The Paying Heed

The Paying Heed

Whom do you pray to?

No one.  Absolutely nothing. 

We pray, I guess, to displace for a moment the crush of hope.

But I carried this question around with me for a while…

                                I noticed, more than noticed, the cobwebs

                                and the shoaling light, the way the doctor

                                listened, and the flecked tweed of her skirt,

                                and the speckled bird and the sickle-cell man’s

                                slim feet.  Isn’t that a kind of prayer?  The care

                                and maintenance of the web of our noticing,

                                the paying heed?

                                                                Kathleen Jamie

                                                                “Fever”

I don’t know how old I was when I concluded

that God, no matter how urgent I was,

does not intervene.  Maybe fourteen.  Maybe

that day I came back from mass and it was

late in the morning and while we were away to worship

my mother swallowed a bottle of tranquilizers—

and on a whim (some said God sent her) the neighbor

went to visit and found her just in time.  I arrived

to the hand loose on the floor, her open gargling

mouth and the coming and going of her

consciousness.  The fire was low and it was a few

days before Christmas, the hours we’d open

our generous hearts to God.  For days we were told

no we can’t go and see her, there’s no one

to drive you and my father seemed put out

when they called on the eve of Christmas Eve

to say it was finally time to come and fetch her

home.  Collect her and her belongings.  She’d be

back when we got home from our half day of school.

Bruised.  Hollowed out.  Exhausted.  Days and days

in bed and home exhausted.  Denying she tried dying

they declared her fit to be our mother and sent

her home again.  But she couldn’t.  Either one: stop

dying or be our mother.  Maybe through

habit she got back enough muscle to wash the clothes,

to make a loaf of bread, to drink, but that was

it, and we kids took it the way we were told

and God had no part of it.  I was ok with that

I guess, if it was that he could sit at her bed-rail

and hold her hand and trace the IV lines

through the poles and bags, make out which one

was the catheter and which one was the food.  I’d do

to be without, and it was truer than I’d know

for years.  Without.  I know why the need is there,

of course.  Wouldn't I sit faithfully in mass for the next

six years?  And wouldn't my mother would sit home, stoned

or broken boned, all of it routine and rote?  No one

intervened.  No one chose one course over the other

for us.  We limped along and made it

or we didn’t because what blindness we coped with

we felt we could grasp.  It was the examination

light, that brought me to my sense, too bright even 

for a suicide, though it dims when it goes out, like 

the way, after a long exposure, after closing my eyes, the negative

space remains and it floats, like angels

are supposed to do, but not being substance can’t

stop a goddamn thing, can only swish and whisper

though maybe that’s just the wind, and soon, some say, rain.

Late Mid-Winter Snow

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Late Mid-Winter,

Snow

Little soul,

you have wandered

lost a long time.

                                                     Jane Hirshfield

                                                     Amor Fati

The way waiting in the dark

is when we’re expecting

snow but we don’t know it

has begun falling yet and how

because now it is falling

and the sun will come up without us

seeing it isn't it always up

somewhere—hasn't it even risen

by now and we know it has

it was there yesterday

and they say it will

be there tomorrow

but today today the snow

is like ash falling straight down

the chimney.  Remember

when the man came to clean

the bats out and the crystalized

creosote, like sand on that frozen

shoreline just by the run-off

creek-ditch we’d sit by when you

stepped on it remember

how it flaked and fell

into the water and it was all

fast and cold and broke open 

more on those thin shelfs

of ice suspended above the stones

(and if I’m lucky in this)

the old coal from the run-

aground barges all those

years ago-- and I love holding

it in my hand because I know

I’ll never burn it and never

turn it into ash

into seared heat that clings

to brick and builds up as it cools

and melts some and goes

rigid for a creature like

a bat to get what? stuck?

raise a pup?  because it’s

a somewhat dormant chimney,

but still…it’s late mid-winter and the casual

brush of a foot or a broom seems

destructive, to sweep it all clean

or if not clean at least

down into the bottom of some

bottom to settle it all the way dust

is settled briefly before the wind

on ice and snow

to pause on the shallows

while sun on our side

of the earth right now

makes her way turns

and seems (though we know

otherwise) to rise hold still

and fall

Bearing These Peculiar Things

Bearing These Peculiar Things

And if a tissue-thin

Section of self lay on a lighted slide,

And a voice breathed in your ear,

“Yes, ah yes.  That red oxide

Stain is where your iron, Lady Hera,

Entered him.

