God

 

God 

Immortality requires worship.

                                                Jericho Brown

                                                Of the Swan

God is non

                   

-binary.  of not

    want

        not

            of

(va                    is

            pen

        (gi    na)

               or

salt of

    their earth

maybe you need to change

            your

defamation of intimacy

    be

    cause

if dicks are absolute

        100%

ne    cess    ary

in

being a!        creator        the! cr

                                                -eat

                                                or-

you're missin' 

the sssssssssssssss

                            sss (lip) ssss

into all that jazz

of being done in

the dark

Fall Down Easy

Fall Down Easy 

There is the happiness you have

and the happiness you deserve.

                                        Jericho Brown

                                        As a Human Being

Wide now and hidden by

a man's simple genetic bio

                                    -logy

for chest and belly hair, the scar

they left  you

with 16 years ago next month

is a brand scalpaled

by the hands of the doctor

whose ungloved fingers I couldn't stop

looking at: pristine

as you'd think them to be

and tips ballerina thin

confident through each jointed

pilon, digit and knuckle.  I'd wanted

to distract myself from 

the ticking numbers of infant

morbidity rates 

and thought: look:

how confident wrist to tip

how it's simple as the lift

of the ballerina 

we all pay good or bad money

to witness just the once if we're lucky

the entire weight of her whole

body on the tips of her

toes.  I bet you know

it's called pointe

and I bet you know

it's pronounced pwaent

and I bet you know

there are records

minutes and minutes

long of endurance and duration.

I'll say it's like holding your breath

and I know you understand

that the deep drawing in

the settling the counting

how it all starts before the burning

starts and how there's almost as much

resistance to close your eyes

and puff out your cheeks

like something is living

inside there suffocating

but you'll never let on

until little pins of light

until the possibility of drowning

until the doctor resuscitates

let's die, revives, and reinstates  

with the lift and then dip 

of a little knife and later

ungloving sighs maybe

and lets the whole world fall

in easy the only proof then

of saving it an abdominal

scar not as broad then as my son's

smallest finger but now

wide as a grin as a medical

routine through hours of 

scoping through the intimacy

of a bowel the discovery

behind the omental wall

of the smallest of deaths

coaxing the living to part

ways with to lift the little blackened

corpse from its soft ossuary and tuck it

in the gauze and lace it in

but only later after the ropes

of the colon are neatly coiled

again and set to working

set to doing what dirty work

they were shaped for earning

their keep now behind a man's

rub and grunt after good warm

soup and bread.

Anchorage

Anchorage

you don’t even glance

     at the cause of your doubt

so how can you tell

     what form I take?

                                                Kathleen Jamie 

                                                Fragment I

It’s as brief not as the picture itself

but the length of time I want to

look at it.  I think it’s been in a cabinet

for a long time and it’s the picture

of that picture that I’m seeing now

and what’s behind the glass that I have

to look away to think about it.  Nothing

violent nothing sexual nothing shy, just

a piece of bone but I know I won’t

really see until I put my eye against

a blacker space and then the image, well,

it’s as if I’m listening to it and it’s not

because I was seeing a whale’s eardrum

though that’s what I looked deeper

to see and the label’s faded and there’s

the shadow of other specimens (balls

a crow has swallowed, and small

big as my fingertip really, shells, to lend

some sense of context) almost blurring

the words so I do I look and narrow

my gaze and limit the light (and lately

look through the very bottom

of my glasses) and yes that’s exactly

what it is, a whale’s eardrum.  I notice

straight away how curved it is, not

a single jagged edge, as if all those years

sending out song and taking in all that

song it could swim through:  the ice,

the heat, the seeing completely

on the inside their mate (and wouldn’t

it be so kindly natural for us to be

able to find ours that way and not have

to reject or be rejected) and later, if not

for a predator or a man, a baby and the sound

of their face!  it’s enough for me to just see

it for now though I have to say wouldn’t

it be, oh wouldn’t it to put that eardrum up

to my cheek and lips and let it finds its way

to my own ear—wouldn’t it be oh wouldn’t

it if I could shrink down and walk right in,

like I’d been a long time away and welcomed

back, and to save me

from breaking apart completely, because listen

wouldn’t sound inside there just turn

me into, oh, I don’t know, mica or some

natural shellac, or what I’m getting at

is fragile and I couldn’t get out fast enough

but they’d know, they’d know, prophets

they are.  I’d like it, I’d like it a lot, to be able

to hold it and make my hand the shape it makes

so I could come away with something to hold,

like clay folded over and over and then

pinched, with those two holes for listening

and letting go, Or, crudely, and still

clay, a heart in utero, pressed into

the almost liquid bones and between

them until bone after bone a near-solid cage

is made and it’s a heart, a shock absorber

(maybe that’s why the cage) and it will pump

and drum, pump and drum out

our whole entire lives and oh but if I could

lay my own ear to my chest and listen

I think it wouldn’t be all that much

different than what a whale hears

when she hears! when she’s living out her life,

just everyday living, her little pricks of terror

or sadness or all things glad to hollow it.

