It Is Simple

It Is Simple

and there is nothing at all

but inner silence, nothing

to relieve on principle

now this intense thickening.

                                               

                                                Donald Hall

                                                Je Suis Une Table

And so what it is we’d hoped to gain

by weeding the squash thoroughly

in the tick of fog, when the humidity weighs

itself against our shoulder-blades or

when it turns up in soft curls the soft cover

of the immense book we’re supposed to be

reading.  Because we’ve given ourselves,

haven’t we, a full plate of dead and dying

rows and lines, just tacked the map with here

and here and here at all the spots we want

to embark to—while the laundry spins but can't
hang to dry in this weather; while the book I’ve borrowed

from the library, the one that follows famous

a-typical (though they’re not supposed to

be) (maybe either one, depending on your dog-

ma) Catholic writers (and converts to

boot) (and who would choose that
today? ) in the middle of the last century makes me grope

for a doorknob that may take me, 

for a day anyway, to meet these peopled

heroes in their own brain

of faith—making no

excuses for their poverty, and not, by God,

using it to beat with a stick

the innocent of God, the non-

believers, though what that means is entirely

up to you.  And when you pin it

down, I’ll only say that yesterday

while I was thinking of a girl I used to know

who died quite suddenly the night before

last, I watched the young doe pull

the tall weeds out

of the half row of butternut squash

that haven’t come to blossom yet

and I’m out just now to take up

where I left off and say she makes it

look easy, the pawing in the tall

grass, the front hoof paused up, awful

close to the house, where inside

lately children have been sleeping

beside it all:  unknowing of it, and still

just as faithful for having missed it.

And Anyway ,What is Negative Space?

And Anyway, What is Negative                                        Space?

And so we blended and possessed

Each in each the phantom guest,

Inseperate, we scarcely met;

Yet other love-nights forget!

                                                the Phantom Guest

                                                Natalie Clifford Barney

I’ve always had trouble wondering what all

there is about negative

space – it makes me, doesn’t it ? – and you –

precisely

and by what it is not.  And what is not is this: somewhere

in the world but not my world

(maybe your world –

                you’re world?)

the moon’s gone just past

full and it’s sitting in your lap

the way a sick child might.  It’s been up all night

exhausted in a fever.  Dull, as when a cloud was

brighter and then when it all briefly went windblown

to parts – how sweaty the hair of her on your bare

shoulder, the length

of the slip-

strap stretching, then slack – soon

                                embedded in the gone lax cheek skin.

What’s negative here is what’s not

here – the hospital room – that’s someone else’s story –

the cool tile of the bathroom

                floor – though soon won’t that be

                yours, having

                to rise having

                to be near where everyone can be

                sick and be free

I imagine I’m uncomfortable enough in what’s

                negative by filling it and making it define

                a lie so well it becomes

the truth.  So yes, the moon.  It’s true. Yes, the sick

kid, it’s true.  But who

held her, well not that’s for a fact

not happening.  Really she’s twisted

in her sheets.  She’s just home

from a pit-party.  So there’s sticks

in her hair.  And even if later she blames the blood

on menstruation, period, she’ll pull

whatever curtain around her and make it all

into that space I have trouble wondering,

that negative defining (because right now

it’s important to say

the chickadee is hanging with the seed-bag

ok no she’s just flown off)

never quite makes it and maybe

I guess it’s not a maybe,

that’s the whole dam

point somewhere it’s draining someplace

there’s a beaver with a feshet

of twigs aiming straight for the whole hole

and it’s not enough

not ever

to cover it plug it seal it completely

(and not entirely

possible anyway)

God’s honest. Truth.

Thick-A-Fog

Thick-A-Fog

He was, of course, a piece of the sky.  His eyes

said so.  This is not fact; this is the other part

of knowing something, when there is no proof,

but neither is there any way toward disbelief.

Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it

filled not with darkness but with light.  Bird was

like that.  Startling, elegant, alive.

                                                                                Bird

                                                                                Mary Oliver

It’s not at all cautious this morning’s

fog.  And it really

does seem to crawl

like some Sandburg cat, those

little paws remember,

but this one’s long,

and on its haunches

stalking, or in some way

a cause of absolute

calm for being caught

in it, but in the way shock seems

calming when we’re in it,

some hurricane eye maybe,

and what’s just beside us is

blotted out

and what’s more awful is

just beyond

it, and hasn’t paused but has

arrived and, stoic as it is, and grim,

waits the fog out, tall as dignity.

(As an aside, and it’s the way

we are when we’re in it ourselves

and sounding our future out

without our loved one,

I was looking at the word Pilgrim

on the cover of a book I was supposed

to be using to sing out of at a funeral

of an old Quaker friend—it was called

“A Pilgrim’s Hymnal” and I wondered

if grim is short for pilgrim and if it was,

wasn’t that just

the way of it, and talking of which,

that’s what I was

before the service started, before

the visiting minister’s 

wife of some fifty plus

years (he’d later say that in the eulogy,

how he’d met George and his own future

wife in the same place)

led him to the chair behind the pulpit, his blind

eyes staring up the whole

time, unblinking it seemed,

but not grim—and maybe I’ve gone off

in another sort of fog, and now

you know if I’m not

sounding I get lost and the talk’s stopped

and thought becomes

cotton muffed and impossible.  Grim. 

But didn’t they, stop I mean,

Pilgrims, 

those who wanted for

their own a home on the hill (even

while they took it away from the least

grim ones

who already lived

there) living up to their names

the way fog lives

up to itself: coming through

with its heavy demands on our attention

on land and on water,

and if we’re not attentive

enough it’s off the cliff

we go—because we are not birds

our bones are marrow, not pneumatic

like the gulls or owls or, here close

to me, the day following George

and his funeral, though I can only

hear them: the robins, feasting

on the worms the fog has called

up, because it’s heavy and wet

as the rain

expected later today, greeting,

the thickness of the fog making them

into little enough movers

in their own strange land they stop—take

the opportunity to sing

into it

to hear it all

come back to them

after striking the shoulders

of something solid, and some of it

moving along through

and beyond, on the molecules

of the not so cautious, always followed:

(what choice have we?) breath,

bones, fog.