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.