rising. Blood’s what the wound keeps gushing.
WHAT I SEE IS THE LIGHT FALLING ALL AROUND US
To have understood some small piece of the world
more deeply doesn’t have to mean we’re not as lost
as before, or so it seems this morning, random bees
stirring among the dogwood blossoms, a few here
and there stirring differently somehow, more like
resisting stillness … Should it come to winnowing
my addictions, I’d hold on hardest, I’m pretty sure,
to mystery, though just yesterday, a perfect stranger
was so insistent that I looked familiar, it seemed
easier in the end to agree we must know each other.
To his body, a muscularity both at odds and at one
with how fragile everything else about him, I thought,
would be, if I could see inside. What’s the word
for the kind of loneliness that can feel like swimming
unassisted in a foreign language, for the very first time?
BLACK AND COPPER IN A CRUSH OF FLOWERS
Weapons thrown aside, despite
duty; smell of sorrow recalling mostly the sea,
even many years inland; lions devouring, right in
front of you, your best horse: everything’s
somebody’s history. Once, beside a windbreak of pines
and holly trees, I was told to forget having heard
what I was pretty sure
I’d just heard, he said, looking
through a window in whose reflection I carefully
watched myself undressing, not being looked at, and
not minding especially, though Yeah and meanwhile
all of it amounting to what now exactly, mister, I
wanted to say, but—
who says that? Rampant: that’s
what they call a lion when shown standing on its hind
legs in heraldry, heraldry as in symbols like crowns,
double roses, severed hands with lace cuffs arranged
so, across a breastplate, a shield, letterhead, affectation
born from a pride that’s, by now,
also history. Who can
say what’s true in the end? Other than the flexed
claws of it, extending outward from inside the body—
and those parts, accordingly, where indifference flourishes
going hushed, a moment—I hardly know what
the truth’s for, really. If I’m frightened, shouldn’t I be.
All my life, I’ve stowed what I loved most
safe away.
IF YOU GO AWAY
When death finds me, if there be sight
at all, let me see as the torn
coyote does, turning its head
briefly, looking not with understanding but
recognition at where the flesh falls open around
a wound that more resembles
the marsh violet’s petals, that hard-to-
detect-at-first darkening that happens—soft,
steadily—toward the flower’s throat. Why not
let go of it, I used to think, meaning that
instinct by which the body shields itself
from what threatens it unexpectedly—a fist,
the next so-called unbearable
question that’s bearable after all, voilà,
surprise … I know death’s
an abstraction, but I prefer
a shape to things, though the shapes
are changeable. In my latest version,
death is a young man with a habit for using
one side of his mouth to blow his hair slightly
up from his brow, while with the other half he
mutters things like Each time I leave,
it’s like I’ve left forever. Behind him,
stray cabbage moths lifting up from
the catalpa’s blossoms make it seem as if
one bloom had flown free
from the others, fluttering mirror from a clutch
of still ones. There’s a kind of love that
doesn’t extend itself both ways
between two people equally because it doesn’t have to.
WHAT THE LOST ARE FOR
Here, before these shadows that,
in their disappearing, returning,
then falling as softly again
elsewhere, have sometimes
seemed the first and last lesson
left on the nature of power, though
they are not that, I bow my head,
I bend my knee. I hardly care,
I think, anymore who goes there,
only let me pass—however
flawed—among them, my fears
not stripped from me, but kept
hidden as, more often than not,
just beneath stamina, somewhere
grace, too, lies hidden. Nobody
speaks to me as you do. Nowhere
water-lit do the leaves pale faster.
ROCKABYE
Weeping, he seemed more naked
than when he’d been naked—more, even, than when
we’d both been. Time to pitch your sorrifying
someplace else, I keep meaning to say to him, and then
keep not saying it. Lightning bugs, fireflies—hasn’t what
we called them made every difference. As when history
sometimes, given chance enough, in equal proportion
at once delivers
and shrouds meaning … About love: a kind
of scaffolding, I used to say. Illumination seemed
a trick meant to make us think we’d seen a thing more
clearly, before it all went black. Why not let what’s broken
stay broken, sings the darkness, I
make the darkness
sing it … Across the field birds fly like the storm-shook shadows
of themselves, and not like birds. Never mind. They’re flying.
