While the Judges Deliberate on The Juried Piece: Son

While the Judges Deliberate on The Juried Piece: Son

So strange it was

to slip away

in the stream

from the hard won

maturity,

to feel abandoned

the line spooling,

the bridge gone,

even the ground aswim,

a river going nowhere,

my hook snagging on thin air

and nothing hidden

in the flowing world

to catch, or bite, or tug again.

                                                David Whyte

                                                “Fishing”

While I slept and while I was awake

you were made and made and made I carried you

while you were being

made and day after day

close and away we came to be grateful

that this time maybe you would want to stay.

But there was a place in you I didn’t make

in any way but haste (even if I never knew

                                                                or never could)

I took you the day

after you were born and warm and up

under my chin you made a place

for yourself there a brand

and as fast as that they took you

away they made another cradle for you

and it was not big enough

for me and we

where once we were one skin lifting

from the tissue we were now two

and on opposite sides of the veil.

You know how when you stand at low tide

                                                                in the wet sand

and just watch the bow or the stern

or the starboard or port side

of the boat and the fog alone and maybe the water

prevents you from knowing

prevents what it is you seem to see from being

seen and if you want to see what is

coming what it is you think you see is coming

or going and you wait and wait

you wait while the water empties out

before it completely turns around and begins

and offers choices:           either wait but for what and risk drowning

                                                or turn a shoulder and walk a half a league

                                                                to go back up the beach

                                                                to see from higher ground

                                                or to be like a Jesus and a Peter

                                                needing sleep

                                                needing cups dropped

                                                needing feet beside your own

but pulling olive after olive after olive

from the tree and pressing each to your jaw

and the meat is torn from the stone

and the loath to drip oil seeps between each and squeezes between each

                space in your teeth

                the glistening skin

                and the come undone sliver: it’s some of the pit

                sharp against the gum and a flick

                of the tongue it’s gone it’s all glide

                down the windpipe down to the inside

                of the dark

                a tiny boat so like the sculpture

                of Ch’en Tsu-Chang: the men at leisure

                                                the ode on the Red Cliff

                                                a transcription on the hull

it’s like this through time:

a garden

a sea

a teeny olive pit being

sent down

into the black blood of my body

to what?

to get lost?

to come out again?

to choose

to remain? to be

half made almost made inadequately made

(I’m ashamed) and then taken away?

We: Mother Daughter Watch the Cob and Pen

When We: 

Mother Daughter Watch

the Cob and Pen

I know but will not tell

you, Aunt Irene, why there

are soapsuds in the whiskey

                                                                Alan Dugan

                                                                Elegy

While I slept I would’ve liked you

to pour me a drink, to be

the bartender to a future me

and much later when you were sure

you’d give it all another go

this life thing.  I’d order some-

thing ordinary but ex-

pensive: a simple three

fingers of your best oldest

Jameson unopened

and when the bar closed we’d go

out back and watch the bottle

get emptier

and emptier and finally

we’d see eye to eye

we’d rise or fall depending

on our height, and I’d remind you

about how once we watched those

swans, a mating pair, one late

afternoon day remember? almost

their whole body in the water

and those questioning necks

and the one Cob raising

his wings so they looked like elbows

all about striking.  Remember?

Remember how we didn’t

decide if they were coming or going

and it was you

who said look at the edges

of this pond, they’re freezing

he’s flapping to keep her

warm look! and I did look and it seemed

like that's what it did, that he was all about tending

and we walked back strangely

brand new having just borne

one another and just been born too

and a wind came about his flapping

behind us and we turned, his mate

came closer and the water

and her ripple made her reflection

seem as though there was a whole bevy of them

when it gained the bank

and melted into it while his wind and

our getting sober combined.  I was just looking

you still choosing your suicide and I---

how could I ever make you

change your mind?  What if I told

you that once the swans take

flight, once they are saved they change

their name, that now they’re

a wedge and they glide through

the sky unstoppable and as an albatross,

and I’d tell you if you even cared to let me

save your life…

but these swans are still

drifting and drifting still and yes the lake is

freezing them in and if they don’t move

if they stay still they could be there

come spring when the ice breaks up,

sighing like a made up mind

in the night, that, come a warm morning:

sees there’s enough melt left to them

and though frozen they are buoyed

by the hold the ice has had on them

and the weight of their winter together

is enough to make their breasts,

their last siege and wedge, fall into

one small splash that from the bank

looks to me to be a whiskey bottle

tipped, bobbing, neck up, neck down,

filling, falling slow to gain weigh enough

to sink.

