Undone

bow,
aground

Undone:

Eyelet, Throat Line, Toe, and Tongue

how can water die

with drama, in a final cascade,

a suicide, a victim of terrain, a martyr?

                                                At Stilli’s Mouth

                                                Richard Hugo

We watched your life slide by

like it was a quiet winter

river of ice, like there was time still

to make it through the cooling months you set

yourself down for.  But not used

to rivers I couldn’t know where

I walked back to, or where the mouth

caught all the salt and silt of you it could

and everything else the tide might desire.

You’d taken enough to get you

through, I'll grant you that.  I watched you pack

the only bag you had and stand

with your back to all of us, good

riddance written on the bottom

of your feet.  Seeing you

walk off like that at the start

of autumn, to ‘broker

with your soul’ you’d said, made me

come to feel a building, bulging heat beneath

my fingers, as if I’d shut them

in a car door and never cried out. 

And I didn’t know what you meant

then, I thought you’d walk

until you got half tired and then

by some pluck of love turn

round and be our mother

again.  But there’s some

hunger under the river you bank

on and when the tide rises up 

to your good riddance shoes,

whose soles are worn and rubbed

up with running, whose tongue

laughs under the knot-near-the-key

hole, whose strings sit mute by virtue

of what they try to close.  They are the first

thing I find  you’ve abandoned

when I come looking for you, when I

finally knew we weren’t enough to make you

want to live.  Listen, I followed

almost right away.  I walked

where you walked, I ducked under all that 

thick-limbed reclaimed pasture, all those trees

startled birds and the chittering

vermin, they were as close as I could get

to saving your life.  I’d find you

the following spring, feet bare

and not very far from where I started

looking, the river receded by then,

or at least on the bank of that

particular jut, the rim of the rocks

all salt, all crystal, like agate, like bitumen,

like hunger on the mouth of one who constantly licks

when it thirsts for something.  But nothing,

not river, not children, your own even,

can feed it.

Choosing

facing south
Lubec, Maine

Choosing

Why am I afraid or sorry you are dead?

My hands paid contraband to be this still.

My mouth rotted with the truth

to be as tough as wheat before your stone.

                                                               

                                                The Other Grave

                                                Richard Hugo

Maybe I I need to read everything, every

word I’ve written, to choose to be confident

I’m not repeating myself here.

Now that you’re tucked in some virtual

file we can go back years and years,

you and me, and then too into the small

drawers, my first blank books

of self-destruction.  Is it only now

that it occurs to me that I had nothing

at all in me that you could love?  I walk by

those little books every day, like

the way I walk by your stone in summer

on my way into the woods.  I'm always, I think

on my way past preserving you.  Once, for formality,

I stopped, or maybe a couple more times

to water the gargantuan plant

my sister brought, as caution that her grief
was larger than mine, a plant now crumbling

crumbling to rust, down to its roots, yessir, now

that I’m gone.  It pulled the hanging hook

low, driven shallow above your stone,

like a heavy glass bulb on the low branch
of the Christmas tree, so that it leans with its cliché

star or angel, a little drunk, propped

on nothing but it's own sweet hanging

by and by.  But by looking at it (the tree
I mean, not just that one drunk

bulb) I would swear it was hitched up leaning

on a wall, something farther back

from the crowd, cool, aloof, observing.

                                (Here’s something new:

                                I remember one year you only

                                decorated the front of the tree

                                and it fell face first into the wood

                                stove.  To satisfy four kids

                                you rummaged in the shed

                                for bailing twine and screwed

                                two big hooks into the horsehair
                                plaster walls 

                                and strung the tree up

                                to bulge out into our Christmas.

