Christmas Blizzard

Christmas Blizzard

Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence

of love, which confers meaning to loss.  Loss is not

felt in the absence of love.  “The queen died and then

the king died” is a plot, wrote E. M. Forster in The Art

of the Novel, but “the queen died and then the king died

of grief” is a story.

                               The Light of the World

                               Elizabeth Alexander

I suppose it was over long before I knew

and maybe that was because I loved you and hoped.

You know, it was the kind and sort of love that grew

in the same plot of earth and at about the same

time, it felt the same sun and rain and snow though

maybe not the same amounts and maybe not

at the same time.  You had been rooted

a few months before me and bore

the empty crib by yourself longer and more loudly.

Our mother used to say you cried for the first

eighteen months of your life so that means

I heard you for only a small few of those months and by

then with the three of us, two and a half years old

and younger, she’d had it to her elbows—

bones

she’d lean on out on the doorstep she said, away

from us long enough to not murder us.  She said

this euphemistically, though over time I didn’t entirely

doubt her and it wasn’t body she’d’ve killed anyway

but she certainly in her own crave and poverty

stole from each of us bits of soul that would, like a buried

bobble dug up with a spoon and absently discarded,

prey it to her lips and keep it between her teeth.  We

didn’t know what we’d dug up or what we’d lost.

Maybe it was this: in the chaos and the lull between the next

chaos it was the sound of someone’s loving

breath against our cheek.  It makes me think of Alexander

Graham Bell “speaking” to his deaf mother, how he’d

rest his lips against her cheek and she, fingertips like

a thrush’s wings, would feel his words and touch her

response to him—I bet this was the kind

of contact we ached for and ultimately wouldn’t sooth

you, full to the hood with colic and trauma of her

abandonment.  I think we say out of our own ache:

we say: this is what I want, we say: this is what my day needs

to look like to make me happy only I can’t reach—or

don’t want to, like the day after the blizzard, the top

of the snow goes colder, goes frozen and we stay

behind the dark window looking at the warm houses

in the valley and watch the smoke go up into the clean

sky and say I could have that but I can’t

find my coat or hat or a convenient pair of skis or skates

because see the way is paved in ice.  Come spring

and given the life of seeds some of what and who

we are could make it that little bit of the way if it weren’t

for the settlement of birds, the variety of spiders,

the cinema of buds all different manner of distractions.

Rooted as we are in it we can’t know if we wintered

well at all, if we kept close enough to our heartwood

to prevent freezing altogether.  I think maybe

and ultimately the great distance will never be even

or broached between us and it’s not I’ve given up

trying more it’s like the day our mother died and you’d

left hours before and I stayed and after she was

finished one of the first things I realized was she wasn’t

alive to hurt anyone ever again and maybe you should’ve

stayed to come to know that too and known

where you draw the line, when to begin to say:

I’m on my way to being through with being hurt

by you and that starts it always starts with putting it

all down and opening the window or looking up

into the sky after the Christmas blizzard is through

and seeing not just blue, no not just blue but winter

birds coming home to roost in our bare, ice crusted

birch.  

Leaving Rehab

Leaving Rehab

…all you can see are my travels

and they are the least of me,

not the one who has arrived.

                                     Marriage—(Ulysses)

                                     David Whyte

It comes to who do you take with you

in a pack all your own, snd then who

can you not do without?  bound

to be disappointments, the pile

rises and shrinks like a tide

in the middle of this month’s moon:

slack calf and then hip and then,

because you have not turned yet

to go, lip and a trickle of salt

between the teeth.  The tongue

knows more than it lets on or allows

and brine, this brine, is the very

mineral it needs: the flecks of gold

no one has ever really known

how to pan or mine are left behind

when the tide turns again and once

the land is dry for the moment

(knowing seas it all returns

sometimes clean sometimes debris)

it is time to take on the strongest

villains, the gracious angels,

and watch the navies collide inside

the heart and mind and be

surprised, be awed and surprised,

(who’s alive at the end?) who tries

out of the rope and foam, who gropes

for it, survived and you’d like to

say you read ahead, you knew but

you didn’t quite, you’d missed some

subtlety in your drowning, didn’t you? 
Yes,

the story was written for you and through

it your torment I wouldn’t do I wouldn’t

do but you didn’t do did you when it was

your turn really you shrunk back in it,

you swallowed the whole boat load, didn’t

you? 

