of it all) is the smell of ice and brine,
rough sea in the purist wind
that blows from far-off coasts
and stays here, freshening.
You would taste a tinge of time
on your tongue, its encrystalled distances
jagged in the strong stark absence of lament—
that chunk of knowledge always inaccessible
but always defended by the physical
world, without judgment or pretense,
simply floating.
Death and Transfiguration of a Star
Ambitious beam,
what’s physical in your case “strains
all concepts of the conditions
of matter.” Trillions of times
strict as steel, thousands the pull
of the earth’s magnetic field,
spinning and spinning
on mercurial impulse
as if in a race to defeat
only your past increase, earlier
your inner center became your cloak
in a brash refashioning,
your deepest matter worn now on the sleeve,
old metals polished,
a world of sword blades clashed
a millisecond. What’s physical
in you swells beyond mere image. Numbers pale.
Surface “smooth as a billiard ball”
won’t cut it. Pre-intellectual,
dependent on the mind
to be imagined but not to exist,
after the ultimate solipsist-
ic meltdown—all guns in the arsenal
for despair, all hooves in the stable
of soldering force,
all shards of the heavenly mirror
held in your fists—you stabilize
instead of disappear,
your silver arms stretch light light-years
ahead of dying.
Some hole awaits
as blackness must
the most boggling volts. You will be
zero volume, endless density,
when words don’t leave a trace.
The Fish
How they appear: tunneled vision
in a brackish world. But they weave through it,
ambient, loose as the drops that brush their skin,
slick colony of mists. Or do not weave.
These snaking vines, these luminous passersby
who quiver and blink in strange upstagings
don’t form obstructions to a path, but mark details
in an intimate landscape, one that, though vast,
in practice is always narrowed…
Minutiae abound, things small as the tip
of an eyelash, which the fish might gulp,
for inside lies the way to another world
of blood, fanned bones, cold pearly spears
around which scales furl armor. Slits
for breath, sleek passageways, flutter life
in beats, the rhythm of their keeping.
Where they exist: this pulse they are hinged on,
this harsh gill music. In colorless fog,
or where a billion hues confound,
they can settle on the island of that
breathing, hold fast to the stone of it
as the great mouth churns, each wave
one ring of truth the sea itself extends.
Jellyfish
Movement means closure,
a thrust from where you are,
that gelid other plane,
your bell-like head
with wordless aperture
emptying, emptying,
the pleats of your innards,
a shallow accordion.
Your tendrils trail neon
lit cities of cells
—you, pellucid ferry,
invisibly carried
spun dome like the ghost
of some merry-go-round.
And we who don’t float
with such unconscious ease
think it terror to rise
from our notions of land,
rock, and ownership, can’t
ride a bottomless plain,
colored trust in our sails,
in the lax, placid matter
that holds, not from falls
(for you too fill your head
so your gossamer motors
move onward) but holds
if you never once moved,
if you didn’t take in
the first place where you are,
fold around that cold present
then push out, with liquid
momentum (like knowledge)
from flushed, chambered cells,
would ascend nowhere new.
In the planktonic dark,
a touch is the world,
the devouring of touch
motion’s guidance. Your emptied
bell head tolls the thrust,
the sole luminous effort—clear
life thinking’s lost!
Anatomy of a Skylark
Inside a bird there are
chambers and chambers,
tunnels through scapular
bones, tarsus flues.
Tongue under mandible
thin, flat, and tapered.
Feathers in mantle top
down-folded wing.
Oxygen circulates
pale pair of lungs,
paths to esophagus,
gizzard and heart
(thumbnail-sized). Breast, of course,
puffed up with plumage,
quills the original
pinpointed art.
Words follow from this.
Do they say anything
mythic as music
while lizard feet cling?
Instruments grew in
the hollow where noises
—genus of throat—
found a painstaking form.
The Glass Sponge
Pheronema carpenteri
Your body housed inside a nest of glass,
its lucid needles woven
in radiant networks like a dozen
webs of spiders sewn into a dome
and coated with a layer of liquid quartz
so that they are fixed as crystal
around that softness which the sea flows through,
that softness full of holes.