                                That was the year I got the doll

                                that peed herself and got a rash

                                if she had one of the five red-carbon paper

                                diapers on, little dots of raised plastic pain

                                and I was supposed to clean her

                                like any dutifully good mother…
                                they looked like little stars, or better
                                still, connect the dots, which my sister
                                did, in blue Bic ink)

And talking of walls and leaning, those

places where you take in the crowd without needing to

get involved, I think I’m starting

to take that same composure, and I’d dare

say I think I am beginning

to know you.  I think truly if we met

on the street the first thing you’d do

is slap my face for one or more of these

perceived betrayals.  You hated almost

everything about where I was and where

I was going.  Believe me when I say I tried

whatever a nine-year-old knew

to try, even lying about the knife

my sister held in her fist over my throat:

she chased me and pinned me

and was caught by the babysitter.  But you know

that already.  I’d argue, having

slipped this life a mick now, you know

more than you are obviously now able

to let on.  I’d argue too if I wrote down

everything I knew about you someone

somewhere would laugh back that

you don’t know the half of it cliché. 

Today I make  your face float below me

while I look at your stone, which is

amazing in and of itself given you’re nothing

but ash and urn, a box tilted on a long

root.  I watched you when they put you in, leaning

maybe until spring, when the root

would rush its blood past you, called

as it was, on its way to the warming canopy. 

But all winter that first winter I imagine

you are in that small box, cradled

really, and safe as you wanted to be,

safe as I keep you, swaying in a stranger’s arms

just like when you started, premature

born and a little over two pounds,
all those years ago, abandoned to life

and choosing, somehow, to live

at least

sixty years
of it

                                

Acoustic Shadow: An Appeal

Shadow's Acoustic

Blood doesn’t go backward but it must,

once it's pumped, though only in the slack,

echo in the constricting chambers

somewhere, and only in sound.  I wonder

if this kind of hearing is like feeling a belfry

wall after the monumental bells are gone still 

and their ropes hung back and limp, how if my hand 

is perceptive enough and carnal

my palms on the inside of the lissom turret

stones, they’d read the vibrations sent into 

the veins and set there like a scar, ages ago, 

a deep agreement sealed in the lung of it when

say, a pneumonia’s diagnosis could go

either way:  remember that moment when God

            gets nearly pinned to the desert

road by Jacob and the referee, (whom-

ever he is) sound in his sight, nearly gives

the match to the man and maybe

he blinks, there’s salt

in his eye and the upper hand

shifts and the loss becomes a draw?

And what’s this got to do with blood?  Maybe

nothing except it’s my pulse that’s going back

and forth over the curves, beneath my skin.

I’m thinking if I touch the stones in the house

that hangs the bells, and when the bells

go still I’ll listen and close my eyes

and let the echo (like in any cave) fixed there

climb to my fingerbone and then my sternum

and then beneath it bleed through to those

oh, I don’t even know what they’re called,

in the dissected heart muscle I saw, the places

that resonate and pattern sound in there: hand

prints, reindeer, great extinct beasts without

ever any chance again at the light.  All shadow now,

a raised sonography, like something

slicing back, a scalpel, maybe, sliding its simple whisper

through the flesh, right through the roof

of it, into the bells outer edges and then, drawing

back to only, the true purpose, forge ahead,

always ahead, appealing.  

if it isn't it won't

if it isn’t it won’t

a theme for further reflection:

the arithmetic of compassion

                                                Zbigniew Herbert

                                                Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper

if you see them afterward

if they even know you or

if you even know them

if it is they and you and 
if you ar both absent of flesh and bone,

if it is you neither have and are without a mouth and tongue

if (we are so used to being

touched,

if even inappropriately)

isn’t it going to be hard to hold on,

isn’t it going to be like cold wintered over chimneys because

aren’t they long without heat

aren’t they long without smoke

aren’t they then suddenly when you come home flushed of all their guests:

