Bearing These Peculiar Things

Bearing These Peculiar Things

And if a tissue-thin

Section of self lay on a lighted slide,

And a voice breathed in your ear,

“Yes, ah yes.  That red oxide

Stain is where your iron, Lady Hera,

Entered him.

                                                James Merrill

                                                "Alabaster"

Did the one who made that word peculiar

come to mistrust something about

what he saw, because look, the word

liar is perched there on the end

like the hook of some bird, a pelican

maybe or hawk, predatory fast,

tentor grasp and able.  As if

to say this takes the most

extraordinary skill or will to

carry it through, beyond what was

shiny or seducing and when it’s

come upon and thumb-rubbed

and spit on and all its sand falls,

the obligations set and it’s going

home no question about it.  So

you’ve found a bit of bone on the beach

and even though its random, bent

to it you feel all the noise of the world

shut off for a moment—like

the lowering of the battle-dead

finally at home, finally allowed to

stop soaring.  A bird’s skull, like

the one I have on the top shelf

of a little bookcase that looks like

a boat and my whole life floats

in there, my dead and behind-me-

life, friends faces smile out

at me as I walk past or as I lift 

and dust (but not that often)

the crumpling wings of a gigantic

(my five-year-old daughter’s line)

dragonfly, and because we’ve had

a warm spell this middle part

of February, I bet the shells of lady-

bugs will be drawn out once I take

the whole thing down and pledge

the hell out of it.  I’m thinking

I ought to move this altar soon—

or at least rearrange  the way I’ve

randomly stationed the dead in

my life who’ve meant something,

like, listen, I’m going on forty

eight years old in less than a month

and there's the one picture 

I have of a boy I’ve lugged all these

years, thirty three now this summer,

the boy I followed into the woods

with a gun and we shot

at every leaf (he was thirteen

and didn’t I love him

the way any twelve year old girl

would) and he showed me how

to smoke, how to hold it in

and I’d take it and gaze and pull

the red coal close to my nose

and not cough, no I was past that,

I wanted him to think I was more

than some girl.  So we smoked

and laughed and killed absolutely

nothing and walked out of the trees

touching but not holding hands, only

touching and the gun was empty and we

watched the way the old house sat

in its hundred fifty-year-old hunch 

and said well, yea, I’ll see ya almost

at the same time and he walked

out first cool as shit and into another

life that would crush him to death

three years later in a car crash that

when I think about it today, really

think about it, (because they said

he didn’t look dead) we are sitting

by that tree and we’d made an agree-

ment and the rifle we fired

the bullets out of was our blood

across his knees and he’s flesh

and bone and not dead.  But I’ve got this

particular picture in that boat behind me

and we’re supposed to be looking

at the camera but someone says

something funny and he’s laughing

he’s turned away and I’m glad for that

(aren’t you when in a broken life

something comes along that makes you

rise up out of it and lets you take

aim and someone, your good friend,

holds you from behind and while

you aim and says hold your breath, hold

your breath and let it out

slow in your ear, relax, settle on it

and his finger over yours while you

both, this tension is peculiar, pull 

the trigger and fire.