No.  No I didn’t.  I was the only one

who didn’t.  Prove it?  Prove it?  Well,

I’ve arrived, haven’t I?  I'm here, right?

Filing Tooth by Tooth

Filing, Tooth By Tooth

After this look down…

Your hands! Only your hands!

A pure contradiction,

a pure blessing.

Everything you learned

has come to nothing.

                                    David Whyte

                          Seven Steps for Coming Home

While I slept you sharpened

the chain-

saw blade you made

ash and hackmatack and blue

spruce and maple seem easy

to handle the way you were sure in their felling

how you made the most precise angle

at the near base

of the tree how you listened

and stood and the wind told you

and the elastic snap told you (and you told me once

                                                                remembering

                                                                how you heard a man’s jaw

                                                                make that same

                                                                                                sound

                                                                                after he’d made or tried to make

                                                                                                                off with your wife

and it went down through the rest

the man and the tree

of all the standing men and trees

defeated branches and limbs

finished

beseeching

quick work that makes her

all the hers

naked and you say it’s all in

the sharp

                ness

of the teeth on the chain

and all evening most evenings

you file and oil

                the tannin of your day making

                sachets in the air and your whole day’s

work in your plaid

                                sweat and motor oil and sawdust

                and scuffed up boots and you look through

each tooth and you make one stand out

above the rest with a dab of mum’s red

nail polish

                                time after time the hover of your unguided spot on eyed angle

                the count of the push ahead

                the count of the push ahead

                the count of the push ahead

a tongue on your upper lip concentration

and George Jones

                                                on 8 track in the background

                                he’s playing at playing round

                                                                at glass after glass of whiskey and women

while you file straight across the teeth

one one one and raise your thumb

every time to gauge the strength of your morning.

You’ve never once dropped a chain

running it all too hot.  Every plug is clean

as brand new and you pull it all

into the living

flesh of your own woods and play the grim

God selecting

which ones you’ll cut today and pull

the chord and pull the trigger

and walk into all that other silence sharp

ready to bring it down

hack the limbs drag it out in chains

to cut it

stack it

dry it

burn it

all

piece      

                                by

                                                piece

species blending into species

depending on how hot you want

your fire.

True, But Still,

True, But Still,

it wasn’t a Monday that year you died

but a Tuesday and it was almost

a Wednesday and then

one more day and it would’ve been

Thanksgiving.  It was Monday, the day

before you died, when you turned

sixty and you were as you’d come in

all those years before: sick

barely breathing, hustled to

the sunk indignity of dull

lights and a bevy of on call
nurses who knew all of what was good

what was good for you and did none of it.  Still

a month or more from being just barely

ok, you couldn’t wait and you wanted

out and you wanted a particular

out you thought people, finally, might

stick around for.  And as soon

as you were made

comfortable the room tipped, almost

everyone spilled out, they couldn’t

hang on.  I'm Remembering ‘Out, Out,” by

Robert Frost right, how the boy

was doing a man’s job cutting

wood and his sister called out to him

‘supper’?  How he was distracted

and the saw sawed off

almost all of his hand?  Remember

how the doctors came and he

weak as he was didn’t want them

to cut it off because listen, a Hand!

