty dog in me waits
patiently anxious for the master
to come home see what i've done
and act accordingly.  the worn
spot on my nose says enough
about how quick i am to come to
book.  some of me though
and maybe it's the same for you
too wants to be the rolled wad
itself a bun of ink and easy
dealing or glassless spy glass
a tunnel that on one end the palm
end or the eye end is dark and dead

but the other if i turn around
and say fuck cliches look look
there's a match struck there's land
ho! there's enough light coming
from the back end of that bug
and i can pide piper her ass
right on out of this place alive
no questions asked.

Homesick for Christina Olson

Homesick for Christina Olson

after Wyeth's Christina's World

he's famous for painting a lady

(though she'd never called her

self a lady)

lately come from her people's graves 

a righteous riot inside the secret

intimacy of the cemetery 

weeds, how she 

seems to teeter on her hip but really

it's her way of scudding meanly

by herself and her plaited frame

of bone and woven limbs, rude 

fingers and twisted pelvis of her some-

what diagnosed distrophy or my-

elitis she pulls herself by what grip

she can finger and widens her

strip between the farmhouse

and the grave her people wait

for her in, their days of climbing

lofts and stairs gone by

like a guest in a winter 

wind a blasted sea wind a goblin

sea captain and somehow a Hathorne

(the genealogy is true through,

her mother straight through,

to then past Nathaniel who slipped

in the 'w' and dropped the spiky 'e'

to keep himself as far away from

Salem condemnation as bloody fate

and taking his Seven Gables 

into fame like she, taking

 as her gaze toward her own place

into fame...tell me what do you

see in seeing: Christina or 

the autumn field or the farm's

barn or the three storied house

or the one or two swifts or swallows

falling in and out of the roof line

of the gable ends of the barn? 

something's suggesting sky, even

if the hill rises all around her, 

a pallat of autumn umbers and wind

coaxed grays.  Ok, not coaxed, not

on that crop.  Dictated really.  This 

is.  This is how it's going to be. Tell

me, haven't you known women

like her, sunk under the suffering

of their ferrous, their anvil and 

hammer life.  And haven't you sought

to validate that skin and that bone 

that waste of daily news under

the bum of the incontinent?  Leave it

to Wyeth, upstairs watching her

crawl back or toward, the story's

focus is variegated as the glass he sees

her through, determined too

and willing to strip down naked

for every waving blade of grass

for every crack in the path 

her hip has worn to polished clay.