                                                James Merrill

                                                "Alabaster"

Did the one who made that word peculiar

come to mistrust something about

what he saw, because look, the word

liar is perched there on the end

like the hook of some bird, a pelican

maybe or hawk, predatory fast,

tentor grasp and able.  As if

to say this takes the most

extraordinary skill or will to

carry it through, beyond what was

shiny or seducing and when it’s

come upon and thumb-rubbed

and spit on and all its sand falls,

the obligations set and it’s going

home no question about it.  So

you’ve found a bit of bone on the beach

and even though its random, bent

to it you feel all the noise of the world

shut off for a moment—like

the lowering of the battle-dead

finally at home, finally allowed to

stop soaring.  A bird’s skull, like

the one I have on the top shelf

of a little bookcase that looks like

a boat and my whole life floats

in there, my dead and behind-me-

life, friends faces smile out

at me as I walk past or as I lift 

and dust (but not that often)

the crumpling wings of a gigantic

(my five-year-old daughter’s line)

dragonfly, and because we’ve had

a warm spell this middle part

of February, I bet the shells of lady-

bugs will be drawn out once I take

the whole thing down and pledge

the hell out of it.  I’m thinking

I ought to move this altar soon—

or at least rearrange  the way I’ve

randomly stationed the dead in

my life who’ve meant something,

like, listen, I’m going on forty

eight years old in less than a month

and there's the one picture 

I have of a boy I’ve lugged all these

years, thirty three now this summer,

the boy I followed into the woods

with a gun and we shot

at every leaf (he was thirteen

and didn’t I love him

the way any twelve year old girl

would) and he showed me how

to smoke, how to hold it in

and I’d take it and gaze and pull

the red coal close to my nose

and not cough, no I was past that,

I wanted him to think I was more

than some girl.  So we smoked

and laughed and killed absolutely

nothing and walked out of the trees

touching but not holding hands, only

touching and the gun was empty and we

watched the way the old house sat

in its hundred fifty-year-old hunch 

and said well, yea, I’ll see ya almost

at the same time and he walked

out first cool as shit and into another

life that would crush him to death

three years later in a car crash that

when I think about it today, really

think about it, (because they said

he didn’t look dead) we are sitting

by that tree and we’d made an agree-

ment and the rifle we fired

the bullets out of was our blood

across his knees and he’s flesh

and bone and not dead.  But I’ve got this

particular picture in that boat behind me

and we’re supposed to be looking

at the camera but someone says

something funny and he’s laughing

he’s turned away and I’m glad for that

(aren’t you when in a broken life

something comes along that makes you

rise up out of it and lets you take

aim and someone, your good friend,

holds you from behind and while

you aim and says hold your breath, hold

your breath and let it out

slow in your ear, relax, settle on it

and his finger over yours while you

both, this tension is peculiar, pull 

the trigger and fire.

When I’m Humble Enough

When I’m Humble Enough

The minute they

ducked through the bothy door

they switched to English.

Even among themselves

they spoke English now,

out of courtesy…

                                                Kathleen Jamie

                                                The Gather

I wonder what they call themselves when we've not been

among them.  Whales I mean.  In their language.  Before

we arrived.  Must some rub and rumble come in their hollows

that’s as galvanic as lightning and as sear-shocking?  

Or not depending.  We say whale in English—

walvis in Dutch.  In the Inupiaq agviQ though

maybe the most intimate of all since they got

to know them first and as they may justify

accepted the offerings of their Gods.  But they?

Their presence in themselves?  What is their name?  I like

to imagine it comes as a pulse of something or a breath

or a great orchestra of heartbeats and the echo

is something maybe we could touch on with a kind

of leather tooling punch and firm cardstock paper

and a rule stylus, the kind the blind used to use

to write with.  Raised dots.  Straight enough for

fingertips.  And all that heft of sound.  Right to left.