humble the burst of bats or birds

humble the cough of soot

humble the sudden blue flame

humble the billowing creosote: up and out and still

if you see,

if you go back to,

if after that smoke’s kissed what it can of the brick

especially if it’s on to crumbling and broke clean and neat

if it is as it once was before it’s been set 

won’t it be cleared

won’t it be as if nothing

won’t it be as a slight limp

won’t it be as stiff

won’t it be as a word held on the tongue

like a bird under a thumb

like a little heart

like it or not, giving in, giving out

After Mr. Cogito's Mother

in darkness
rear servants stairs
vanderbilt
hyde park, ny

After Mr Cogito’s Mother

the left

given to leaps…

the right

nobly rigid…

and so

on both legs

Mr Cogito

goes

through the world

staggering slightly

                                On Mr Cogito’s Two Legs

                                Zbigniew Hebert

I have to do the math backwards although any

one with any shred of aptitude would simply say

eleven just like that eleven it’s been eleven

years already only eleven years and say it

like it’s only been a week it’s been a week a week’s gone

by already though I appreciate how we don’t

even know some among us when we stop 

counting or when counting stops meaning

something even though it slips perfect as

a master dovetail joint into place all that

cutting all that sharp angle sanded to dust has become

and what it is that makes us the us is just me

because who else does this in my life I don’t

know who else is seeing that this year your birthday will fall

hmmph, fall, like love I guess or glass or you

in the bathroom on your last of last days

on a Monday and you died the next day the day

after three weeks later.  You’d been given a few hours

at least to be sixty and my father wanted it

that way though all he’d say is that he wouldn’t let you

die on your birthday.  He couldn’t

appreciate the symbolism in that and so

he made you wait it out for a few more

hours and then left you before you

were finished.  I’m not judging that not in the way

people who can do simple math who arrive

at their facts just like that and if I could

I’d snap my fingers here and make

the whole crowd blink for its fist in the palm

affect though gentle gentle and without

a shred of revenge.  I bring it up

because I always think at this time

of year you would’ve been wanting to

bring the whole garden in all at once so

you could get it done and sit on the couch

and have a smoke.  I bring it up

because this year Thanksgiving falls

early on that fourth Thursday of five

as it happens just like the year when

you died.  I bring it up because lately

I’ve been thinking about Descartes and his

Cogito bullshit and two poets are happening

to be having a conversation on the radio

about Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito

Laments and it makes me take him up

off the top shelf where he holds

all the rest of them (Bishop and Moore and Yev-
tushenko and and Miloz and Nemerovski)

I have to move

the teaspoon of bone and ash I have

(stashed is the wrong word but tucked

might not work either) of my friend

Roger who died eight months

after you did and right away I know I’m going

to put down everything I’ve been doing

and take up with him again.  Herbert

I mean.  And remember all the things

he ever said to me, really said to me,

and fall in like a foot soldier on rations

having marched halfway across Africa

or Canada or for him Poland with some of

God in his pocket.  I could say his story

is so much sadder than yours and though

I wouldn’t be wrong I wouldn’t know exactly why

that would be except to say Poland

and World War Two and Stalin and you’d get it

you’d understand at least from

the perspective of suffering something

you did your whole life and held up

like evidence at a trial like it was

the missing piece in a complicated

it’s not going well for whoever’s side

you’re on and BAM! the whole ocean

is turned and Moses pats you on your back

for your acrobatics.  Ok, that’s a bit

blasphemous and cheap I get it and maybe

you’d slap me if you were here but you’re not

and so I read Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and think

maybe you’d go down on your knees

after reading ‘Mother’ and clothe your cold

bones even after that first line:

He fell from her lap like a ball of yarn.

Or would you have to wait like the rest of us

to get to the end to be broken to see

after the boy leaves her and continues

to fall far away from her she holds on

like any sound shelter far away from him

she holds on a station master a place

to wait ‘her outstretched arms’ that

glow in the dark like an old town

the only thing I see after you die and move

away and come back and move away

far far away at the foot of your bed.

in light
rear servants stair
vanderbilt
hyde park, ny

After Mattia Preti of Malta’s The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew

