Sweeping

Sweeping

Only brooms

Know the devil

Still exhists,

That the snow grows whiter

After a crow has flown over it…

                                                Charles Simic

                                                Brooms

Maybe sweeping  becomes innate

when heaping the random bits and blow-

ins make the way as safe coming

as they do going.  It’s how

you welcome a guest, by the pristine

boarders you keep, these and your

crisp invitations:

see the lines are straight and safe

to my door and to the warm

way in.  It takes years

of practice.  Of heaving off detritus.

Of watching for the snow you’ll event-

ually shove off, all those flakes that fall, fall, fall

all winter gathering just to take

themselves into the melt of spring

to make monuments for the sky who has

offered so liberally of herself,

and to shape them like they are understood

all along, even, especially, as they melt

away,  the way a bear melts

into her woods, or a bird into her branches

each of  their coming in and going out

driven by appetite

or fatigue, tongue or loin,

beneath this sky and alongside

a quiet eye, without deciding what all

it will become as it is met

and swept off, a shovel or blade or broom

straw, the way known before the hand

takes up with the handle

with the strictest of confidences

and not a word, not a single word,

except maybe shhhh, shhhh, shhhh,

shhh, shhh, shhh;             shhh, shhh,

shhh      hhh,                              hh,   h

the terms

the terms

The colonel praised the use of moderate electric shock.

Charles Simic

because finally

I purged myself

of the think:

I want you

again and deserve

what you do

to me again and again,

I open you long

after I’ve shut you

off as if on this

day

you’re a faucet you’re

a hot and cold mixing

valve finally fixed when

I chipped away 

the crumble

of the once

 adhering

corner on corner

spaces 

and reached between

the two

that needed

replacing

the two

I had

finally

(although this was later)

s  m  a  s  he  d

to get at you

I can’t say how

simple it was

to finally figure

I didn’t need

to stand

shivering in

the mist and trickle

of the shower

and quicken my invisible

splinters

(spinsters you'd call them)

the way I always

did that it was

it really was

a simple repair

and depending

on whose brand

I needed behind

it all

I can get off

with not having

to spend a week’s

pay to watch

some cliché

plumber come in

and diagnose me

as easy

as shit

I can do it all

myself, twist

consistently one way

to take it

out and the other

way to put it

right again.  Now

the crack

in the tile is mine

and depending on

the way the steam

rises

can be

a smile

can be

a wink

and if I join it

with the others

I didn’t put there

intentionally

I can

make

it

out

still

wet

and still

alive

Tell Me What is the Door to Purgatory Made Of But Your Own Belief?

Tell Me What is the Door to Purgatory Made Of But Your Own

Belief?

Help me to find what I’ve lost,

If it was ever, however briefly, mine,

You who may have found it.

                 Charles Simic

                       Mystics

Days it’s just letters the way letters loop

you know together and make words making

sense and maybe even praying  and pages

of them slide like they’re on someone’s lap

clasped by a hand a couple of fingers

a fist and the world’s coming on and going

by and wants for nothing not ever not even

needing to be seen even though look at me

here taking it all down by shape and time

and hue and heat (or not, of any of them)

of day and making it make happy or sad

or love or hate but who’s paying

attention listen I’ve gone over all the lines

all these times and brought them up like

a child is brought up from the bottom from

the very bottom of their bottom which isn’t

my bottom and can’t be and we situate even

so don’t we the way if you think on it like this

clouds begin by being drawn up and taken

to be changed and blown across the front

of us and the back of us and if they could right

straight through us and finally (briefly) set on down

in a foreign place who’s paying pray attention

round as their eyeball is or hard as

the very center of their hand when it opens

finally and the knot that’s been pearled there

is small and it’s rubbed by a thumb or a tooth

and tongue and is called to surrender to

if a thief ok a thief or a dismisser ok

a dismisser or believer ok a believer

to all whoever can take every feather

of every bird and give them their just indulgences.