Santa

Santa

Above Helpstone

the hawk circles

the house that I have failed.

There is a small body

caught in his claws

it cries to the hawk in fear.

I said, beat, beat strange wings,

what is won then lost

comes back with the fiercest pain.

                                                                David Whyte

                                                                John Clare’s Madness

I stopped knowing there was a human

Santa Clause when on Christmas

morning the doll I’d wanted all year,

the one with her own benign face

and pink lace canopy bassinette,

was there anyway.  Earlier in the summer,

when the J C Penny Christmas catalogue

came in the mail and it was my turn to

look I spent a long time on Tonto and the Lone

Ranger and their horses Scout and Silver.

They rode wherever the hell

they wanted and saved every lady

and kicked the shit out of every

bad guy.  Even the kids felt safe

when the dust cleared and the dead

lay in the streets and even though 

Tonto stood back and let the white man take

all the credit and all the land he was still

my hero.  Playing  with my brother 

I was always the Indian

because I felt braver that way and I had

braids and I died every day.

My homemade bow and arrows would

break when I pulled back the "sin-

ew" yarn too far and the living 

alder branch we’d split from her tree

started dying too and it would be

spring before I made or even could make

more.  They never lasted the winter.  But

I should’ve put a store ahead anyway,

a hundred at a time, it was that easy 

but it meant stealing 

the yarn it meant no mittens

though I couldn’t have known that I just

couldn’t.  Instead I stole away the before-

Christmas- blizzards taking turns

with that catalogue and staring at the doll

men who made me brave just by wanting them

in my hands.  And when I asked for them

over the pink baby doll (and I’d liked her too but

she couldn’t save me, I’d have to

save her and I didn’t know if I was

Indian enough) and waited and waited

for the tree, for Santa (we had a stove

pipe, which complicated belief: how he

negotiated that twist and flame—

sometimes when my father

opened the woodstove door I’d wonder

how Santa would not get burned coming  down

through or if he’d get stuck in the elbow

of the pipe, or the flue might be pushed out

of his favor or he’d choke on creosote)

and a few days before he was set

to arrive at his midnight appointed time

I’d somehow lost my turn with the catalogue

and I don’t know but my mother

screamed and screamed at me

that I wouldn’t get the doll and that Santa

wouldn’t be coming and I was such

a bitch and a whore.  The secret was out

and I was shocked to finally know that she

had more power than Santa.  And more that

it was another year I wouldn’t

get Tonto or the Lone Ranger.  And when

on Christmas morning the doll and her

tulle pink canopy and carriage were there

anyway (and even my brother didn’t get a horse

and rider) I thought that the low fire

in the woodstove would never be

revived, that Santa maybe kicked snow

down the chimney and the cold of the morning

made me dizzy.  In the small dark

of that day I felt my head ache and ache

as every bit of him flashed away.  And I tried

to be a good mother, and maybe

there were days when I was, maybe there were.

I did get what I thought I wanted or deserved,

even if she was second

on my list.  But she knew it, poor thing,

the doll.  She came with a tomb-

stone sketched into the back of her plastic

skull.  And I kissed that spot more and more

as the year bore out and I cut my hair

and the Indian in me went out,

as quick and faithful as Santa, out

of the kid who believes they’ve been bad,

because after that I knew I was.  And too,

always would be.

Ars longa, vita brevis

Ars longa, vita brevis*

While I slept you slept too and the both of us

on and off, a light switch in a trembling

left hand patting the wall the night

stand to find it throwing the globe of the glow

along the low ceiling watching the way shadows

fall as though it were all water tossed

from a bucket against the stall where earlier

in my life a calf was being born and her mother

licked what she could away and the rest

especially the bloody hay was left to the broom

and shovel and I pushed it and scooped it

and lifted it to the wheelbarrow and carried it

away and pushed every now wet blade

up to the shit and tipped and dipped and went

back for more.  This birthing life this watching from

the stall while the cow groans and grows

and comes into her own and months on end:  

grain and water and hay and long days in the pasture

her eyes roll back and she bellows and huffs and does it 

all by herself and in the end licks what wounds

she can reach and makes for the baby and I shovel

first around them and then, when they are

moveable: bucket bucket bucket and the blood

is washed clean off.  I say to myself after talking

with you about it, after you told me you slipped

and fell in the powder room that it wasn’t just 

that you bruised easy now that you’re older, or

that you hit your head just to need to shave

(maybe they’ve stitched you with your own hair

I know they do that sometimes) but the boiling

headaches after are what life  has come to now

and the vomiting and the cerebral bleeding—days 

later, after you’re home and made comfortable.