Cascades of glass twist down
to rope you to the sand. Or
one potent spike of glass stabs the sea floor
to lock you in that dim frontier
where you will shine in the eye of a traveler,
sucking in food and releasing wastes
through your spiked and greedy osculum.
Human divers may loose your root,
unhook it carefully (for your edges cut)
and lift you to the land-locked world where sun
shrivels your body to dust
and dries the needles of your shell
to be sold, a dazzling valuable
tourists misapprehend
as the work of a minor craftsman.
A Waterfall
Starting at the pinnacle,
ice-held and wind-whipped,
threading through the solid planes of years,
caught now in pits, now caves, now eddies
of froth like lace or quiet muddied pools,
making its way from ordered lines to whorls,
down gutters other, older flows have wrought
in fossiled rock, inscribing them with grit
and vestiges, to finishes unknown
at bottom, long lax lake or stifling dam,
fishless or filled with tadpoles, algae, trout
—whatever stops the overarching flow’s
mysterious course is not for me
to guess; each slip of tongue and shining length
and glassy skein that swings from bank
to bank,
slaps into dark obstructions, crashes, breaks,
and hurtles, faster waters at its back
turns into sounds: a low, insistent drawl
of water rippling slow to cross a wake,
the high cries when it hits the hardest rocks
or bursts into a fan of foam in air,
the minor murmurs, major fluted leaps
in choral pairs, the wavering water strings
looped over crannies, tightened on thin stones
while underneath, a range of lower notes
now integral, now hidden, harbored, drawn,
withdrawn, or pulled to fuller pools below
before it mingles, rises, circles, falls
continually; and of the lofty height
where it began, that iced and thin-aired peak
I started from, I can’t hear anything:
the wellspring’s real, just as the finish is
but from right here, those seem like vision, silence.
The Kingfisher
I wanted to see a kingfisher
with its throat bound up in whiteness
and its black crest aimed at clouds.
I didn’t know what it looked like,
not really. In poems and stories
it would flicker, a subtle omen.
But a kingfisher appeared
one February Sunday.
First, a high, rattling call
like a constant shake of maracas.
Then the bird itself touched down
on an aged tree, on a pond’s island,
in a circle of melting ice.
From that one place, it called
and called and its call tapped a contradiction
to the cold, a noise that loosened
the ice’s thin sheets.
The kingfisher lifted its tail
up and down, moved close to the water,
moved closer. Its eyes skimmed the pond.
I clumsily focused binoculars:
the white throat, the angular crest!
—perceptible, barely, by color
and form, a lot like a painting
viewed so close up it’s blurred.
Step away. Step away. I didn’t
from my life’s one mention of kingfisher
until some noise
(a rifle, or muffler, or tree fall
in the distance) triggered its flight
and then I watched it lift
—it’s heavy, a bird more burdened
than some, and not all grace—
trailing calls like the beads of a rosary:
a string of clicks in air,
a shadow leaving the ice.
Evening at the Dix
Looking into the river at dusk, I noticed
nothing but the silver waffling common
to the water’s face if there were wind. But then
I heard strange slapping sounds. Was there a tide
that rose and lapped the limestone banks?
Of course there wasn’t; this was just a river.
I leaned over the bridge to look more closely.
Because of the lean, late rays of sun
that poured into the river like a flashlight
I could see straight through the water’s haze:
In the dull shallows under the bridge
a school of minnows turned to hang one
slant direction from another, their bodies
flickering greenish bronze. I raised
my eyes and saw the river’s face
disturbed with rings right on the surface
that burst and disappeared. These made the sounds
I had heard: The long, lithe bodies of the bass
writhed up so their back fins just broke
the water, then slipped back into the murk.
One place and then another would be touched
so the effect—in that gold, nostalgic light—
was of a syncopation, like the notes
played on a piano, how one finger strikes
and sinks into a silent drift just as
another note is played. It happened quickly,
my noticing, the river dabbed with circles,
the circles met and pierced by curving fish,
slick, scaled, with dull-gazed eyes
and torsos long, in the muddy veils, as eels.
The river seemed to reveal itself, all fins,
tails, mouthparts, pushing themselves through
the fibrous threshold of its currents, a world
drawn open to this watery vein
in which things flailed. Three great blue herons
floated across the river, angling wings.
