before hearing the sound
of sixteen New Hampshire Reds
settling in before sleep.
Dusk gathered
like a handkerchief
into a pouch
of clean straw.
But only fifteen
adjusted themselves
on the wooden couch.
One, with more white in her feathers
than the feathers of others,
still wandered outside,
away from the chuckling,
some quiet joke
neither she nor I quite heard.
“The foxes will have you,” I told her.
She scratched the ground,
found a late insect to feast on,
set her clipped beak to peck at my shoe.
Reached for, she ran.
Ran from the ramp
I herded her toward as well.
I tried raccoons, then cold.
I tried stew.
She found a fresh seed.
Her legs were white and clean
and appeared very strong.
We ran around the coop
that way a long time,
she seeming delighted, I flapping.
Darkness, not I, brought her in.
THE EGG HAD FROZEN, AN ACCIDENT. I THOUGHT OF MY LIFE
The egg had frozen, an accident.
I thought of my life.
I heated the butter anyhow.
The shell peeled easily,
inside it looked
both translucent and boiled.
I moved it around in the pan.
It melted, the white
first clearing to transparent liquid,
then turning solid
and bright again like good laundry.
The yolk kept its yolk shape.
Not fried, not scrambled,
in the end it was cooked.
With pepper and salt, I ate it.
My life that resembled it ate it.
It tasted like any other wrecked thing,
eggish and tender, a banquet.
THREE-LEGGED BLUES
Always you were given
one too many, one too few.
What almost happens, doesn’t.
What might be lost, you’ll lose.
The crows will eat your garden.
Weeds will get what’s left.
Your cats will be three-legged,
your house’s mice be blessed.
One friend will take your husband,
another wear your dress.
No, it isn’t what you wanted.
It isn’t what you’d choose.
Your floors have always slanted.
Your roof has paid its dues.
Life delivered you a present—
a too-small pair of shoes.
What almost happened, won’t now.
What can be lost, you’ll lose.
A ROOMLESS DOOR
I walked
past a house
I walked past
a house
I walked past
my father’s
house
I heard weeping
it sounded
like
a piano’s 89th key
A SMALL-SIZED MYSTERY
Leave a door open long enough,
a cat will enter.
Leave food, it will stay.
Soon, on cold nights,
you’ll be saying “Excuse me”
if you want to get out of your chair.
But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat
is “Excuse me.”
Nor Einstein’s famous theorem.
Nor “The quality of mercy is not strained.”
In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.
In this world where much is missing,
a cat fills only a cat-sized hole.
Yet your whole body turns toward it
again and again because it is there.
BAMBOO
What exists wants to persist.
Even the knock of bamboo on bamboo
spilled outward continues.
And you who have lived—restless, ambitious, aggrieved.
Who have answered to Walter, to Shirley, to Tim,
to Carlos, to Teisha, to Haavo.
Do not think it unchanged, this world you are leaving.
A DAY IS VAST
A day is vast.
Until noon.
Then it’s over.
Yesterday’s pondwater
braided still wet in my hair.
I don’t know what time is.
You can’t ever find it.
But you can lose it.
A THOUGHT
Some thoughts
throw off
a backward heat
as walls might,
at night, in summer.
It could happen
this moment—
Some movement.
One word’s almost
imperceptible shiver.
And what was
long cold
in your left palm,
long cold in your right palm,
might find itself
malleable, warmer.
An apricot
could be planted,
in such a corner.
POMPEII
How many houses
become a living Pompeii,
undusted, unemptied.
Catastrophe is not only sudden.
Hearts stop in more ways than one.
Sometimes the house key is lost,
sometimes the lock.
Sometimes an ending means what did not knock.
ONE LOSS FOLDS ITSELF INSIDE ANOTHER
One loss
folds itself inside another.
It is like the origami
held inside a plain sheet of paper.
Not yet more heavy.
The hand stays steady.
STONE AND KNIFE
One angle blunts, another sharpens.
Loss also: stone & knife.
Some griefs augment the heart,
enlarge;
some stunt.
Scentless loosestrife,
rooms unwalked in,
these losses are small.
Others cannot be described at all.
SUITCASE
One ear is going,
packing its suitcase
early.
It is packing the rain.
It is taking some leaves.
These.
Also that russeting bird
in the cloudying
iris,
blurred as a hand
waving goodbye
is.