HIS MASTER’S VOICE
—See that’s the thing you’re not getting, though, the part about
honesty being at worst a bruising experience, at best
a bruisable one …
*
I woke regretting everything all over again, since when is that
a crime?
*
And then woke wanting the kind of sentence whose
unfolding brings to mind a road
so untraveled that
indistinguishable brown birds do their dust-bath thing
right there, in the middle of it, to either side the shot
bedragglement of wild dahlias, their fake-looking posture
of half collapse, swoon of summer, the heat behaving
the way eventually the facts do with a truth more difficult
to touch than usual, that same
haloing out, around it, think
sea anemones when seen from above, through water, and softly waving …
THAT IT MIGHT SAVE, OR DROWN THEM
I have seen how the earth erodes differently
from the way that trust does. Likewise,
I know what it means, to come to love
all over again the very mistakes I
also know, looking back, I might better have
strayed clear of. Two points make a line—but
so does one point, surely, when pulled at
once in two opposed directions: how
to turn away from what’s familiar, for
example, toward what isn’t
defines hope well enough, but can define,
too, despair … When I look around
at all the wood that’s drifted ashore, been
bleached clean, and stranded, I think
to be stranded must mean giving in
to whatever forces make of strandedness
over time such smooth-to-the-hand forms
&n
bsp; of trophy as these before me now, each one
distinctive. There’s a light that can make
finding a thing look more than faintly
like falling across it—you must kneel,
make an offering. I threw my compass away
years ago. I have passed through that light.
GENTLY, THOUGH, GENTLE
Now that neglect only half excuses the field’s contagion,
it’s not enough to look back at the past as at a thing
to shy from, this is not
nostalgia, you must look at it,
try to, just as steadily as, for entire days, you watched
bees ferry water up from the moss-conquered
birdbath to their hive, presumably, in the chestnut’s
branches, that moment-at-last in summer when
the release that fall will be
again seems possible, the way
within aggression you still want to believe
always something more tender, given a chance, will show
too, eventually, as if “flowers
first, then the fruit” were what you’d meant
all along by a clean arrangement, the door this time
closing not so slowly, your hand turning the lights down
democratically upon the heat, the night, its night song …
THE WEDDING
Where there’s nothing but shade, ever,
he plants sea oats and ferns, lamb’s ears for
the soft down that covers them, that he calls
fur. His
“shadow garden.” A grown man,
around whom the air itself, sometimes, seems
to tremble like a man trying hard not to, lest
he seem unmanly. For his own part, he says
mercy may well be the better part of conquest,
but
Take No Prisoners has gotten him this far—
why mess with it now? Things like that; out of
nowhere. And then, as if the truth required it—
his version, anyway—whole stretches of silence,
for hours after, long enough to start dreaming up
impossible reasons for why the pines barely
move, like it’s because they’ve
gone stiff with
superiority over the other trees, doomed
to leaflessness soon enough … Let them strut,
if that’s strutting, he’ll say, addressing
who knows what—the clouds, his hunting dogs,
as if it made
no difference. —And this, once:
So much of life already gets spent fucking loss
and/or getting fucked by it, he said, looking
hard at me, Don’t you want to find happiness?
MORE TENDERLY OVER SOME OF US THAN OTHERS
And the wheel, as promised,
in time turning; the light Homeric now, now merely
Virgilian, predictably
flashing off the waves that toss between
sincerity and authenticity in the storm’s wake, If they can make
no difference, why these feelings? And the whole crew gone missing …
THE WAY ONE ANIMAL TRUSTS ANOTHER
Somewhere between what it feels like, to be at
one with the sea, and to understand the sea as
mere context for the boat whose engine refuses
finally to turn over: yeah, I know the place—
stumbled into it myself, once; twice, almost. All
around and in between the two trees that
grow there, tree of compassion and—much taller—
tree of pity, its bark more bronze, the snow
settled as if an openness of any kind meant, as well,
a woundedness that, by filling it, the snow
might heal … You know what I think? I think if we’re
lost, you should know exactly where, by now; I’ve
watched you stare long and hard enough at the map
already … I’m beginning to think I may never
not be undecided, about all sorts of things: whether
snow really does resemble the broken laughter
of the long abandoned when what left comes back
big-time; whether gratitude’s just a haunted
space like any other. This place sounds daily
more like a theater of war, each time I listen to it—
loss, surprise, victory, being only three of the countless
fates, if you want to call them that, that we don’t
so much live with, it seems, as live for now among. If as
close as we’re ever likely to get, you and I, is this—this close—
A STILLNESS BETWEEN THE HUNTING AND THE CHASE
Because there’s been trouble—but when
isn’t there?—this time to do with the people, after
years of forgetting, suddenly unforgetting that while
tribute can mean acknowledgment, respect, etc., it’s
also meant, historically, the price to be paid for
what was never freedom—it only looked like that—
the king’s mounted his horse. Disappointment?