how could he work without

a hand?  But the ether was his first

real sleep ever and maybe it was

accidental but he slipped out

into its pure and stunning buoyancy

and balked just once, just for show

because you know

sister was watching and those doctors…

Well, that’s the line everyone

empties out on: because they were not

the one dead they've turned

to their affairs.  By the time you were ready

to leave with dignity and this time

for forever you were percolating

you were drawing up

something that was the very last

of something and I felt you give out and be

no more.  Later on I’d imagine

the girl out of line after Frost is done

with her, how she washes her brother

and lays him in a grave.  Ten years on

maybe she still visits him, she makes

a big deal of it to the woods where he’s always

with the oak and the ash and the baby

maples.  She looks up into

their canopies and maybe, knocked

loose by the sheer regularity death
anniversaries have, she hears him

laughing, pulling a chord to shut the machine

down not giving it another thought.

She thinks this to the stone

in front of her, to the body of him

in the ground under it, to the weight

of it in her memory, his dying, his still

letting go his still warm fingers on his still

attached hand saying stay, stay

there’s still enough time to change

your mind.

Tree

Tree

While I slept the tree striped to her every all
together leaf by leaf she let me know her

needle by needle.  Even in daylight wind a pock
of rain the coming of the snows she stayed straight
and up right into the sky naked and maybe aside from her flash

of fire and the ache of some days to lie beneath

her green to look up into her canopy (because

I’m not made to bear it all) I have to say I admire

her most this time of year when all her nudity lets

nothing on but honesty: the bump gnarl

ragged nipples the rough or silk of her bark

and the prominent scar her summer

mastectomy what’s left of a final sigh and shrug

and fall against the fence breaking it to

replacement.  She gave it in a labor I take

for granted I feel guilty for but can’t say why.

All day through to spring and all night her

aching isn’t she all that hair a woman, who,

seeing a storyteller at dinner breaks through

the mob to to wash his feet with all of it

pouring scandalously around his toes and ankles

and calves—and didn’t he in a moment

wont of humanity palm her scalp and right

down to the root boost her and cup her jaw

and send her throbbing out into all those

stars?  Once the clouds break away frayed

and manhandled by the contrailed wind they make

her stiff and rigid hair stand straight on

and anybody who looked her way as she left

weeping would have seen—would have seen—

but a mirror—but the coming and going of a cloudy

cloudless night—but a woman lying down

to sleep naked with all her perfumed hair spread

wide as branches fruitless now and bare

but for all that—oh but for all of that!

Arbor Vitae

Arbor Vitae               

…and hell

you realize, resembles more

an average life,

half hidden,

never fully spoken

something you can grow used to.

                                    David Whyte

                                    When the Wind Flows

While I slept I dreamed

sometimes I remade

the day in my own face,

a trace that came

to me brand new it

came to me clean

with the lull of a song beneath

the lid of my lip, and in French

too because I loved it I loved

the way it sounded

the way it could soothe
(I never knew what it meant
until later)

while it plucked

one by one by one

the feathers and the top

and then the bottom

beak and then the eyes…

I slept the wrong

and the right side by side

and they would

fistfight and I never woke

that there wasn’t a clear

winner but I never woke

ever knowing who

it was.  I’d think

about them while I stood

at the end of the lane

waiting for the bus to come

and I watched the house

shrug us off

and I never

wanted to go back

into it after that or take

a friend into it not because

of shame everybody has that

but because it was there

that the fire was out 

and it was close

to Christmas

and the tree was missing

her best branches

cut off so she could fit

in the corner next

to the stove and too

some of her lights

would glow and some

of them would not

and while I slept

Jesus would be

born and I’d feel pity

for him in all that cold

and I’d want to take him

home to my bed

and maybe soup maybe

and a bit of bread but there wasn’t

soup and there wasn’t

bread

and all the hay had gone

to the dog and it wasn’t

enough her floor was still

bare and cold I know I slept

in there once with her

while the house was

shrugging with us in it

and listen don’t let anyone

tell you it’s not so bad

we just say things like that

so we can sleep

at night so we can leave

Jesus to the dogs

so we can

cut down trees and make them

flash for a month

or so until we tire of them

and shrug them off too

timing that shrug

with the closing

of the woodstove door

when the fire’s going

good and those sparks:

so generous so ravishing

to our dry dry tinder,

almost too close to it, fingers.

