Sometimes Climbing is Pausing

 

Sometimes Climbing is  Pausing

 

I thought of you today. 

I was climbing a mountain

and I imagined that

you were climbing it

 

with me.  At one of the steep

parts, when I started to

fall back into the weight

of the backpack and

 

the weight of the air,

I stopped and watched

a spider sun itself

on a flat, well-lit rock. 

 

I photographed it for you

knowing you

might not feel all that

comfortable around

 

spiders, but also knowing

the reason this spider is

still

with us is because I saw it

 

on the rock I was about

to step on.  I hope it is

somewhere else now, saved.

I hope it followed the sun

 

on its way down this mountain

the way I followed

my thoughts of you

on my way down this mountain.

Please,

 

Please,

           

                        For cousins wade, theresa

 

Never know the morning a new

Ache in the place where the old

Injury has made its tight residence

Insist itself for itself alone never giving

Up the ghost but only going relict,

Relic.  It’s mouth & hands small as a

Wren.  When it wakes it sings – it per-

Ches on the claimed ligament and

Opens its throat.  Somehow the hutch

Doesn’t go cold, even after all

These years.  Perpetual, the clutch

Of the eggs is the transformation of

Yolks into eyes, albumens into feathers

Tails & breasts & wings.  Semi-matured, it

Quakes on the edge of its first

Flight, the perch patient as any

Nesting abandoned.  See the muscle

Shake awake, flinching in the pinch of

Being.  It is here we want to widow our children

Selves, abandon them

On the lane half-way up to the house

That bore and beat them, tore their

Throat and gizzard & sent them songless

Out on the dawn.

 

Or never know how yesterday my cousin

Pulled over on the side of the road, a little

Gas station, a little break, having driven

From North Carolina to Louisiana to save

Her brother’s life.  And she did too.  Pulled

Him out of his coma with the strength of her

Permission & the swelling in his brain

Began to wane.  He woke, being weened, & she

Stayed long enough to set him on his course,

To hug her other brothers & sisters & plug her

Course home.  Exhausted but staying the way,

It was nothing but a straight shot & work

The next day.  Pulled to the rest

Stop something in her went slack.  At the pump?

In line to pay?  Filling her mug of coffee?  She

Keeled over & later they’d say she was probably

Dead before she met the floor, though they

Also said she coded three times, & under the paddles

Seemed to rally.  That ache.  The one

One wakes with.  The one one doesn’t want

To recognize or make way for, give a curt

Nod, a lowered lid to its dominance, a bend

Of the knee, the way a bird taking to her

Sky might bend, the start in their heart

Being what gets them airborne, into the shadow

That layered across its face & made them take up

To the clouds.

 

Standing at the Bay Window Holding a Basket of Unfolded Laundry

 

Standing at the Bay

Window Holding a Basket

of Unfolded Laundry

 

 

It’s trickery, the leaf folded in

such a fashion as to make me

think for an instant, for longer,

that it is a cedar waxwing.  This

 

dead lilac leaf in this morning

light.  In less than five minutes

it will be just a leaf

curled like an upright hand

 

whose thumb has drawn itself

up to its cousins in its attempt

to be a perfect buddhist:

Buddhist in the minute—

 

isn’t that the angle we’re peaking

out from, standing at our window

with the sun behind us,

on a morning when it all just

 

continues to rise?  Even the dead 

are made

to look lifelike—made and made

and made to  look like life.

What I Keep

 

What I Keep

 