I’m going back to thinking about Geerat Vermeij

and the sanctitude of his sighted fingertips.  How they learned

to stroke the bones and stones and all manner of old

things, curios, and they must’ve, I’m sure of it,

come alive under his aphotic gaze and it named

itself and maybe because he hadn’t touched it

first, the word I mean, in some book, after his fingers

learned how to read, it was entirely itself in his hands.

Really, what I wanted to say was I saw myself alive inside

the exhiled ribs and hide, no, the entire cavity of a sperm whale

and smelled all that was left of her oil that still

to this day oozes out of her and wished we were humble
enough to get to a knee, both knees, and bow in their rumble  

tongue and feel it all around us and not parry it

away with our own feeble and petty attempt to need

to know something.  It must start—here’s my righteous!

being blind and naked and afraid, bent down into it

and pressed, face hidden or right out in the open like

the blind, whose milky eyes fend off all that light 

to see with and get to feeling instead, intimate, invited.

                                                                        I imagine at last

the bulging tongue is lifting to let me feel it with my palms

and thumbs and hold it up like I’m scooping water

to my lips to feel, soon, a raising me up out of needing it

at all, wet and tragic and electric and shattering, all that is puny

in me, and needy, and brief, and, yes, humbly without speech.

Three Too Many

Three Too Many

The god is absent;

His dead leaves are piling

And all is deserted

                                                Basho

We’ve been teased all month

a blizzard, fifteen inches,

warm rain, shorts, t-shirts

riverbanks thick and confused

winter birds painful, awake

no place to go, song’s

lost, falling through maple twigs

two months to budding

like hands spread wide for water

split lips thirsty tongue have made

it this far through to

almost March starving, deaf, mute

and more, more to come

frigid wind: Saskatchewan,

fish silting river’s edge, on ice

Fidelity: Trying to Stay Warm at Fifteen Below

lock and key
Thoreau's cell

Fidelity: Trying to Stay

Warm at Fifteen Below

At two in the morning I’m doing

laundry while the rest

of the house sleeps, I listen

to the story out loud and stand

in the kitchen waiting for a place

to pause: if I carry it

upstairs and out loud two hours

into the new day I’ll wake them

all, I’ll take them out

of their dreams like I was just

taken, this one about waiting

for my ex-husband to get home

to dinner and in the dream he was

already home he’d just chosen

not to come upstairs to the table

and the steak was getting cold

and the spinach too and the rest

every bit of it hung low and cold

hunched shoulders on a pool

of juice going firm, a solid au jux,

globs I’d prick with my fork

and watch the flaked fat fix

itself to the tines.  Why is it,

waiting for them as we seem

to be asked to do while they laugh

with friends and drink and keep us

upstairs in a cage we wait

gratefully, we learn to say

he married me didn’t he, out

of all the rest he married me.

Before the bell goes off, in the dream

I’ve become brave enough to go

down asking when he’s

coming home and by the time

I navigate all the stairs (why

are there always so many flights

of stairs in dreams?) he’s taken off

his tie and there are guests

and it’s a party I’m not invited

to and I call him up, up to

where I’m standing by the open

French doors and ask

when are you coming home? 

and his shirt buttons are gone

and his lips shine and everyone

is laughing their good time

laugh and I think I see him shoot me

an oh no not her glance before he

slides over on my side

of the room and says, as though

he’s on the phone, “honey, I think

I’m going to be late, don’t wait

up.”  And my waking up

alarm goes off as I’m turning around

to go back upstairs, as he’s turning

around to go back to his party.

He’s the only one between us

who’s laughing.  Awake now and in

the basement I’m folding clothes

and listening to a woman tell

a story about a rabbi who was sick

in her blood and scheduled weekly

transfusions on Wednesdays

so she could be her best for Shabbat.