Soaking

"Into" Rebecca Nurse House, Danvers, Mass

Soaking

While I slept the beans re-

made themselves in the water

in the crock they reached

behind the hull and inside it

and under it to shake the sleeping

green awake.  Each little dried kidney

was a stone poured: one

cup one cup into the pot, last

summers: yellow eyes or pea

or Kings of the Early or Jacobs

Cattle wall those possible Elijah’s

sunk beneath the almost

clean town water (and I remember: there was

                                a man who

                                down the road

                                from us threw out

                                his dead dairy cows

                                and left them

                                spent maybe a gurgle

                                or two in their lungs

                                drug there by

                                the bucket loader slung

                                into his pit of fish his

                                scheme to sell it

                                back to the small fry

                                farmers who

                                couldn’t afford

                                commercial fertilizer

                                almost dry and the reek’s

                                worse than shit and some-

                                times because of the leak

                                in the liner of his great

                                pits and after a heavy

                                rain it would seep

                                and sink down into the ground

                                water it would make its way

                                to our faucet to our tea

to our soaking Saturday night

beans put under every Friday

night so long long into the dark

their dry selves could shake off

the rehabilitation the temperance

and shrug and struggle

swell again in all that (some-

times) tainted water.

While I slept the beans

remade themselves they split open

like a head coming down hard

on that last stair, having taken

the fall with the rest of the

body, the foot missing

the second step thinking it’s

it’s, it’s what?  Friday night? 

That forgetting the soak means

no Saturday night beans?  Beans

baked with what sugar we could

scrounge, what water we’d set

to rest before pouring slow so the brown

went to the bottom, and stayed there.

After Reading This Rilke Translation: David Whyte’s You Darkness

After Reading This Rilke Translation: David Whyte’s You Darkness

But darkness holds it all:

the shape and the flame,

the animal and myself,

how it holds them,

all powers, all sight—

                                                Rainer Maria Rilke

                                                You Darkness

While I sleep I don’t

eat (and between me

and the deep water

that accommodates me) I see

my true face on the liquid

shellac that, on the limits

of its hardening, still absorbs

the color of the water

and the color of the sky.

Behind me a V of geese

vanish completely.  One

drop of rain and then

one more fall past and

catch and finally having

enough weight on 

push through.  While I

sleep it is ok to be the

rain waiting it is ok to eat

nothing and still be ok. 

It is ok to see the water

and watch it without

stirring it or needing

to.  It is ok to want to be

completely

alone and break

away from memory

and memory yet to be

and say this

is just a moment so like

so many other moments

and it doesn’t depend

on me being

anything, even a body

that has to move

that must take food

that must walk or run

or swim

that must lie down

and sleep

nightly

and that sleep, it’s ok

to say, is what today I depend on

the most

being tired and cold and going

on close to fifty

yes while I sleep I don’t need

to do anything and it is ok

to say

isn’t it?

while the shellac is still

liquid enough that I’ll wait

awhile before letting myself

fall through and into,

awake,

the coming of the day.

After the First November Snow

After the First November Snow

A garden inside me, unknown, secret,

neglected for years

the layers of its soil deep and thick.

Trees in the corners with branching arms

and the tangled briars like broken nets.