After Mattia Preti of Malta’s

The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew

Held steady enough, still

the reflection in the cup

tips the way the sky will

when I lean over it too

drunk on vertigo to know

it’s not solid, it’s really

falling up sky.  I’ve been

months from such a stomach,

but even this mug of mud

brown coffee’s enough

to see me looking down

looking up.  If I hold it

at the right length before

I tip it onto my lip and just

below my nose (the steam:

it’s sixteen degrees out-

side is a quiet applause

in this hat- and- scarf

room), I see the Blessed

Mother on a cloud, those

three children, and

a flock of lambs,
some sheep. And one of the lambs
looks at me, completely

ignorant of the lift in the sky, the foot

all flesh on the cloud

completely unshocked

she doesn’t fall through—

because she’s solid as

those two girls and the one

boy clutching one each, his

heart and his shepherd’s

crook.   She’s come to them

and revealed hell

and salvation that nobody

will believe, not for a long

long time.  Why did she

not come to me the angry

tight pious nuns provoke

in their cells at night

while they prod and grope

their unholy loneliness?

But that one lamb.  I’m

remembering the faces that keep

rising up out of Mattin

Preti of Malta’s painting

of the Martyrdom of Saint

Bartholomew, how I’m at first

fixed by his looking up

at the coffee colored sky

that must be illuminating

his skin in some miracle

and I’m surprised I’ve only

recently seen his right

arm, the skin is peeled

right down to his wrist

but how is it the faces looking

through the storm I’ve only

now just…but now I can’t

look at his face at all without

wondering at the silhouette

in the left corner, a slave

maybe taking, the way

an anchor may, the un-

steady but expected weight

of all it’s cast out to

contain, it’s him stuck

in the wind and weight

of the second coming, and

closer on, the rain that clutches (but they’re

off canvas, flexing I bet,

thumb tucked under

the fingers can’t you imagine

it’s nothing but this, that boy,

how is he different looking

at a Jesus disciple from the boy

looking at Jesus’s mother.  Or

more, how are those, the man

and the woman, both known

both thrown to the dogs when

the road’s come to be cleaned

when the sky breaks open

and the sheep scatter, the clatter

of their little hooves muted

as they splash through

mud that just moments

before reflected not cloud

not Mary not Bartholomew

backing away toward Armenia

but instead what can be

said to be called a perversity,

the crowd still gawking, their

faces coming up through

the clouds and mist at the now

saint’s elbow, or the children

the three with their knees

bent and the hovering She

draped and robed in gold,

flesh and bone

but only, brief as skin

with its thin thin protection

its excruciating, like sometimes

reflecting, being blinded,
then coming away.

Gladiolus, Chrysanthemums

Gladiolus, Chrysanthemums

And yet, haven’t we each attempted that trick, desiring

ourselves into wideness, more wideness, until we are lost?

                                                              the Mesmer

                                                             Jane Hirshfield

Like most people you shortened the main

name of the flowers you loved best,

the eventually top-heavy gladiola and the afro-

spread chrysanthemum.  And don’t both

need to winter over somehow, in the dark,

on the rocky cellar shelf after opening box

after box at Christmas time, because your mother-

in-law knew she couldn’t go wrong giving

you the mums.  She was capable of such

a quiet and lengthy nourishing as that, hands

through all your winters, but sitting, sitting

in her dormant sheath.  Still, she let you dig

the requirements she taught you early on, in early

spring, and to wait for mid-summer for the color

to break out into your gloomy world.  And she’d

bring a pot or two of mums, and leave them

on the doorstep for you when you wouldn’t

open the door to her, and they’d immediately

go to rust under your care.  You didn’t dead-head

anything but your children, other than what was
offered by chance from the sky and often
your cats who backed up

to let fly a spray of piss that was so wide

reaching it could be tasted in the living room if

the window was open.  And those poor gladiolas:

stalky, blossoms all on one side like flute

holes, opening up on the stem with that precision

coded in them: to open when the sun, when the rain,

when the fog…but always on a day you weren’t at

your best or even wanting to be, all day

granting favor unpredictably, or taking it

in just the same way, with blushed and boisterous

fury sometimes, or quite casually, almost bored

with it all, and usually when the whole

kit and kaboodle had come on and the glads, the best

ones, the ones we’d all been holding out for given

the picture on the box.  When I called you about

the killed boy, my friend, I bet you were on your way
to the garden.  He was the one who used to hit me hard