The cow and her new daughter are just a dis-

traction and really the wrong metaphor for it

all, but maybe what I’m getting at is what a sheer

machine a body is, how it tips to the wounded

thing intoxicated as it is with pain and labor  

and after, when what we’ve given birth to

is standing on its own has been licked clean

and butts the udder to feed, maybe while we

are putting the slop bucket up on the wall

again, again, again, the blood and the puke 

and the new bed laid by maybe I say: if this is 

life, do we choose each ache and fall or do we 

fall into each ache and in the end say it’s not that 

I want to die, no, it’s never been that, it’s just

I don’t want to (and yet why would I want it

otherwise?) live

this way.

*Art is long, life is short

Mother's Day

Mother's Day

 

 i used to wear a scapula   

when i was young and

until i was made fun of

i never felt the wool

scratch my throat bone

or the underneath of my skull.

i thought it was talisman

to my sorrow.  i never

took it off until the fray

became a way to make it

disappear, ragged as my mother's

hem end wits coming undone.

when they took her out

of her suicide skin 

and made her somewhat well

on straight shots of electricity,

morphine, 

and vitamin B, I gave

my bravery to her,

and dipped her chin down

to her own scapula to make it

fit over her bulging skull.

it rested like a child

come new out of the womb

limp and wrinkled and wet

from the work of her giving in

to her birth.

I'm glad to know you were able to get out

 

I'm glad to know you were able to get out 

and sit close to the waters (that's my

one impression with kayaks, how flat

it seems, how the skin of it is simple

and thin and the slim distance between

the pond and one's bottom.  when i knew

i was divorcing

my first husband i went to visit a friend

in webster mass, and she taught me

a very rudimentary paddle stroke and set me

drifting onto lake (i'm sorry, I'm going 

to copy and paste this:  Chaubunagungamaug)

I watched the small islands come up

and seem to board the bow

and settle some and then

fall from my waist point

and then fall some more

and then completely away.  they reflected

in ripples in the wake.  I knew 

if I looked back I'd capsize.  That I'd

want to.  So to the bow, bow, bow

and my own temperamental coxswain.

When I got home I'd spend

another five years trying to bring

what that floating boat and my own

hours and hours pins in the sitting

position (kinda like that stapler 

with her dentures caught)

rear end was trying to pan

out for me.  It was, if nothing

else, quiet.  A dying so quiet

most no one knew

it was going on. 

i like knowing you saw those

turtles.  <turtleeltrut>  reminds me

of e.e. cummings who had

a summer home in madison

and all the hours he sat and saw

his leafs, falling...

It turns out that when i try to write 

anything it ends

up sounding like a poem.  so.

here's my summer: 

spending summer/my end

of the log:

vignette 1

maybe that stapler made 

an agreement to bend perpetual 

as a hingeless clothespin, like

hewn heads of wooden people 

laid gracefully on their sides 

after a day and a night riding 

alongside the laundry it holds 

in place facing the wind to dry

vignette 2

stacks of new and used

books: takes on shakes-

peare, famous lady-angels of color, 

(toni, alice, zora, audre...

   and the odd bawdry jo

nesbo macbeth 

notes

and so it goes :  nope

can't/won't use that

in class)

vignette 3

if since april i was able

to make my 10,000

steps a day goal and today

being labor day is no

exception to rest

how many miles have i

hiked?

vignette 4

keeping up with 

my glimpses of

christina olson, subject

and friend of the famous

painting at the MOMA

i've come to know:

andrew wyeth fell

in love with helga 

and christina but not

in the way sin, stye-

in- their- own- eye,

seekers say.  i've walked

in his foot-

steps in cushing, maine

and laid my face

on that attic pane 

where he first saw

his cripple friend pick

blueberries in the shade

of her people's graves.  i've made

a study of his thin egg-(yoke

only, the whole globe)

tempera brush

strokes and felt my throat

hold, knowing that same

thumb that broke

that yoke is too 

his tender

thumb that brushed soot 

from christina's face

while she sat in place

in part in full in waste

of the arcing sun.  i'd say

as much of his son

jamie and his 

way with nureyev, the stroke

of the dancer's toe 

folding into the mold

of his sole in his bournoville

slippers... 

