Once There Was Light

 

Waning moon, kookopolo frost flautist

Once There Was Light

 

After reading Kenyon’s “Having it Out With Melancholy”

 

it's early again.  i looked up a word i did not know the meaning

of and thought how apt a metaphor for we

who float and rise and nearly capsize in our little boats.

coracle.  room enough for one, possibly

 

one more.  in her poem 'having it out with melancholy' jane

kenyon says it is what sleep arrives in, a 'frail wicker coracle.'

how such floats are only supposed to be rowed close

to the shoreline.  so vulnerable.  imagine the only

 

thing between your feet and the water is that skin

and wicker.  there's an intimacy in such an agreement,

isn't there.  a trust in the terrain.  the broad sky alight

and yoked to our shoulders to remind us

 

only the great weight of gravity keeps us 

from walking entirely into the upward pitch, the birth

promise yet on our lips when we exchanged our wings

for feet: keep this deep ropey bone only

 

a while longer.  coax it to float and not fly off

too soon, so when soon arrives the marrow

will begin to thin as if it were wool being carded

or more apt the seeds of dandelions being

 

wished upon, clutched in fists and caught breaths,

and the pucker of the kiss when the breath

pours out over and the wisps lift into the air

and float over the surface of the water

 

and cling a while to our coat while we go on

and on walking in our bones...

 

Parallax

 

Parallax—

 

            a phenomenon of viewing the same thing

            from different angles.

 

--for Taegre

 

Cook lobster in its own water.

And the mollusk.  Clam and oyster

 

or mussel or the odd handful

of periwinkle.  A fist of rockweed.

 

All pried from their perch.  Or dug.

Or baited & trapped.  Lifted to

 

bald air, whatever the weather. 

Measured & kept,

 

measured & tossed back measured

depending on the scruple

 

of the procuring hand & the eye.  Depending

on who is coming to

 

the beach feast.  The deep

pit in the sand, brick lined, is a heat

 

holder.  The coals are cold

covered with snow from October

 

through April, some years May,

though there have been times,

 

remember? there have been

times when the only way we could keep you

 

alive after you’d gone (you were gone so

so suddenly)

 

was to grope for that hold

& heave out the snow

 

 

& bring the dry daily

news & the slow burning hard woods

 

& the catch of the day,

break the ice at the edge of the beach

 

& haul the water up to the tidemark

& watch it all come to

 

boil while all us living

            hold our own

 

            bowl of lobsters groping for a solid

            something & tight lipped mollusks

 

            and a smattering

            of snails yet in their houses

 

& wait to pour them into the canner

of the boiling salt sea

 

wait for it to steam

wait for them to be drawn into and then out of

 

wait for them               to cool             to cool             to cool

            so that we may

 

 

eat

 

The Honor Guard Steps Up

 

The Honor Guard Steps Up

                 for Taegre

                Everything in the world has a spirit that can be released by its

               sound.

                                    Oskar Fischinger to John Cage

you teach us

            you teach us new

                        meanings to breathing new

                                    meanings to speed new meanings to

                                                98.6 degrees & to keeping it to

                                                            98.6 degrees you teach us

the sum of the

            distance in hours

                        in the hours of being

                                    discovered unswung

                                                to shouldering this

                                                            moment like a soldier-                        

 

trained honor

            guard you teach us left

                        right     left       right tight        

                                    in the concave soffit

                                                of the cheek, in

                                                            synchronized time

 

the polish of it

            you teach us brass

                        the flat pall falling

                                    precisely at the sitting-

                                                down-eye’s line of

                                                            sight, a line so true

 

if it were music

            it would move too

                        a step   a step   a

                                    step      a step a step

                                                at a time           the body

                                                                                    your body

paused in its

            bonehold

                        to begin in

                                    another body

                                                and another body

                                                            and another      body

 

hold                 hold        hold    

                                present    

blow out        

newly corporeal                

                        

                       

Sounding

 

view from below

Sounding 

                                    Consider his: the saving

Of the self in the intense work of its singleness,

Learning to live with it.

                                    David Ferry

                                    Out at Lanesville

 

The plow sounds

            it sounds rising

            from a height of such

            depth it is all (briefly)

            cacophony.  Applause

            at the end of something

            very demanding

            the audience rapt

            in the absolute

            hush of the something

            they cannot name

            they can never

                        name

            save for saying they have been

                        changed, unmistakably

            the way going to bed

                        in the middle

                        of the day changes

                        the body & her rhythm

                        the way waking in the dark

                        to the glow of the new

                        snow not knowing it

                        was supposed to snow

                        & the night is all white light

                        spread all the way

                        into far

                        and you can see that far

 

                        all the way into the dark

                        of the forested

                        property

 

and walking out

                        into this with the plow still

                        far off is an old time

                        revival you know

                        kind where the one with

            the deepest wounds from the deepest

            memory is offered up

            & the soundless awe

            of the congregation

                        their mute mouths

                        their plumbed tongues

                        are laid down

                        before the plow

                        that is yet                     that is yet

 

            (because sound to breach means taking it all in its entirety and it takes

a long long time)

 

                                    is still

                                    beneath it all

            

Ever

 

EVER ~

 

He who would search for pearls must dive below.