Her transfusionist doctor confesses,

after she is well, that she is alive

with the blood of all kinds of religions, even

the blood of atheists has touched her

walls of her veins and arteries

and flowed through all the chambers

of her heart and this is where I

pause, in the middle of the story

because I’m needed upstairs, there

are blankets to tuck under

the chins of my children, kids I didn’t

have with my ex-husband, as if

by instinct, as if I knew

all those late night women were making me

infertile.  And though I could never

prove that for sure, just like the Rabbi

who can never prove God

to the atheist doctor, I’m the one now

with a boy and a girl and the Rabbi’s

the one with the shining eyes and with all

that other blood, blood of every kind

and it stays warm, it moves in her

and it is an au jux she drips into

when she prays or when she remains

silent or crawls into deeper

like blankets or good dreams or selves

that don’t go cold on the plate

and break away like flakes of cooling

fidelities.  

Scallop Dragging

Scallop Dragging

What a species—

still working the same

curved bay, all of us

hoping for the marvellous,

all hankering for a changed life.

                                                                Kathleen Jamie

                                                                The Beach

Sea, I think maybe

you’re the biggest thief

there is the whole round

world through, though 

the same is made true of us.

Yesterday I saw a man

climbing his scallop

drag as it hitched, full

of all the bottom of you

it could pull and something?

one of the catches maybe,

kept him scrambling that

metal web.  At one point

he drew out through

the gaps a lobster that

from where I was

standing seemed, tail

straight down and claws

straight up, to go the whole

length of his leg.  I watched

him toss it back into you,

almost thoughtless like,

(but his balance and that

swaying unanchored boat)

and move on all over

that drag.  When it was where

he wanted it to be and he

was back safe on the stern

the chain came up and down

up and down, shaking

everything out like a Fagan

might when the Dodger

came back in the morning

after a slow night.  Each piece

spilled over each piece

falling, some, to the feet

and I think I mourned those

I'd see them stepping on,

watches and wallets, and too
the fat and bulging

starfish and crab maybe a flounder...
There's the weight of  solemnity

tucked between water and air and solid

fiberglass, the swim

bladder collapsing at the stress

maybe one or two are saved

when the boys come in

with their scallop knives honed

all night, all night while

every drag past is a sweep some-

other boat maybe made, or maybe,

when they know they’re in dangerous

waters, they begin to take count

of what they keep and what

they throw back, ticking it all off

on a breast-pocket ledger

so that maybe, next pass, luck portioned,
they've strayed too close to the shoal, or

if they held back all the catch,

if they were careless: ground

they never knew was there:

and then there’s this groan

in the pully and engine

and a slight back tug and whose

boot is whose won’t matter, will
it sea, when you open your throat

and swallow them, all of them,

and, done, ruffle their hair,

a Fagan to Dodger to Oliver

who’d be saved by God

he would, but not before drowning 

for a while, no, not

before drowning.

black and white negatives

Silence
August Saint-Gaudens

black and white

negatives

some must come

                up from white

                                and black

a spit of grey negative

                on the speculum

                                or not

on but in-in-

                side the sound-

                                box of a skull

inside the spaces

                between each

                                crimp of bone

grain or like those

                who’ve bled their

                                own blood but

in surprise absolute

                surprise they might

                                yes! die of it

like it had never

                (or maybe in another

                                life) crossed

their mind to say

                I’ve got a trauma

                                I want you to

know but only like

                a drowned thing

                                coming up

                               

wavy enough,

                still beneath the

                                whiskey peat

when it was green

                a big green, mean

                                and I didn’t see

I was little

                I was a doll

                                I stood still

while it happened

                to me and I

                                screamed

once but I think

                it was in my skull

                                I think

it’s black and white

                in there now and gray

                                and when he

pulled out grunt

                and tough he wiped

                                himself off

on the cuff

                of my pulled to

                                the knees

panties and slumped

                and I coughed

                                some blood

and watched him (he’ll

                be drunk

                                the next time

and I’ll call it

                love on our

                                wedding night)

and my kitchen

                is stocked

                                with knives

and they shine

                in black and white

                                in white and gray

while the baby

                cries (there’s

                                that one time

he’d rode hard

                the wet road

                                and dumped me

full of himself

                and skidded off

                                and here she

is) and in the dark

                he yells and she

                                goes still like

the way, when

                he grabbed

                                the dog

by the collar

                and shook him

                                until, until—yes

this I want to see

                to show you

                                when he’s asleep

in black and white

                in negative,

                                in the dark room

before developing

                takes shape, sets in

                                on glossy monochrome

                               