How to Split

How to Split

Sometimes

if you move carefully

through the forest

breathing…

                                David Whyte

                                Sometimes

While I slept ten steps

away and across the hall

they came

into your room first

to shake you

two by the shoulders

two by the face and make you

sorry for

what you’d done.

Maybe you didn’t

know what they were

talking about

at first maybe

there were so many

things your brain

was a lit pin

ball machine and the little

steel

balls banged and lit

and slammed and each

time you didn’t know

they hit you

harder they pulled

your hair

your blankets

they changed you and changed

you and early on

you crumpled and curled

your elbows and fists

over your neck

and head you were

the shape

of an ear when they were through

with you.  While

I slept I didn’t

sleep I waited for them

to be gone tomorrow

would be my turn and I went

when the lights

were out

across that hall to gather

what was left and what

had fallen

onto a while washcloth

starting with your mouth

split

and then your eye

split

and then your fending

hand and wrist

where the piss

dripped and you’d tried

to stop them

and the puke

but you could not

while they

while my other sister

while my brother

slept I tended to you I tipped

up and down the stairs

with cloth after cloth

to wash and I have to say

it was at the crotch

  

I started

to cry I started but held

on I held on

I was myself again

I was alone there was no

one I wasn’t split

so bad it’s not so bad

where I was

mending

where came back together

and the cool stained

cloth held me on the edge

of the linoleum while the house

while everyone else

who would never

could ever know

slept and slept

they slept

The Least of These

The Least of These

The song begins and the eyes are lifted

but the sickle points to the ground

                                                David Whyte

                                                The Song of the Lark

While I slept, the cow, two dozen paces

away and under the slanting roof

of the old two stall barn, stood close

as her nose could get to the old cold hay

and pulled what was left of summer sun

and rain into her mouth and shifted the gait

of her lower jaw, the hump of her 

tongue and suffered

everything of the day that I could

never know.  Her breath was low

and sweet, it was a breeze in the three

o’clock morning, and soon she’d make

her great steam of pee and her three

or four clods, clods she’d made and made

and made all the while chewing

and gazing and mooing from beneath the universe

of her tusk-like white skull

hidden in her great brain:  all that was

between her brown sugar eyes all that was

swelling between her back legs…

While I slept, the cow, two dozen paces

away, made me her milk, she made me

that warm and raw milk, what I’d pull, in an hour

or two, out of her and that, I’d learned

later, much later, was the least of it.

Ladybugs in November

Ladybugs in November

The love of form is the love of endings.

                          Louise Gluck

                                       “Celestial Music”

That your last line had to have something

to do with endings isn’t surprising I mean

it’s the last line, it’s an ending, we arrived

after watching you watch your friend watch

something dead feed something living.  That

one of you is queasy and looks away, not

missing the point say but not wanting to

see it all play out—maybe it’s the factual

violence of it all and too that its not attached

to anything like morality that it just happens

that it’s a seized opportunity, not planned

but simply there by some casual attraction.

Take the ladybug falling (it’s probably a lady but

though I’m only guessing really, it’s been

a warm few days into this November and we’ve

seen them new and needy in their lethargy)

down to the light and warming herself here in this cold

(28) finally, morning, her carapace click and I hear

the skit of her feet and wings across the up-

turned globe so that her only way out

is to go past that light and I smell the beginning

of her death, and I’m not tall enough to stop

it, and if I were it would tumble out into my face

and still

i could not stop it.  She buzzes her spotted wings, 

she feels things that make me wonder if all the dying

don't feel as they begin to go under for forever: it’s here

maybe I say maybe because what do I know? I’ve

only seen one woman die and she was my mother

and there wasn’t anything beautiful about it

although yes it did have form it did have grace (after
the extubation they didn't let us in on)