(but in fun he said) and I let him, who taught me
how to shoot a gun, in the woods, all day that one day  

aching in the deeper shadows and we were out
of the houses we both lived in, how we were
shivering with impact like those flowers:

how they rose up from the ground and opened all

at once, high on in their entire vibrancy, so hopped up

on it in fact, so that knowing anything about coming down

after such a flourish was impossible.  Because when
I call I imagine, like I said, you’re on your way
to the lawn, and you’re blown over,
you’re streaked with mud but otherwise ok, full bloom, taken

off just above the ground level, neither shocked

nor silent, because the season has arrived, it has

finally arrived and before we have a chance to remember

how much we’d both planted and when, and where,

(because later you’d let the flowerbeds go

to grass) I see you take the scissors that afternoon

even though you’re a little drunk, and when the rain

cleared I set you to salvage a ravished section

of a bent two or three unstaked stalks, and take them in

gently as I’ve ever seen you touch anything, to the water-

filled vase you'd dropped an asprin in, and walk a mile
down the road, glass and stagger, to the window
of his mother, just then

gone to make arrangements herself, to weed through

and pick the best, the very best, out of what has fallen. 

Bone

into...

nickels-sortwell house
wiscasset, maine

Bone

When my mother would fall

and break herself, we’d take turns

washing her clothes or making
supper, braising the soup bone the way

my grandmother said to, on the phone

at night, after seven

because it was the cheapest

time to call.  I’d make sure

the potatoes were clean after

they were peeled, and the carrots

too, I’d change the water a few

times and the mud of the last summer

they were in the earth would drift
down the drain.  It would swirl and drift

past my wrists, water up to my

elbows really, the gleam

of the marigold peel, the cream-

white of the potato, their black sprouting

eyes now in the chicken feed bucket

and a thicker, lobbed-off  piece I  had to cut

and squeeze the rot out.  Tell me you won’t be

amazed when, come the early spring,

what we've  thrown out behind the barn

all winter long hasn’t come back and with all that

soaking ammonia, the whole November

to April of the shut-in chickens is pitch-

forked out and dumped, barrow

after barrow, some under-dust drifting up

my nose, or to the doghouse, or some

way on down the driveway where

last week in her cups and in the rain, the car
stalled on the edge of the ditch, the culvert

crumpled with the weight of it all, caved

in like my mother’s mouth after

the stroke, inaccessible, a vice.  I’m

saddest about this in winter, that crimped

culvert, because when I was small I’d scamp

like the cats left outside and get to the middle

under the driveway, before it went out into the dead

frozen ditch again and the broken blond

grass and all the world, all of it, would have

no noise at all, not the sluice, sluice, sluice

of thin carrot peelings or potato too

or the wet slump of it going deep from

the top if there were that January thaw,

down from it all behind the barn,

not the pause (but closest of all to that)

between the tip to the fall and the landing,

the bone still whole, undamaged, quiet

quiet before the impact of it broke

the gates open.  And the scream is the first

thing through, and the skin peeled back,

not the second but close, close to

the bone and going, going, like breathing

out of your nose when your mouth’s clamped

shut refusing, refusing soup, warm

enough to melt the marrow into

the broth we make, the broth we strain

and then take to her, and she pushes, like

trying to catch herself falling, away.

Remembering: The Start of Self-Harm

moss
before noon

Remembering:  The Start of

Self-Harm

                It is the one he chooses,

                yellow, plump, a little bruised

                on one side from falling.

                That place he takes first.

