Every time he comes inside he brings in panic
with the cold, on the doormat snow puddling
around his boots. If this were a place of miracles
he could say the boots were weeping;
he could say immaculate heart. The pain, too,
is without form or edges. It slurs across her face,
a dark smudge coming from far off, that smell
in the air before rain, but the smell here
is more corporeal, marshlike, smeared
with flickers that sink, divide, and rot.
What good is he? Her silence, her refusal
to be wise makes him awkward, a tourist
without language, bargaining for something
he doesn’t want to own. The only thing
he knows is the heaviness around her
he can’t split or lighten, the air itself thickening
silently, unseen. Though she cannot ease
his burden, he can sense she’s drifting from him.
Beside her chair he feels himself grow smaller
and almost lifts a hand to wave. Pain moves
out from her like a wake across the water –
the sharp liquid V that is also the flight of birds.
SETTING
Light dozes into autumn and late afternoon.
The good dishes clean, the table set.
One place missing a spoon.
The crow’s flown off with it.
He’s laying his own meal on a black cloth.
Something you can chew on,
something you can spit out,
something you can share
with that part of you
you’ve given nothing to
all your life.
SOLITUDE
Sometimes the dark’s so dark
nothing can move through it.
Even the wind, even the geese
who just an hour ago
charcoaled their journey from star to star.
You love the lake at night
because water keeps its distance
yet carries sound, crackled and clear,
from the farthest shore. Sometimes
the hard notes of a party
drift through the screen from cabins
on the southern spit. You said
nothing moves through this dark.
But music does, and voices,
and you go on.
PAST THE MIDDLE OF MY LIFE
Ripple after ripple of lake-light
breaks on the sand and stays there.
The faraway has just passed through.
The day is small but it begins with so much
beauty, I am poured out like water.
A red squirrel stands upright on the woodpile,
clenches his paws on his chest and stares,
wanting me to choose. Maybe it was Jesus on the lake
in his fishing boat, the disciples pulling up their nets,
light from their faces and hands – his face, his hands –
what water carries to the shore, the hard gleam of heaven.
There should be music. Harps in the birches,
psalters and a drum. I dance on the sand,
twirl one way, then the other. The fire begins in my feet.
There should be baskets for the fish, there should be
hunger. That I can give you. I used to shine.
REBUTTAL TO THE HIGHER POWER
Think of all the names the unnamed could borrow –
blue-eyed, fescue, little quaking –
if it had a mind to.
You lie down in the pasture,
the back of your head
pressing into green like a fieldstone
that’s stayed in the same place
since muscles of ice heaved it to the sun.
Beneath you grass stretches its roots
farther than an arm and hand
can reach into water. They douse for darkness,
draw it up to meet the light, or is it light
the dark becomes on this other side
where footsteps fall?
Through hollow stems, grass siphons
the can’t-be-seen
and sends it out ignited.
It’s what gives the shine to everything
that roots, inclines, or rises only inches.
Dirt, lichen, stone, their telluric under-glitter.
It’s the gloriole of wild oats
in all the ditches, the nodding seedheads.
The same nod as the birch bough’s,
the rowboat on its tether,
the same nod –
no – slightly different
as the crow’s, as he hops stiff-kneed around
the roadkill. As if everything but you
knows the body’s way of saying yes,
all afternoon
the grass replying
when the invisible asks.
DROUGHT
Dirt hems your jeans and the long dress
you wore when spring got hitched to summer,
gravel pinging like rice on a Chevy hood, so hot
your hand burns when you touch it.
Someone’s nailed a foreclosure sign
on the barley field. You begin to hate
the colour blue even in delphiniums,
even in the slough made bluer by its lips of salt.
So many auctions in the country:
that mad roll of syllables blowing in
from all directions, the heart’s true music
plaintive and crude, gone to the man
in the red cap, two bits once,
two bits twice, and sold.
High above the heat, clouds aren’t good
for anything but adding up the losses,
carry the one, carry the one,
when you want the one to fall.