On recovery: of the bonny swan, drowned by her jealous sister

within
s. lee photo

On recovery: of the bonny swan, drowned

by her jealous sister

When the tide returns

from its other life,

bearing its adulterer’s gifts

and the wrack-plastered reef

becomes again a sunk unknown,

then we should take our leave—

                                                                Kathleen Jamie

                                                                High Water

We’d arrived the both of us exhausted and wet

from separate storms and shore battered getting past

the shoals and every bit of clothing ripped

with teeth and feet or the broke mast pole I hung

to and you you’d said for you it was an upended keel

above a water field of swans you’d say even later still when

you regained your lungs and emptied them of salt

of scaring sand scraping your throat and for that you

were voiceless longer still so you told your story

on my body when your lips were healed

enough you kissed every bruise and scab I had and

each was the bowing of the way the swans

mated when they regained the same shore we were

stranded on.  We couldn’t fly or even consider

beating our wings in acceptance or retreat but we

could lie down together and stop being

naked or stranded or even married to another

who and so far off shore and saved from the storms

that threw us overboard to drift in and through

the early migrations for you the swans for me

one solitary albatross who’d glide like calm
shadows glide and let me grasp (by now the fever

being on solid ground) her tail and slum through

the deepest months of winter until I couldn’t

and my thumbs broken and my fingers and later

waking up and being loved by a deaf-mute and who knew

better who tells me to listen how far I’d been drifting

and how close so cleverly close to taking my skin

to the flat end of the earth and hurling it off so that

turning back I am all curve and bone and the sun and the wind

have their way hardening and hollowing me.  Tis the banister

of each the clavicle and the pelvis and the hair of me

you make me boy you make me and you pull each string

through your mouth and pin with my finger bones

and thumbs and keep them fast your chin to tune to
stretch to strum and pluck and speak free of water

of skin of single each you me becoming finally we.

a hammer and my finger bones fourteen each a sweet

note each hold me hold me broken without

but at home under you strummed plucked harmonic
throat.

Something of Lazarus

Something of Lazarus…

The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.

                                                                The Weighing

                                                                Jane Hirshfield

                                                               

Is it possible to want nothing

in return, knowing the motive

is the only armor we have left

after salvaging the remains

of the gutted house, top

to bottom, all of it gone com-

pletely or gone enough that

needing it is only the beginning

of a melancholy we don’t know

how to negotiate?  Because I stood

there, in my burnedout house,

the wind easing in through

the broken glass living room

window (axe smashed and thick

handle or glove leveled, run

along the jamb and sill, it all

perfectly relaxed now under

my feet (heavily booted they’d

said) and everything else

broiled, rotted now to the heart-

wood, insides out, visible:  were

its true natural state all along

and we’ve just stepped in

and had the staves taken

from our eyes.  What lives

we lost or saved there temporarily: 

my mother, out of the house

with her portable green canister

of oxygen: saved.  Cat after cat

slinking from the smoke, curled

finally and together up in the tub:

lost.  It all makes itself known, taken

down on a list of what there still is

to be grateful for.  Of course

it’s all lost one way or the other. But

of course the memories are still

intact, right? Because who can lick

those but another kind of fire, or

sometimes a slow burner, in

another prison in the body

altogether, and quiet, a model

citizen.  My mother, in her ending,

was forgetting this way, and asked

for the old house the way all the lost

ask for the way home.  I’d grieved, truth

be told, for the spark itself, all that was

sentimental in the keeping

of the corporeal (even if it’s ceramic

or paper or (because some

of the harvest was in and piled

in the cellar) flesh and potatoes,

a record yield.  Lost.  Doomed to

spend their entire lives now

in the dark.  I think

of them from time to time, and when

the demolition team came to take

the old house down after all had been

gotten out, how bushel after bushel

took on the weight of that house

as everything fell upon them

from above: the charred gables,

the twenty-year old apple

tree beside my mother’s then sick-

room.  All of everything buried.

And they took it onto (into?)

themselves in the dark.  And sensing,

maybe, their end, they kept

their eyes shut to it all.  I’d like to

think that come spring, (because

there was a great heat in the earth

and some of those potatoes

must not’ve made it) there had

to have been a few at the bottom

of the barrel, a few among them,

that were saved and waited out

the winter.  That come spring they

ached to do what was in them to do:

reach and stretch and get by

every rock from the cellar wall,

every charred and buried beam,

and make it up through to sprout

in the lilac bush, flourishing

my father would says when it happened,

because they’d been able to save

that, by Jesus, they’d been able

to save that.