it did ease the pain out of her face and take her

(where?) away.  And like this Lady Bird Beetle

she dug and clawed the hospital bed she pulled

what she could into her fist that wasn’t really

a fist anymore and then let go, pulled and let go

and she did this regularly like a heartbeat

and I couldn’t tell if she was grimacing from pain

or if she would always have that tight shape to her

relaxing face or if it were a vacancy clouded sometimes by

a fragrance or a space of complete awake, the way

a washing machine agitates and then doesn’t but 

lets its drum fill with water and those calm calm moments

before the shake.  Four hours after they

(we) unplugged her she was dead she was at her living

end.  So no, it wasn’t without form but yes it wasn’t

beautiful either unless freedom from that kind of suffering

is beautiful, so yes maybe that.  But it started there

it didn’t end there.  After all that she had

her ending finally.  So yes, what’s not to, hollow now

hollow as canyons and creek beds well into their years

of drought, well into the meat of it all, love about that.

On the Urge to Mark the Days as Significant

On the Urge to Mark the Days as Significant

“You're so beautiful," said Alice. "I'm afraid of looking at you and not knowing who you are."  

Still Alice 
Lisa Genova

Maybe we say we’ll mark them 

to remember them

because we’re afraid

of forgetting them or
maybe we're afraid of saying

they had no significance 

or relevance and so we make

a game of it: Birth            Day

anniversary         Death                    Day

anniversary        we say I’ll say

remember how I could

ever forget and as soon

as that it’s a two fish rainbow

trout maybe

that swim by in my mind if I

hadn’t sung
happy birthday
for my son
or the prayer of st.
francis for my mum

If I hadn’t made

a cake and this year

two old vinyl records

and a Bob Ross Happy Tree

T-shirt  or if I hadn't climbed
into your bed the day
my mum died
to commemorate

maybe it would be just another

day just

a place of space

to walk through and into

November to listen
in the quiet because maybe 

it’s my way to fend off

the bears that wait

to rappel 

my memory who stay

open mouthed at

the rapids during

the salmon spawn

that drip millions and millions

of eggs down their chins

fish who will never know to be a fish,

a fish! never just the milt

never just the cold current

who won’t be

gill

or fin

or flesh

I say listen

I commemorate everything

that’s come to stay
a little while

that with all this
resistance grows

that was once so sick

that was dying

from the beginning

that pulled through

to come all this way: son,

I mark you

every year I mark you

I never want to for-

get

I never want to not

though it’s glass

sometimes, cut from

Budweiser brown

fallen to the ground

after the accident…but no

not that anniversary today

not that one

only you only going in to have you
to have to let you go

alone into a nobody would know what

pain that snaked away inside of you

to kill you

oh but it was long ago

it was so

those bears

look

if I don’t look they won’t look

but look

but don’t

walk away from the banks

it’s not yet time

it’s time

it’s not yet time

what day is it let me mark it

I need to mark it

why do I need to mark it?

First Kiss: At Eleven

First Kiss: At Eleven

It’s the way the people regard the theft of the apple

That makes the boy what he is.

                                                                “Aner Clute”

                                                                Edgar Lee Masters

                                                                Spoon River Anthology

And it starts, right like most of all the rest

with a drop of what some might call purity

though the truth of it is we can’t see

anything without it be through the milk

of our own….                     listen, maybe it begins

innocent a kiss see on the cheek

and maybe suppose it stops there

in the soft hollow between the teeth

and the jawbone and then it’s done

with a touch it’s done with the first three

fingers of your left hand because your right

hand is somewhere else has something else

in mind or that’s what your mother says

when you’re caught with him that you had

your hand on his crotch but really it wasn’t

like that it really wasn’t like that at all

and what started as a warm bird a new

baby two weeks hatched and peeping

(you’d come to see feel hear his lips that way

and for days and days later too) became

under her tongue and tutelage the labor pains

of nothing more than a common slut a dirty

whore a saloon floozie how many Hail Mary’s

after that first kiss did your knees come to know

and confessing it first when the priest, hearing

sighed and sent the judgment down and called

you lost lost lost there’s nothing left now

and he took your hand and laid it on then in

his unzipped pocket and something warm came

up through the dark and he smelled

different than the beautiful boy, old, like going

to the block the day after the slaughters

and it had just begun to rain and the blood

was sticky and as your cheek when he was done

shoving shoving shoving blood of the lamb

down your throat now go, a rosary a meditation

on the sorrows of the Virgin

and you’ll be clean and please tell your mother

to send you back next week with those clean

linens and don’t see that boy again or won’t he

burn in Hell girlie and look now you’ll be the cause
of it.