HOPING TO FIX UP, A LITTLE, THIS WORLD
The cat we’ve named Basho
plays with the ghost cat who slips
from bamboo to drink at the pond
when the sun begins to fall.
Our other cat, the shy one, climbs
the slow branches of the pear,
and you, my love, go to bed
again too soon. Too much sun?
I ask. Did you forget to wear your hat?
Dusk gives way to darkness
and leaves behind its watchfulness.
The cats absorb it. They see what I am
missing, what I can’t make out.
At the pond I light three candles
and float them on the water.
Fish flare up, combustible as coals;
they warm the lotus bud that swells
to breaking but will not open. How long
your sleeping makes the night.
DRINKING IN MOONLIGHT
“No one to drink with
well, there’s the moon.”
– Li Po
Hey, the moon’s been hungover
three nights
after drinking with you!
Look at it
lying on its back, pale thing,
the top of its head completely gone!
It’s got one foot
on a carpet of clouds
but the earth’s still tilting.
Now the tides
won’t high and low
when they’re supposed to.
Don’t raise your jar to coax it down!
Don’t sing your tavern songs!
The tree frogs and coyotes
have fallen mute. Cranes
go off in the wrong direction
and in the grass there is no dew
to soak the lovers’ clothing –
they pull it on too soon!
TU FU WARNS LI PO WHEN LI PO DEPARTS AFTER A NIGHT OF CAROUSING
Don’t fall out of your boat!
On this shallow lake
storms rise up without warning
&nbs
p; and the eye that sees double,
that makes the steadfast
wobble and bob
doesn’t know
if the light ahead
is from another boat
caught in the worst,
or if it’s from a stove
a woman’s lit on shore
to fry fish for her husband,
hoping the smell
will lead him home.
WHAT CAN’T BE SEEN
After sunset I walk under spruce boughs,
looking for the owl the others saw midday.
Huge, they said, it took up so much being,
so much heartspan in the air. Whoo, whoo,
I move toward it, no moon or stars,
my way snow-lit.
Above the branches foxed in blacker
than the sky, I hope to see its ears
in silhouette, the shoulder-shrug of wings.
Whoo, whoo, louder now, then nothing.
It seems just in front of me and high.
Beneath the trees, I stand inside
my many years, inside the owl’s
deep hearing – its hush, my hush,
circling out and out and touching
our grey heads. Let this be
the what-I-don’t-see I die with,
this feathered, thick-lapped
listening of the night.
AT ANNY’S STABLE
The biggest death
I’d ever seen, anything
that was light, that was wind,
gone out of him.
The vet who put him down
knelt by his side, removed the shoes,
one leg resting on the other,
back and front, and gave them
to the woman who was weeping.
Next morning before the backhoe
I go out again. He’s on his back,
mouth twisted, legs straight up
and stiff. Flies jewel
his chestnut head.
Maybe this is where
the legends start, Pegasus
and the Horses of the Sun.
His hooves – unnailed –
run on cumulus and blue, wings
sprouting first above his ankles
where the bones wouldn’t mend.
WINTER DAY
All night the stars have fallen. Snow
resurrects their light. In winter you are closer
to heaven though you may not know it.
Clouds lie down in white and silent fields,
undulant, unplanted. Outside, your breath
separates from the air around you,
turns crystal on your brows and lashes,
your lower lip. You lick a sweetness,
the taste of what your body has twice-warmed.
Stand still: you’ll hear the hands of the wind
working, without commission,
freeing from the nothingness of snow
the forms it finds along the fenceline,
the ribs of drifts climbing up the ditches,
hollows where deer have rested for the night.
Veined with shadows, the snow’s marmoreal.
With a single chisel, wind sculpts your body.
It gives you this one day.
LEAVING THE GARDEN
I don’t know why I threw the apple.
The air so thick maybe I thought
it would stall, mid-flight, the rain
that had yet to fall smelling of rust
as if it hung above the orchard in buckets
made from old machines. In the shadow
of the tallest tree there was a stranger,
waiting. Did I throw it to frighten her?
Did I throw it to make her see?