What I keep doing

What I keep doing to

What I keep doing to my

What I keep doing to my self

I keep

I keep buying

I keep buying words

I keep them

I keep them stacked

I keep them stacked with

I keep them stacked with spines

I keep them stacked with spines out

I out them

I out them, column

I out them, columns

I out them, columns entitled

I out them, columns entitled and authored

I read them

I read them one

I read them one by

I read them one by one

I read them one by one possibly

I read them one by one possibly by

I read them one by one possibly by two

I read them one by one possibly by two then

I taste them

I taste them open

I taste them open yes

I taste them open yes open

I taste them open yes open-mouthed

I taste them open yes open-mouthed, tongued

I taste them open yes open-mouthed, tongued and toothed

I taste them open yes open-mouthed, tongued and toothed to

I taste them open yes open-mouthed, tongued and toothed to pulp

I taste them open yes open-mouthed, tongued and toothed to pulp enough

                                                                                                to pulp enough

                                                                                                to pulp enough to

                                                                                                to pulp enough to swallow

swallow and

swallow and I

swallow and I swallow

swallow and I swallow them

swallow and I swallow them gnashed

swallow and I swallow them gnashed pulpy

swallow and I swallow them gnashed pulpy communion

swallow and I swallow them gnashed pulpy communion body

I swallow them and I swallow them gnashed pulpy communion body, blood

I swallow

I taste

I read

I out

I keep

What I keep

 

The Wash

 

in bronze
andrew's hands

The Wash  

 

The wind sways not the leaves evenly.

                                    Paul Lynch

                                    The Black Snow

 

Like a new or lazy laundry maid I wash

            whites & darks together & like any good dye

            it rubs the light

            surface & makes the white breast, the white chest, the white short sleeve

                        the white calf the white toe the worn white heated heel

                        gray as an excavated & recovered

                        wound whose scar

                        is a smiling moon. 

All our sins are washed

            & strung to the sun & the sun blinds us

            for our devotions.  Somehow I’m caught

            on the weathered pin’s rusty hinge

                        and the wind is picking up.  & skies pass.

                        They pass by remarkable or not remarkable.

Days I’m too preoccupied to do much other

            than strut and string my gray wash & call it

            everything but what it is: difference.

            Difference, I think, is how I define

                        grief vs how I define mourning.

                        Grief is the heated brand thrust

                        out of the coals & pushed into the fleshiest

                        part of the heart, her left

                                    ventricle.  Mourning is the ritual of attendance

                                    to this wound: the flush and swoosh of saline,

                                                            whose salt has been mined & dried & stored all these years

 

                                                            and now a pinch of it into the water,

                                                            water from the well, from the river, from the salty bay. 

 

                                                            And attendance depends on the depth of the brand,   

                                                            on the gauze applied to keep the sutures true

                                                            to their form, & how white the gauze is, even after all

                                                            that washing.

Provenance of Rock Bottoms

the dead pearl diver
benjaman paul akers
portland museum of art, portland, maine

 

Provenance of Rock

Bottoms

 

How sometimes my neck bones are a many

fathoms chain & my head its anchor sometimes

at rest on bottom and then, when those immobile

bones ache

to move, I’m able

to withstand my bow’s prow-dip first

to the calm, then to the wind.

 

How dropping

my body means or seems to mean it can’t

rest benignly in its anchor box . . .

 

how I want to contemplate

the provenance

of the bottoms I’ve been on, and dug into,

stabilizing me there as the part of me on the water

twists and tries to

rise to float but

how I wind up wrestling, me

both a Joseph and an angel

God,

 

and how in the place where sky meets water

I come to

wonder how even on bottom

aren’t we always still

somehow in the sky?  Even if that sky

is humidified?   Whatever the height?

The depth?

 

How head and hands and pelvis and knees

and feet lifted mere millimeters is this:

my skin always touching

the surface

of the bottom, scissoring it open, depositing

it to the sky.

young mother in the grotto
Auguste Rodin
portland museum of art, portland, maine

Losing

 

Losing

 

This is the vale of soul-making.

           

                        John Keats

 

No small monument,

            he’s sleepless his last night

            seventy five years on he land he let

            fall through his hands

            crumbs of dust unsalvageable.

            Lost to gamble those six-

            sided cubes in a throw

            and lose.  They were airborne longer

            than I’ve been alive.  Who knows

            how wide his Rubicon – likely

            we were born deep

            into it, submerged, and the gamble

            had already been

            agreed to, the terms set & etched

            into the rib bone holding

            salute to a heart thumping out,

                                                in panic,

                                                in code, I, I,

 

I’m broke,

I’m broke