                                      David Whyte

                                      Easter Morning in Wales

We didn’t know we simply didn’t know

or me maybe just me frenzied as I am and can be by the brief
yet sudden onset of the cold or not sudden its been

arriving all along even though I’ve turned my back

not unlike those brides who were

warned and warned and they played

around instead they laughed and kissed each

other and took the sun into their mouths

and swallowed like Titus they rose to the cliffs shelves and left

themselves exposed so their toes and fingers go first

but they don’t know they don’t drunk on the sun

as they are and only later, at the closed

gates will they naked and exposed

know, sober, their certain sun has set

it’s glowing has glowed and glowed and burned itself 
out and they’ve been thrown like stones but oh I didn’t want to go

to this particular gate I wanted to open

the way for the gray and bare apple orchards 
the maple groves to take me in please, take me 
naked in for the winter and show me

how they, ancient crones, skirtless shirtless, after having

born and borne all their fruit, dropping it hope-

lessly to hands and mouths and beaks and grass, survive the cold.

On This Road, Driving By

On This Road, Driving By

In my Father’s House are many mansions…

                                                           John: 14-2

From the road, it all, every house, takes on the mantle

of a passive crowd moving (though it doesn’t know it, the crowd)

(though maybe that occasional few and aren’t they straight away

gagged quick as lickity split) to their doom: house

after house after house and all the human things all the animal

things that happened in them that no one that anyone

believes but see they’ve got their reasons for saying so, they do:

take the place next door to me, it’s gone now, the house

and the barn (I never knew the barn but I’d play on the slab of

foundation floor, avoid the cellar hole) and some of

the trees that went too in the fire but the grounds and the roots

fan out to meet other trees older trees that were there and still

are in their always dark.  This house I walk by or used to every

day was mostly empty and caving in, it wasn’t livable in fact

but when he came back with his daughters it was like

something out of Faulkner if you get my reference

he interfered with them he was a sick sick man the men

said I heard later he struck them and touched them

and fed them the ghosts he brought from Poland when he

and his folks rid on the last living trains out, road on in

to Canada and everyone else would file by in the opposite

direction, south, to the ovens, so maybe (is it you?)

he’s given a little room to be crazy, he’s not right

in the head, he could seduce, but who isn’t charmed by him

his elegant accent he never talked about anything but whomever

you to pull that you out of view of his daughters

abused, bleeding from the…well we don’t talk about that

and he’s dead now anyway dead and buried back in Canada

it’s just a house now isn’t it, a gone house a burned down house

struck one night by lightning arsonists I heard they got time

for it, funny how that happens, the rapist goes free and the man

taking the only revenge he knows for the rumor of those girls

goes into the big house and well, that’s all I can see on a night

like tonight on this road driving by.

(tea)

(tea)

for my mother

Yesterday, Elaine got me to thinking about tea

and how you made me go back and do it

all again if it wasn’t in perfects

shades of brown (and because sometimes the boiling

water was too fast coming or not

fast enough or it had gone mostly

dry and the tinkle of the lime

would slide into the metal netted

spout, I’d be distracted by one

or some or all of these, blowing

on my finger from the hot bubbles and drops.)

You’d taught me: two tea bags (Salada)

