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.