                                                The Groundfall Pear

                                                Jane Hirshfield

To seal it, I brushed some of my daughter’s black polish,

from the nailbed to the tear, to prevent getting caught

on anything.  Anything at all.  Because what requires

fastening and the frequency of fastening is distracting

to the small injuries: the thumbs mostly and lately: (I

shut my right one in the car door last March and it’s still

coming through) a certain split on another over and over,

but only so, it’s subtle and I bother it when I need

a small pain.  Who doesn’t sometimes?  When I was

small I discovered it was more grounding than gravity,

to draw blood up from under my living skin, to mark it

now and forever and be made again and again while

it healed while the scab hardened and sat firm, a man-hole

cover of sorts, the rushing by of blood just below, on

its way to or from the heart, but slowing down when

the road got narrow, right there at the wrist.  I felt it give

a nod on the way by, the way any good penitent would

when he or she passes the gallows say, now grown over

with honeysuckle or morning glory, the gibbet only just

visible from the road, the brass commemorative plaque gone

chaotic green.  Lacking polish, it is more important now,

wouldn’t you say, than the day it was tacked, and the con-

veining days and the silence, the power of the sky

bearing down on my small hand, the sharp tip of the glass

(once it was sand.  Sand!  It was soft enough to walk on

at night in the dark) poised just there, just there, small

injury.  Because they start that way and make it, brave,

through healing and decay, through blooming through

fruit, though not before, and this has to be considered,

the he-bee drone: the proboscis touch to me after he cut me

and drank me and had his way…and I have his mark to this

moment, and I touch it when I need to, a compass when

I’m derailed, when those gallows are cleaned with a frenzy

by the community, and the rope’s hung, it’s tested and hung.

And a spider, a very small one, knits her web in the noose.  I’m ok

today, truly.  I’ve come through, thank you.  It’s enough, black

polish.  On a thumb.  On a nail cut short to avoid randomly getting  

caught.  Thumb that blood was drawn from.  That was pressed

into the cheek, the soft meat of a tender beast, opening

me to close me, the nailbed silent as the king-

sized bed upstairs, blood a pestle: morning glory, honey

suckle.

After Kathleen Jamie's Autumn

After Kathleen Jamie’s Autumn

…see the leaves hurry Shy but dirty…

they’re here look…

blown into your stair

I see them too, Ms Jamie,

                the leaves skittering without all that green to wait

                                them

                                                to weight

                                                                them

                the waiting the wind that weighted they won’t

                                all summer long (and through their chrysalis curl

                                                                                                of April and into May)

                                                submit to juiced like they are

                                                                when the roots they depend on

                                                                                                                pull up from the warming

                                some of the thicker sap

                                                                (not what the sugarman taps)

                                                yes it’s the thicker liquid and it winds its way through

                                                                and all the sun to flatten, let me address you leaves, leaf

                                                                                                you

(though this

                                winter it’s been blizzards             

then days

and days

of fifty degree (even in February)

rain.  First

                                it’s snow

                                to the knees

                                                                then it’s hip boots

                                                remember, I passed under the memory

                                                of you

                                                it was Monday

                                                and the tide was going

                                                                                                and so—

clam hoe and a pack of smokes

                                Wasn’t I just a day or so ago

                plowing out for Paul, who, home now

                                                from that save-yourself-old-age-pain

                                                                knee replacement

                is elevated and taking in

                                the smell of hay and horse shit

                                                coming in the back door

                                                                and it’s not latched all the way and it bangs

                                                and bangs and last fall's the all of yous

                                                                maple leaves congregated

                                                                                and now you’re stiff and limp

                                                                and bent as men who spent all winter in the trenches

                                                                                                yes congregating

                                                                                in corners with the assortment

                                                                                                of butchering tools: pullies

                                                                and blood crusted rope,

                                                                                an occasional glass buoy float

                                                                                                and it all, when the foot’s timed right

                                and the wind sifts it there

                                                                ground to powder

                                                                                and chaff

                                                that if the window across the room

                                                weren’t stuck shut by a decade's worth

                                                                of old paint

                                                                it’d all blow straight out

                                                                                the door

                                                                                                if it were open

                                                                                and there were loose leaves