vignette 5

today, my boat

is a camera lens.  slung

round my torso or

snug enough in 

a pocket.  i listen

to audiobooks while

i'm looking.  yesterday

i started reading colum

mccann's apeirogon.  it

is

fantastic.  he

is 

fantastic.

a fabulous narrator

of his own

tones...

and so: mostly 

photos of lilies

of a doe (you maybe saw,

and her lamb)

and fox

and my spirit

bird: heron

and stones

and pitchpine oozing

from a wounded 

white

pine...

and now I've, talking

of walks,

got to go

and get my start.

hope you liked your poem I wrote for you.  hope it's not too ver-

bose..........

Leaving.

Leaving.              

As if they believed it possible

I might join

their circle of simple, passionate thusness,

their hidden rituals of luck and solitude,

the joyous gap in them where appears in us the pronoun I.

                                                                                Only When I Am Quiet and Do Not Speak

                                                                                Jane Hirshfield

I was leaving the day

I noticed it, not new

but new to me: a path

to the woods I’d never

taken because it wasn’t
or didn't seem to be

there and in time

the amount of time it took

me to be gone and get

back again, saplings had

rooted up through the once

cleared off moss.  A keener green.

A fresh radiance, timid

in the wind.  A bethel

of crows meet there maybe

before they glide to a field

of corn not come to tassel
yet.  He was late getting it

put in, hoed up.  So they’ll take

what blueberries they can

find and make their way through

the new nave our neighbor's made

with his apathetic skidder.

If I had a day or two

more—if the rain would leave off

—maybe I’d walk up there, past
the tassleless corn, the clutch
of cranberries, the grave
stone for my father (who still

lives mostly alone at home)

and mother (who still waits
mostly alone below

that stone) and into the broken

swale that made while I was,

all these years, off on my own. 
I’d see  all the new shoots, far
enough above my head 

that if it were dark

they’d be sky, fold themselves

over me the way an aching

community would, stoic
in the parade of the respected
dead, finally in their

own home after decades

away.  It's only grass, but
some will lightly kiss, with

fingers on my shoulders,

a decades gone thought

of going off and not

ever coming back.  

And I'll imagine it, but
there will be grips of each
of my two shoulders to bring me
back to myself, and later,
casual buck up backslaps, some

awkward thrusting hugs, 

some stumbling

and some picking up

where I, we, all of us, left off.

Epistle/One

Here's the house with childhood

whittled down to a single red trip wire.

Don't worry.  Just call it horizon

& you'll never reach it.

                                        Ocean Vuong

                                        Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong

Isn't it this: that epistles

are about listening, 

that the tip of the nib

is really just the beginning

that it travels back the entire

length of the arm & knows

instinctively it must turn

at the elbow and keep

going to the neck?

This is where I want

to ask, because there's 

this fork in the road: 

how does it know it needs

to split itself in two

like a blade of grass

that if torn down its middle

and held to the lips

and then blown gently 

                        through

will produce if not music

then a sound truer

than music because it sounds

so like the body letting go

of something it had been

holding on to afraid

to hand it over

in good company.  And see

the pale root end 

of the blade of grass

is intact like what remains

behind while whatever needs

to split takes its time 

past the clavicle to the throat

and parts - one to the chin -

and one toward the nipple - 

tell me do you know

where words live?  Behind

the bronze areola & through

the fatty memory of a baby

living there while life was

pulled out?  Or otherwise:

into the mouth or nose or ear

on its way to the left

hemisphere where the experts

say language lives?  How,

do you know, does the marriage

come together once 

its all the way back

and down, dilating at the wrist's

anchor on the page, the fingers

pointed and apart like two

knees and the nib between

them remembering, remembering?

Someone's come  a long

long way.  They're soaked 

from the dark and foamy

roads. They've stopped off

at their old home 

only to turn off at the bottom

before going in.  Someone

else lives there now.  A stranger.

A family of strangers.  