(and here I have to say once I started to learn

to read I thumbed the taglines

and rubbed them wet sometimes to be brave) two

sugars after it had steeped

I think maybe four or five minutes

and I’d squeezed the tea out

using the tag and the bowl of the spoon

or the rim of the mug and then dip it wet

into the sugar like you did because who

cared? you were the only one allowed

to have sugar (I lied for my sister all the time

who was hungry and someone

a neighbor maybe  had taught her to

stir a little sugar in water to fend

off the gnaw) and it didn’t matter

if the lip of the bowl was tannin

crusted and the lumps of drying

sugar from your last cup of tea were carried 

into this cup.    And then the canned

milk and this too was only for you, and

I remember this: once I tried to open it, one

hole then opposite another hole and each

was too big and it poured too fast

and spilled and we were just one day in

after buying groceries and everything

had to last another week or more for

when my father got back from working

away in the mills in Millinocket

and I thought with shock: all that milk gone…

maybe that day you were distracted

tending my three-year-old brother, he’d

gotten into something and needed

a bath and you were heating water

in the canner to pour into the tub

and I just waited for you and you weren’t

coming and so maybe I wiped it up as casual soft

as I’d seen some man touch the face

(and you’d said mmm-mmm-mmm) of

a woman who wasn’t his wife (how would I

know that unless you said) on Days of Our Lives.  Or I tried

to wipe it.  Because milk gone missing in a house

with four kids even if they weren’t allowed

(there was powdered for us, blue as the old

lady’s hair who sat in front

of us at mass, who smiled sad who took your hand

and pressed green paper into it) never went

unnoticed.  But this time

by some miracle and that distraction (my brother?)

a maybe you gave it to the stray

cat the neighbor said, the same one who

taught my sister about sweet water, the one

who that day taught me that this milk

this spilled milk and this spoiled cup of tea (she

drank it for me) just needs smaller holes

in the can see? stand on the chair so you can

reach see put the point of the knife here see

hit the handle with the palm of your hand see

and then do the same exactly opposite see

gentle don’t tip the can it needs two

holes to be able to breathe see (and she touched

my nose and each hole) now be careful, 'cause

the next time there might not be no cat

you see?  And she left and you had

your fifth cup of tea and used the bags

only once.  And the day sat, wet pillows

in the trash, and an empty can of evaporated milk

beside it all for company.

This is Just What I Waited For. Isn't It?

"Through One Pane"  From Nathaniel Hawthorne's Study, The Old Manse

This is Just What I Waited For.  Isn’t It?

On considering the parable of Jesus

about the man who saves

his wine for the best guest and nobody, even

the king good enough.

and so he dies and his prize is drunk

by waifs and beggars. 

I think:    just the beans and peas we put up when you were 

    still alive are waiting, and they've been pulled, every each and all the last
    of them from the shelf, lifted,  and their lid sucked up.  And a breath
    is let off the liquor—yours leaning once over the mouth
    of it, cheak leaning into the teaspon of salt--I think

                something critical in me wants to wait… it is enough...
                for a while…you being down there bottled, your hand
                prints on the glass, just to see them staying there backstage,
                preserved, and when the light was thrown

                on they'd say we stayed though all this time, and they’d be fully seen,
                but just,

just us you and me in the dark a largo of dark that though we’d never
                built it with our own hands we did compose ourselves in it 

                shape and contain it shape a shelf on a shelf for it and the glass Mason

                and Ball jars all jewel, they are a proof of this, our labor our hard

                waiting taking place while we clean and clear

                and clip away everything that would occupy the earth

just last year (your last though how could we know) and then that last jar
                can I see it on my own shelf? maybe it’s

                honey a couple three years old and when I put it up

                I put it up to share with my friend who was on her way

                but was delayed and remains delayed like there was some

                hailstorm maybe and a whole new crop needs sowing over her,

just over the top of her and another friend dead because of the deep defeating
                toil of it all.  

                The sowing I mean the cause of the delay.  But what does a jar

                of honey know only now the slow going

                toward stone (I glimpse inklings of it in the dim when I want

                what?  what do I want?  Something not that not that it's just,

just that I’d waited saying listen when I open you they’ll be here

                and they’ll be close and close their eyes and they’ll drink

                it like it were wine and the work of wine and the bees

                generations of them long dead ago will all at once rise up

                from the spoon they’ll buzz in our mouths this and it is

just (it is) just what we waited for I waited for and now one guest is

                dead and never coming and one guest is far

                away and never coming and I thought it’s crazy

                I know but I did I thought waiting waiting not opening

                the jar for years and years meant they still were there was

just a chance but now I know they’re not and there’s just

    not there’s just not a chance and spoonful after spoonful

    I dip and eat I do I dip and eat and suffocate on all that was and is

    too sweet and all that still is and catch my breath

    and hold it and feel my teeth erode: and only when I know
    it's the last of it all is just inhaling the empty jar
    yes, just inhaling it, just enough