Nothing marked the day
as different, the almanac assured
a gentle rain, no frost or early snow.
Even now I’d do it again, throw it
without remorse and watch her leave the garden,
her mouth stuffed with leaves.
No, the old story can’t be told
again, the old song is over.
FAMILY CUSTOM
Just before the woman died
her daughter cut off the buds
of all the tulips in the house.
My friend who works for Hospice
tells me this. Was it ritual, family custom,
personal request? She can’t say,
but they were Vietnamese and Buddhist,
and they knew exactly what to do.
No flowers brought the season
into my father’s hospital room
though my mother could have snipped
some May blooms from their garden.
A close-up photo of a horse hung by the bed,
his gaze turned to the side. My father’s
face was yellow and he could not eat.
Don’t you look good today? the ward nurse said.
Though I wasn’t in the Buddhist house
I can see the tulips’ hard red fists
on a linen cloth beside a milk-glass vase.
In my father’s room, waiting was
the only thing we knew to do. For hours
outside the frame, tried to make him
turn his head, hold this dying in his eyes.
Those scarlet tulips, they didn’t know
they wouldn’t open; dense and darkening
round the edges, they gleam where
they have fallen. If they’d been cut off
here, I’d have put one in my mouth.
DIVINING
The wind’s low listening: how it turns
every leaf beneath the trees, swirls cilia of snow
so the snow hears too the warm earth stirring.
I try to listen in that way, the grace notes
on the underside of sound, what my mother wanted
to say, what my father wished he hadn’t,
my brother’s teasing, how it makes me
stumble still and think I’ll fail.
The horizon was a line we couldn’t hear
except when a jet traced it white across the sky
and that was rarer then. I’d know the poplar’s
rush and sighs outside my childhood window
anywhere, but it’s grown taller or it’s gone.
It comes now in a different way
like the almost-sound of falling snow,
or the cry of my first lover.
They say hearing’s the last to go. After sight,
taste, the loss of smell and touch, it’s the rustle
of someone’s hands turning you over in a bed,
dry wind through a screen, death’s whisper.
The ear’s a diviner, then. It witches sounds
like water from under clay, dipping
its bone-wands deep into the dark.
ALL THINGS PASSING
“Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.”
– James Joyce, Ulysses
Each new day cloaks itself in mourning –
that’s why it begins in darkness.
Friday doesn’t know it will be dead
by midnight too, buried with the hours
beneath the western pine. The cows in the south pasture
don’t know, come Saturday, they’ll be struck by lightning,
all twelve under the tree, their hooves blown off.
Death’s barbecue. Funeral meats after rain.
In our garden the camellia’s brown before
the blossom’s fully open. Designed for that:
samsara’s flower, is, is, is, it simply says,
unfurling what we know but startling us each time.
The plum’s another story: even in the dark
the bees are working, zipping back and forth
between its petals and their waxy tombs.
Remember the honey in the skull
, the mind
made out of sweetness? Sunday’s come again.
O Lord of Dailyness, give us the common
bread and ease of each lost thing.
COUNTING THE MAGPIE
“Souls of poets dead and gone.”
– Keats
Warm-blooded
explosion into air, breath spinning into matter,
becoming bird, long-tailed
exactness of black and white.
Its feet are tar-walkers, waders into lightlessness
precisely deep. How heavy the soul is
in that feathered body! How it loves its weight,
its magus head conjuring beauty
in spilled blood and carcass, in blowfly scab.
Death-feeder song-spoiler the stretched-like-sinew
sound you can’t make into music – count the magpie,
the soul’s raw cry that needs no other’s singing:
one, and one, and one.
SUMMER SMALL TALK
1. After Rain
Spiders,
rain has given away
your secrets:
little death stars,
little abattoirs
the flies zip past.
2. Insect Invisible to the Eye
In tall grasses
the click-click of small
scissors snipping cloth.
Tailor of the meadow,
how he works
while it’s still light.
Out of the blue
dragonflies drop in
with their orders:
something long and straight
without waist or shoulders,
something with a sheen.