Either Way Fully Engaged

Bee in the Attic
at the Old Manse, Concord, MA
Artist: Eddie Simmons

Either Way Fully Engaged

The end of this is not in sight.

And I have come to the waning of the year

weary, the way long.

                                                Wendell Berry

                                                from “Work Song”

By August the house was gone

and for good this time.  Empty conch of itself

the great shell had been drilled, the muscle
sucked, then hollowed by a tiny, more insipid one,

who moved on.  What fell from the walls,

(what hadn’t flash-burned to the paneling

like a Nagasaki kimono)

settled in flakes in the yet wet ashy footprints

of the volunteer firemen who later collapsed each

wall by wall ax blow by ax blow to know

how fire could've stalked through like a larcenist,

shouldered and slid dropped along by the blown in

insulation (that was years ago they put

that in) the tufts of crumbling horse-hair plaster, (even

more years than that, a century maybe)

and how it languished in the ceiling or the bed-

room floor depending on where you were

standing and made for the ancient (today anyway)

knob and tubing wiring cut off

after the last fire.  Years the rats

scrambled past those intestinal wires, snakes

that buzzed while they chewed down to the copper

of it all and a small zigzag spark

to singe their whiskers to squeak them to spook

them along, and one maybe on fire

after he’d earlier dipped his face too close to the open

pan of kerosene in the basement

and scattered and took his soon to be Prometheus

face through it all.  How is his

labor any different than our own bumbling own?

Don’t we all take something down

from the inside out and claim it’s our

message that will save lives that will light

up the world?  Face soaked rat?  God

chained to the foundation?  Walls that break

day and blooming sun and bring the feasting

eagle and scorch and a sea beneath

us that burns, a privilege atop the capstone of our skull

and bone don’t we know only this: that going

home to a house burned down is like returning

to the orphanage or the hospital after

the adoption or after death’s last discharge.  There’s

nothing left of us there, no matter how much

we sift and plumb through, no matter what

we carry out in a box or plastic bag labeled

with his or her name, tangled chains and

a wedding ring cut away from all that

swelling all that choking smoke too late

for the perfect rescue the proverbial

coughing on the steps the oxygen the simple

gift of drawing breath, of what comes in and goes out

methodically taking us down, feeding us, extinguishing

us, fully engaged either way.

Yell-ow

                                                                                                                                                       

Yell- 

                                                                                                                                                         ow                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Part of me dims with pain,

Becomes the stinging flies…

Part looks into your light

And lives to tell you so.

                                                Last Words

                                                James Merrill

I haven’t seen enough

                                                of fall—I haven’t and can’t be

                                                                content

                with a drive by drive through

                                on my way to

some stop quick slip it all in and make it

                home

                                to suppose at dusk a dusk under

                the and over the

                                                tree I walk beneath I haven’t seen

                                enough see this girl I knew once she

                                                                came through

                                                sometimes

                                                                sober

s              om         e                                             ti             me          s

                                                (k) not                                   and she’s not

                                                                                now

                                                plain and simple and won’t ever be again

and I wonder if                I hope so                    she saw

                                on that rainy day

                                                                                before

                                                                she

                                                                                                dropped

dead

                                if she thought

                                                                                yellow

                                                look

                                                                yellow I love

                                                                                                                yellow

it’s raining it’s been raining all the way back

from Phoenix rehab I’m about to scream see this shit’s real

                it’s dope it’s lit look I haven’t seen it since

                                                I got out

                                                                                I’m clean I’m stayin clean

                baby don’t

                                                don’t

                                                                                no listen don’t

                                               

                                                                ok?  don't.

                                                ok ok ok ok ok ok

                                                                                                just one more

                                one more

time

                                                                                what?   what’d you say too late see

                                                all that

                yellow

                                                                                                                all that deep

                                yellow

                                                                in the is it? the rain?