MY LUCK
My luck
lay in the road
copper side up
and copper side down
It shone
I passed it by
I turned around
I picked it up
I shook
my beggar’s cup
quite full
I left it there
to be refound
I bent down and
I unbent up
copper side down
copper side up
between the air
and ground
left there picked up
My luck
A HAND IS SHAPED FOR WHAT IT HOLDS OR MAKES
A hand is shaped for what it holds or makes.
Time takes what’s handed to it then—warm bread, a stone,
a child whose fingers touch the page to keep her place.
Beloved, grown old separately, your face
shows me the changes on my own.
I see the histories it holds, the argument it makes
against the thresh of trees, the racing clouds, the race
of birds and sky birds always lose:
�
�� the lines have ranged, but not the cheek’s strong bone.
My fingers touching there recall that place.
Once we were one. Then what time did, and hands, erased
us from the future we had owned.
For some, the future holds what hands release, not make.
We made a bridge. We walked it. Laced
night’s sounds with passion.
Owls’ pennywhistles, after, took our place.
Wasps leave their nest. Wind takes the papery case.
Our wooden house, less easily undone,
now houses others. A life is shaped by what it holds or makes.
I make these words for what they can’t replace.
I RAN OUT NAKED IN THE SUN
I ran out naked
in the sun
and who could blame me
who could blame
the day was warm
I ran out naked
in the rain
and who could blame me
who could blame
the storm
I leaned toward sixty
that day almost done
it thundered
then
I wanted more I
shouted More
and who could blame me
who could blame
had been before
could blame me
that I wanted more
WHEN YOUR LIFE LOOKS BACK
When your life looks back—
as it will, at itself, at you—what will it say?
Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool.
Flame curl, blue-consuming the log it flares from.
Bay leaf. Oak leaf. Cricket. One among many.
Your life will carry you as it did always,
with ten fingers and both palms,
with horizontal ribs and upright spine,
with its filling and emptying heart,
that wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled, in return.
You gave it. What else could you do?
Immersed in air or in water.
Immersed in hunger or anger.
Curious even when bored.
Longing even when running away.
“What will happen next?”—
the question hinged in your knees, your ankles,
in the in-breaths even of weeping.
Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in.
Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face.
No back of the world existed,
no unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for.
This, your life had said, its only pronoun.
Here, your life had said, its only house.
Let, your life had said, its only order.
And did you have a choice in this? You did—
Sleeping and waking,
the horses around you, the mountains around you,
the buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts.
Those of your own kind around you—
A few times, you stood on your head.
A few times, you chose not to be frightened.
A few times, you held another beyond any measure.
A few times, you found yourself held beyond any measure.
Mortal, your life will say,
as if tasting something delicious, as if in envy.
Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving.
THE SUPPLE DEER
The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.
Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through.
No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.
I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.
Not of the deer:
To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All gratitude to the MacDowell Colony, the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, the Key West Literary Seminars, and the Vermont Studio Center for residencies and generous hospitality extended during the writing of this book. My thanks also to the magazines and anthologies in which these poems have appeared sometimes in earlier versions or with different titles:
Agenda (U.K.): “Chapel”; Alaska Quarterly Review: “Green-Striped Melons”; The American Poetry Review: “When Your Life Looks Back,” “Izmir,” “Stone and Knife,” “These Also Once under Moonlight”; The Atlantic: “Of Yield and Abandon,” “Vinegar and Oil,” “The Conversation,” “For the Lobaria, Usnea, Witches’ Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen”; The Believer: “Haofon Rece Swealg”; Bombay Gin: “The Dark Hour” (reprint); The Cortland Review: “The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident. I Thought of My Life,” “Fourth World”; Drunken Boat: “China,” “Sheep,” “Three-Legged Blues”; Five Points: “All Day the Difficult Waiting,” “The Present,” “Protractor,” “Rainstorm Visibly Shining in the Left-Out Spoon of a Leaf,” “The Tongue Says Loneliness,” “Bruises,” “Chapel” (reprint), “Contentment,” “Suitcase,” “Five Pebbles—Like Moonlight Seen in a Well, Glass, Mountain and Mouse, Memorial, Night and Day,” “Rain Thinking,” “Tolstoy and the Spider,” “Red Wine Is Fined by Adding Broken Eggshells” (reprint); The Georgia Review: “A Hand Is Shaped for What It Holds or Makes”; The Great River Review: “The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident. I Thought of My Life,” “Pompeii,” “Come, Thief,” “A Roomless Door” (all reprints); Harvard Review: “First Light Edging Cirrus”; The Kenyon Review: “A Day Is Vast,” “Sweater,” “Two Rains”; The Manhattan Review: “Come, Thief,” “Haibun: A Mountain Rowboat,” “Pompeii,” “The Familiar Stairs”; Marsh Hawk Review: “Come, Thief” (reprint); McSweeney’s: “A Roomless Door,” “The Cloudy Vase”; The New Republic: “A Small-Sized Mystery”; The New Yorker: “French Horn,” “If Truth Is the Lure, Humans Are Fishes,” “Washing Doorknobs”; Night Sun: “Shadow: An Assay”; Noon (Japan): “Everything Has Two Endings,” “Rainstorm Visibly Shining in the Left-Out Spoon of a Leaf” (both reprints); Orion: “Bamboo,” “The Supple Deer”; Ploughshares: “Critique of Pure Reason”; Poetry: “All the Difficult Hours and Minutes,” “The Decision,” “The Pear,” “Seawater Stiffens Cloth,” “Perishable, It Said” “Sentencings,” “Sonoma Fire”; Poetry International: “I Ran Out Naked in the Sun,” “It Must Be Leaves,” “Love in August,” “The Promise”; Poetry Ireland Review (Ireland): “China”; and, as reprints, “Critique of Pure Reason,” “Rainstorm Visibly Shining in the Left-Out Spoon of a Leaf,” “The Lost Love Poems of Sappho”; Poetry Kanto (Japan): “Sometimes the Heart Is a Shallow Autumn River”; and, as reprints: “Bamboo,” “Shadow: An Assay,” “Green-Striped Melons,” “A Thought”; Poetry London (U.K.): “Everything Has Two Endings,” “Sheep,” “A Thought”; Poetry Northwest: “The Inventive, Visible Hobbles”; Poetry Review (U.K.): “The Dark Hour,” “Red Wine Is Fined by Adding Broken Eggshells”; Quarterly West: “Left-Handed Sugar”; Slate: “Invitation,” “The Kind Man,” “Alzheimer’s”; Spiritus: “Sometimes the Heart Is a Shallow Autumn River”; The Threepenny Review: “Heat and Desperation”; TLS/Times Literary Supplement (U.K.): “Narrowness”; Tin House: “Hunger,” “Wild Plum”; Tricycle: “A Blessing for Wedding”; Vallum (Canada): “Big-Leaf Maple Standing over Its Own Reflection,” “My Luck”; Water-Stone Review: “Each We Call Fate,” “The Lost Love Poems of Sappho,” “The Visible Heat,” “The Question,” “The Perfection of Loss,” “Distance Makes Clean”; Wild Apples: “A Thought” (reprint); Wilderness (the Wilderness Society newsletter): “Like Moonlight Seen in a Well,” “Mountain and Mouse,” “Opening the Hands Between Here and Here.”
Anthologies: Best American Poetry 2011: “The Cloudy Vase”; Best American Poetry 2007: “Critique of Pure Reason”; The Best Spiritual Writing 2010
: “Vinegar and Oil”; When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women: “A Hand Is Shaped for What It Holds or Makes,” “All Day the Difficult Waiting,” “Shadow: An Assay,” “Rainstorm Visibly Shining in the Left-Out Spoon of a Leaf,” “Critique of Pure Reason,” “The Lost Love Poems of Sappho”; The Way of Natural History: “The Supple Deer”; Alhambra Poetry Calendar (2008, 2009, 2010): “A Blessing for Wedding,” “French Horn,” “The Pear”; Writers on the West: “Building and Earthquake,” “The Dark Hour,” “The Supple Deer”; The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry: “First Light Edging Cirrus,” “The Supple Dear,” “Narrowness,” “A Hand Is Shaped for What It Holds or Makes,” “Perishable, It Said.”
“Pompeii” was commissioned by the composer Evan Chambers for The Old Burying Ground (premiered December 2007, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and February 2008, Carnegie Hall, New York City). “Opening the Hands between Here and Here” and “When Your Life Looks Back” were reprinted in Where the God of Love Hangs Out, by Amy Bloom. “Green-Striped Melons” was reprinted in “American Life in Poetry,” a nationally syndicated newspaper column. “For the Lobaria, Usnea, Witches’ Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen” appeared in a fine press limited edition broadside to benefit the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. “Critique of Pure Reason” was distributed worldwide by the Broadsidedpress.org project. Twelve of these poems appeared in a fine press limited edition Center for Book Arts chapbook, The Present. Eight were first printed as limited edition letterpress broadsides by the fine printer Jerry Reddan, in his Tangram series.