If there’s any inside me, he thinks, let it work
more keen. He knows enough, if not everything,
about vision being sight, vigilance a form of sometimes
looking and sometimes prayer, if attention is
prayer, as every half century or so someone seems
eager to say again, like it’s the first time … In the one
dream left from childhood, there’s always a ship,
just now visible; still far. But this is waking,
and this his favorite horse, whom he’s never named,
that’s how much he loves her, though she’s
branded, sure, the way all his horses are: “Without
mystery, what chance for hope”—in Latin, on the left
flank where it catches the light, loses it, the king
sashless and in flight, though it looks processional,
he thinks—stately, almost—as the newly fallen believe
at first there’s still a plan available: they’ll save themselves.
BEFORE THE LEAVES TURN BACK
Though I’ve shot the owl down, it hasn’t stopped its trembling,
so I have to still it. I cup my hand as for a shield, a sign—both—
until it looks like my idea, at least, of mercy beside the one
wing where I’ve broken it … A bit of brightness on the side,
please, if there’s some for sparing—I’m pretty sure that’s how
the song goes. I don’t know yet that an owl’s wing, when nailed
to a barn’s door, means protection—otherwise, I’d keep it; but
that time in a life when the kind of happiness that’s made in part
from sorrow isn’t yet the only kind: I can hear it finishing. Where
are you? The only sound, for miles, is the sound of finishing.
FOR IT FELT LIKE POWER
They’d only done what all along they’d come
intending to do. So they lay untouched by regret,
after. The combined light and shadow of passing
cars stutter-shifted across the walls the way,
in summer,
the night moths used to, softly
sandbagging the river of dream against dream’s
return … Listen, it’s not like I don’t get it about
suffering being relative—I get it. Not so much
the traces of ice on the surface of four days’
worth of rainwater in a stone urn, for example,
but how, past the ice,
through the water beneath it,
you can see the leaves—sycamore—where they fell
unnoticed. Now they look suspended, like heroes
in
side the myth heroes seem bent on making
from the myth of themselves; or like sunlight, in fog.
CRAFT AND VISION
Though the casting of light can’t really be called—not at
least believably—in any way a property of shipwreck
once the wrecking’s done with, what harm’s left, now,
in saying so? As for those who would argue otherwise,
let them. Always, if it’s wanted badly enough, there’s
somewhere a findable veil just waiting to be lifted or pulled
slowly aside, classic revelation, a word that itself at its
root has a veil within it, somehow making the word feel
all the more like proof, as if proof meant nakedness, as if one
and the same—darkness
and weather; force, and sex. Every
thing I do I had to do a first time, even if I’ve forgotten it;
after that, I think the rest, what follows—the second time,
the last, etc.—it’s all just translation, this life coming down to
the same three questions I’m told—and believe, most days—
it always has: What happened, what didn’t happen, who does it
matter to? Write what you must, then walk away from it is
not the hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn, by any stretch,
only one of the hardest. Witness, then blindness—that’s a way
of putting it. To be clear, by blindness I mean the deepest
blue possible, good cotton, not silk, the blindfold.
CROSSING
Now that, at best, we’d rowed halfway across the woods
that we mostly thought of our lives as—despite the fact
of water—accepting our position, and understanding it,
still mattered, but not like remembering what
the point had been, why we’d set out at all, from
the very start: to release something, but what? whatever
the erotic version might be of a soul we ourselves scarce
believed in? A persuasive sound to that, but if nothing else
we’d at least learned to trust sound only so far, even as
we’d had to figure out the hard way to stop giving out trust
as if trust were sex, and not what more often just gets