Maybe they're sitting 

at the same table

where years ago you threw

the hot broth at the wall.  Drops

of it, fat as snow, would fall

on my neck.  The scars

like commas.  This poet I know

calls them fetuses, those commas.

curled, paused, as awfully 

dependent on what's come 

before and what's yet to 

arrive to be completely legit

-imate.   It doesn't know

the first few words, Dear

_______, have been climbed

all night just to arrive, are entire

ranges dependent 

on the weather and only 

complete in the easiest 

of seasons.  Or the few words

beyond, flat as a johnny

cake you forgot

to add the leavening to

and tasteless after all that

stirring.  Epistle #1: should say,

then: Dear ___________, please

forgive the delay, I've been

detained in the worst way. the two

spaces that resemble each

other on the body like no other

twins- even eyes - even lungs -

even limbs and kidneys - even

testicles and even ovaries -  

maybe because they're resting

places: the divot above the lip

where Gabriel kissed 

the entire Torah and then made you

forget it, and the divot just 

below the neck, the jugular

notch, the yoke of knowing, 

the jumping off the croft

with all the words and worlds

swirling and twirling you've seen

them, you must've done, some

are at the foot of my bed

some are at the bottom 

of the pond and paused there

from when you stepped in

like a sachet of tea

leaves and steeped and steeped

the clean water,  Dear___________,

you are no longer thought of

as a body.  I want you to....

Faults

Faults

The truth is they know us best, our flaws,

and we shun them like the brother

gone to the brothels and pigstys, or the

lover gone off to fortune and come back

with mud on her tongue, or the more:

what he taught her to do: more

than her body of rub and suffer, to be
the palm, the tips of things where all that is 

is the hot/cool pool at the hem of the unscale-

able peak; is and all that’s wanted and beyond
want; as the water and flaws and faults fall off

ecstatic, as they ply every debt

we owe and could be finished with
and chew it and settle it on their tongues, lusting,

going soft in the jaw.  Finally they are slack

and laid out in state.  Look for them in the middle
digit of curled together fingers, in the middle
insides of knees that still creep through, collapsed

flat serene on the hardwood kneeler at mass, esp-

ecially during the transubstantiation.  How their

penance begins in the unlit censer and depends on

one little crumb of resign to melt and smolder

into the dark hollow of the charcoal.  The smoke

could be the boy who kissed without permission

but not without desire, something so brand new,
and never near to pigs or even thinking to.  Still,

let it be known that it’s the pigs

who access us best, and it because of this

we eat them, we know their snorts and chortles, 

and we eat them, don’t we, eat pieces

of ourselves to convert the witness
and toss the linen to the girl or the boy who we fell
against like water, the water we’d come to wash

ourselves in, abrading our flaws

and faults that slough off our skin like pox

scabs we’re done with now and not

by some haunting magic not raise a scar. 
Listen: it’s like that isn’t it

but they stay, they do, the scar of girls

and boys from eye to mouth and very easily

they are mistaken for the kind of smile

a face makes when it sees

something it can’t name but knows, oh

I don’t know what it is, a slip into a close

warmth and the claustrophobia is gone,

and the ecstasy is in the lids of the eyes

and the blush of the lips and the caress

the kiss, and practice makes us say:  I’m good

I’m good with this, it is wanted! and the chains
and all of what we've called flaws fall and are gone

and almost never were.

30 Day Leave

30 Day Leave

Smoke rose through the close strung one hundred

posted on the pole stacked high enough to open

to the dry light and make the fair or unfair exchange

(it depends on your childhood desires) complete. 

Days after you died your mother accidently burned

down the herring shed set back above the tide

and she’s forgiven even the loss of the entire dory

load of the glossiest by Jesus fish she’d ever been told

to stake, mouth to gill, to smoke after they come

from the brine soft as your cheek three weeks

into your last leave.  See the blood and grease and you

seemingly asleep beneath the wheel she made her way

past and that end you came to after come twenty some

odd days of being a three-year PFC.  Home by

Christmas 1968, a changed from the shoes to the cheeks

lost soul going through entire two or three entire nights

lighting fires in that shed and closing the wind in

on them and subduing it all like a mystic you’d read

on some months before your complete conversion

and how you’d come to see yourself only ever

leaving the living villages and smelling instead the every

day lamps within them like dinner invitations

surprised by the quiet Buddhists and their shy obliged

smiles while rice hoards were turned over

into the sky while some French Catholic crucifixes

and their last to collapse brass (sifting through once

you thumbed the verdigris rib and abs and throat

of the God you wanted to take your hope as that open

invitation hospitable as smoke the way your mother

stoked the smoked bone you left off tending one night

to go for a drive a quick drive and she pulled the stakes

onto her face and opened every smoke stoked bone

and showed your ghost and the both of you told

of knowing the other now the way fish know water

after they’re removed from it and after it’s removed

to foreign places like rooftops on dry land and give up

everything they were ever made for and smile

a practiced, ironic smile while doing it.