A motor boat skirred up the water.
The herons arced away. The bass fell quiet.
The waterline diminished with the light.
Another Sea Scene
Yes, the sunlight glitters on the water
as it has before, as it will again.
Your seeing it this way can hardly matter.
You are one of millions, like those azure threads
warping and weaving the surface of the water,
drawing themselves in ripples over matter,
unraveled by the wind. The gulls mock
you. They squawk, Her seeing does not matter.
Squawk! As they swoop through air again.
They’ve seen one person here after another.
The sun still glimmers and it has no aim
besides this sluggish crawl on land and water,
the water clearly azure near the shore
where cliffs hang, where the coves are sheer.
Above the waves’ azure shifts, gulls’ wings aim
only to catch wind drifts. The water
under them glitters, glitters again,
transparent stuff somebody else has seen.
Field
Is it a thing we build inside ourselves
that gives us so much purpose? Maybe.
But sometimes, when I look out on a field
as others did, have done—at chicory’s
angular slants of blue, bull thistle’s
bursts of purple fervor, Queen Anne’s lace,
and all the other pigments of expanse
—tall, weedy flourishes
that nudged into black atmospheres
their leaf, or sprout, or semaphore,
stemmed inch by green stemmed inch, and wove
a length of knots and stoppages that filled
the land’s flat vacancy—my thought
seeps back into itself, under a grid
of soil and pale curved roots, as if
the mind were just another naked field,
the darkened mind.
Grackles
They were not one body. Yet they seemed
held together by some order, their thick necks
flickering with a blue-black iridescence,
their yellow-circled pupils bright and cold.
In a wave of differences that passed
low over the surface of my yard,
they picked it clean of morning’s fritillaries
and other summer gestures fall discards
then settled on the hill behind the fence
for several teeming minutes to remark
its tapestry, each razored beak, each tail
parting Sunday’s gray air like a spear.
I could tell you that they gathered up
the darkness of my winter thought that day
in mid-September, bundled it, black-ribboned,
into sleek coats and lifted it from me
just as you have imagined. But this
would be a lie. I watched them comb the fields
with interest, and, when their beak’s clicks had died,
turned back to what I was.
Chimes
Leaves flutter wild in wind.
Now, as day descends,
&
nbsp; he hears the old wind chimes.
Moon like a portal shines
through nearby trees again.
Wind plays on the chimes.
His neighbors’ lights go on
—gold from the windowpanes.
A fence and garden dims.
All matter must succumb,
he thinks, as darkness climbs.
Houses lose their lines.
Still, the old wind chimes
play in the air again,
a tune without a mind.
shell
There is almost no wind.
The river’s surface shines but is barely moving.
Two mink slip into the blue-green
dusky water from a limestone shelf.
It took me a long time to arrive here
with an emptiness like a hollow snail shell
which this river water perfectly fills,
though the shell was crafted for a certain body
as our brains seem crannied for belief.
Since I have no belief, I must look
very carefully. I must be devoted and scraped clean
of my lavish concepts. I must prepare
a baptism for the absence of faith.
The water’s shallows will swallow its breath
like a dying animal’s, until it is drubbed and quiet.
Nothing now but the runnels
on the river’s surface, the mink’s slide
in siltish depths, an orange fish flexing in air
for a second so the eye sees one emergence
vivid and detached out there
after I have made Him disappear.
3
Restoration
The great mouths of the god’s house, thunderstruck,
Will never open till you pray.
—Virgil, The Aeneid (translated by Robert Fitzgerald)
Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest,
And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all…
—Joachim du Bellay (translated by Edmund Spenser)
Leaving Saint Peter’s Basilica
It isn’t only the marble, the tombs of bronze,
the rigid brilliance of the angled stones,
the columns lined with purpose, glossed with time.
It’s the shadow across the palm of someone’s hand,
the action stopped: the folds of angels’ robes
forever folded, the outstretched arms of popes
who supplicate or bless or mouth a prayer
with static, gesturing limbs. It’s all the layers
hidden from us, the dust that’s flesh entombed,