Gift

Gift

It’s probable that the vanishing of Hell

at our backs is inherent

in the coming of Paradise

                                                                Victor Hugo

                                                                Les Miserables

It’s easy to need to see

when the cream is lifted free

and cherished in its own

crockery that the thining

of the milk means what we

create of what globes still

float,

small blobs of fat’s

concentrated essence:

what we see

in the design is how your

last hours must’ve seemed:

                               

                                the daily mail but

                                                the unexpected letter

                                the daily walk but

                                                the  unexpected doe and lamb

                                the daily tea but

                                                the unexpected cup

                                                you brought for me

and how this turns our

head to the selfless

generosity.  Because

honestly we’d grown

callused, expecting the every

day dirty stove left for me

to clean after a long day

at work or

two or three messes

the dog made when he was

kept too long and you

were not at home or

the barn door left open

and the bucket in the stall

dented from the thirsty

frustrated mare, how she’d

bare her teeth to me

angry but really hungry

thirsty, clicking out

of her need.  Or,

lately:

               

                                you’ve been talking

                                about your other wives

                                as though they were both

                                in the room

                                and you were living

                                in California and days

                                I’d come home

                                and the door was open

                                and you were nearly naked

                                going for a swim.  But it’s

                                December and the coldest

                                winter in fifty years.

                                Your skin was a blue I’d never

                                known and the pilot

                                on the gas stove had blown

                                taking the lips of the wind

                                seriously coming in the door

                                you’d left open.  It was five

                                below zero outside.

                                                (I’d driven home wanting

                                                to tell you about the mother who

                                                died of a heroin overdose

                                                and her child, three, waited

                                                with me, on my knee,

                                                while I pushed buttons and opened

                                                and closed security doors

                                                from my seat and screen

                                                and I’d driven home

                                                with the heat of her

                                                pee gone cold on my clothes

                                                when they took her

                                                and her mother away) I’d wanted

                                                to say let me get clean

                                                before you light into me

                                                but you were that fabulous

                                                shade of blue

                                                and so I pulled you to our bed

                                                and lay down on you to warm you.

                                                Tomorrow

is Christmas Eve.  The phone will ring

and you’ll answer it right

as rain you liked to say.  You penetrated

everything you ever touched

or looked at

or sang about.  You were

often awful.  But on the morning

you were dying you made me

a cup of tea.  I thought you’d forgotten

how.  It’s all I could get out

to get you you said

and touched your chest

and fell.

At Last

At Last

What little I know

                of the way of the world

--scarce anything.

                                                Kathleen Jamie

                                                “The Garden”

I think maybe the sea is the utmost Buddhist

of us all.  I sit this because maybe she

is big enough for it, completely, big enough

to do every bit of giving up and finishing

it.  Big enough to let everything float

over the top of her roiling rolling, reflecting

the face of the sky in her, the skin

of the tales and fins in her, the slick of the spills

afloat on her and in her, surfs and drips

dropping going to foam, whiskers slicked thick

up to the lip of the rocks a long way in

to shore and by the time they arrive they’ve been

everywhere and in everything: 

                               

                                                human feet and gannet

                                                tail, whale birth

                                                and broke open ship’s

                                                hold.  Snow.  They’ve been

                                                snow, and lightning

                                                and once a star’d come

                                                and another time just

                                                (and only because I want it

                                                to be) the last crack/cry

                                                of the last egg

                                                crushed under

                                                the poacher’s foot. 

                                                It dripped itself into

                                                the watery salt and the two

                                                dead now and in the boat

                                                last great auks, heads slung

                                                across the gunwales and some

                                                of the chum some of it

                                                drifted and a bit, just

                                                before push-off, yoke

                                                on one of the men’s boots

                                                almost soundless

                                                in the slosh at the bottom

                                                of the boat, near the stern

                                                near the open bung

                                                blending with the blood

                                                of all their other plunder

But the sea. The sea swallows

and its all gone all of it and only

how much suffering later?

Those foam mustaches?  Those bubbles

coming up to shore to wait

to break open on the dried Irish

Moss: a moment, a moment.