Provenance of Rock Bottoms

the dead pearl diver
benjaman paul akers
portland museum of art, portland, maine

 

Provenance of Rock

Bottoms

 

How sometimes my neck bones are a many

fathoms chain & my head its anchor sometimes

at rest on bottom and then, when those immobile

bones ache

to move, I’m able

to withstand my bow’s prow-dip first

to the calm, then to the wind.

 

How dropping

my body means or seems to mean it can’t

rest benignly in its anchor box . . .

 

how I want to contemplate

the provenance

of the bottoms I’ve been on, and dug into,

stabilizing me there as the part of me on the water

twists and tries to

rise to float but

how I wind up wrestling, me

both a Joseph and an angel

God,

 

and how in the place where sky meets water

I come to

wonder how even on bottom

aren’t we always still

somehow in the sky?  Even if that sky

is humidified?   Whatever the height?

The depth?

 

How head and hands and pelvis and knees

and feet lifted mere millimeters is this:

my skin always touching

the surface

of the bottom, scissoring it open, depositing

it to the sky.

young mother in the grotto
Auguste Rodin
portland museum of art, portland, maine

Losing

 

Losing

 

This is the vale of soul-making.

           

                        John Keats

 

No small monument,

            he’s sleepless his last night

            seventy five years on he land he let

            fall through his hands

            crumbs of dust unsalvageable.

            Lost to gamble those six-

            sided cubes in a throw

            and lose.  They were airborne longer

            than I’ve been alive.  Who knows

            how wide his Rubicon – likely

            we were born deep

            into it, submerged, and the gamble

            had already been

            agreed to, the terms set & etched

            into the rib bone holding

            salute to a heart thumping out,

                                                in panic,

                                                in code, I, I,

 

I’m broke,

I’m broke

Indiscriminate Water

 

thirst

Indiscriminate Water

 

Water washes hands of their muck & mud, or some

of their muck & mud, only certain sorts.  It doesn’t

discriminate, it is simply itself to whom

ever plunges themselves in the under of it.  They will

 

be washed.  Like the fruit trees at the end

of the season, it will have built itself in them, swelled

them to then let fall the fruit.  It doesn’t choose

the hand or tongue, the mandible, a side-

 

ways working jaw of the doe with her three

lambs charging up this row, down that

row too close to the road.  It’s coincidence hat fruit

bruised in its fall has in its beginning a  soft-rot.

 

It is skin and flesh and water.  Tell me,

when the windfall is washed for the cider,

after all those hands have gathered it,

the lips licked with the almost all water

 

on their tongue and in their mouth, the 99.5 %

of it behind their pucker at the tart transition,

will they remember washing those hands and wiping

them with a white cloth that morning, and too

 

those hands, at the start of the season, and only

after a long day pruning to train the trees & seedlings,

to wash it all down with water, before taking

taking the farmer’s daughter behind

 

the idle tractor telling her after the dress is torn

and the blood is thick and smeared between her knees

wash yourself,

there’s water over there at the pump,

 

and while you’re at it, bring some

to me if you please.

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