                                    John Dryden

 

Ever had a pain so deep

in between the private places

right where the left & right side

join? It makes me

think this is how stretched skin

feels, a new velum waiting to feel

paint.  I feel it, feel it fearful,

feel it being so new the ache

doesn’t know where to center

itself so it rests there where the ribs

 

meet each other & now that

they’re there they will never cease being

unseparated.  Consider this:

twins who in utero

& unbeknownst to their mother

form a pact and are born

keeping that pact intact sharing the one

kidney or lung or the one

unamputatable organ

 

beneath the bone housing.

All those molecules no one

can know & not only molecules

but elements & the underneath

of flesh so intimate a place

even the surgeon, pealing it

 

away to make one finally into two

stops utterly, catches a sob

and doesn’t know how

the incision should begin

or for that matter how

on earth she’ll be able

to go on once the cut begins. 

Interpreting Mercury

 

 Interpreting Mercury  

 

It may be only the crudest, cruelest transformations touch us,

gauzewalkers in the hallways of a burn ward.

 

                                    Christian Wiman

                                    Assembly

 

Somehow where to pick up the thread

alludes me like the mercury it is, poison silver

drops falling from the bitten

through thermometer between her teeth.

 

It happened.  She had a fever & she needed

to see the heat registered, read it

as a divination.  Beneath the glass the line

rises while the tube is under her

 

tongue, her conniving ally.  Removing it

through the kiss of her lips makes a new

wound, though a ghost, and going cold

where it used to measure the heat of her.

 

It was never wrong.

 

Once, she taught me to shake it down

to normal, to rinse off the bits of her, to stash

it in the medicine cabinet in its protective

plastic scabbard I misnomed Excalibur

 

because I was gorging myself on boys

in books (my only intimacy my virginity)

and one in particular who could call down God

while raising up the blade he’d slid easily out of

 

the rock it was fixed in.  I don’t think these

things while she sat  on the lid

of the toilet and scrubbed

the crust of sick from her wrist to

 

her elbow.  I think instead I thinks she said

she thinks she has

a fever.  She said let me see.  She saw.

She said

make sure to shake it down & she shrugged

her stiff/limp wrist wet with wash-

cloth.  And all its contents

flung.  The door was shut.  She had a cut

 

above her eye where she’d fallen

up the stairs.  She pressed the back of my hand

to her

cheek & bleeding brow.  Squeezed. 

 

                             Squeezed 

                             hard.  She bit down.

 

She was twenty

two when I was born. The day I read

her temperature I was nine.  We conspired

like thieves above a dug hole.  I shouldered her

 

to bed shhhhhshhhhhhshhhhh 

she’d said.  The shard

& shattered tube of glass, the tiny pool

of cooling mercury estimated me,

and it suffered nothing, apt bead 

reading the heat 

or the lack of it

either way.

Backyard Archeology

 Backyard Archeology

If Newton really thought that time was a river,

like the Thames, then where is its source and into

what sea does it finally flow?

                                    Austerlitz

                                    W. G. Sebald

This dark: solid as soil

    solid as layers of age

        waiting.  Or not waiting.

            Just soil and all her com-

                ponents.  Planned or ran-

                    dom.  Animal offerings.

                        Detritus.  Rusty rusting 

rusted.  Cans of you choose: beef

    stew?  Spam?  (the key's

        missing but who cares, so

            is the meat) Baked beans? 

                Each has been liberated, label,

                    contents.  So, you can choose.

You can choose the mouth.  You can

    choose the occasion.  You, who on

        the handle end of the tool is made

            to dig into the sod (later you'll relate

                to your mate how dry, is it improbable?

                    it seemed, just being released from 

                        winter.  Because it's still

                                March, it's still giving

snow.  There's a chance, an almanac

    chance of a blizzard.  Remember how

        you've seen snow well enough gone into

                the month of May.  Ok.  Make this 

                    your day today:  you'll be bid to

                        sharpen the blade of the spade 

                            and make your way into the solid

dark.  You'll be bid to heft and heave

    to release and reveal the next and next

            the strata of dark.  Maybe a pottery

                shard. Maybe a heart-shaped rock.  

                    You'll still,

digging down, be on solid ground

    or something solid enough as a concrete

            vault built to hold all told and tolled (some

                but again you choose) games of table grace

                    and waste.  Pray, won't you.  I was just saying

how Newton saw time like a river

    and the question was if that's true

        what then is its beginning and then

                where does it, coursed, uncoursed (you 

                    can and cannot choose) disappear to?  

                        Today, I'd say maybe after you try to

flush it all away and it meets some solid

    and slippery companion, collar up to hide

            its face to shove it back and back to almost

                where it came from, that time is a holding

                    tank, lid reluctant to lift without jacks and 

                        levers and (you've dug enough down to see)

once the lid's lifted, a whole new world is stood

    still: swill and scums and insides come undone

        but you know it's not supposed to be this stood

            still...Ok?  This liquid solid caught in the proverbial

                act.  I'd say before the curtain falls or rises, that time is

Brian to the rescue with his pumps

    and pressured backward air to vacuum

        years of passage.  We laugh at

            our fate of being able to

                colloquial or not shoot

                    the shit or chew the fat or

                        gnaw the bone while over us

uncapped, is dark, all dark, dug

    and flung open, a grave hole 

        patient and emptying, emptying

            of all the shirkers and lurkers 

                mongers of manure, there's

temporary stay of execution, 

    there's, you choose, you, remember,

        can almost always choose, abatement.