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.

The Truth About Chemistry

Steam: When Water, When Air. . .
Souhegan River

The Truth About Chemistry

Truant from knowing, I stood where the great dark fell.

                                                                                                William Stafford

                                                                                                Circle of Breath

Truth is that it is

nothing until it is

poured into something

that is if not

its opposite it is

enough of nothing

it finds the spots

left bereft

by the last guest

the last almost decade

of attempts, how

gearing it up

for an easy come on

inside right up to the hip

and there’s only one way

out you get it

whole and swollen

near to choke-broke

in the dark.  It’s not

what I wanted

at all and I’d wash

the burning wash I saw

my mother use

day after day

when she came back

late and we were supposed

to be asleep.  The tub

was a splotch-line

of blood and soap
scum, and the first time

I saw a Jackson Pollock

brewing in front of me

I really saw

the redblueporcelain

and the ring of Irish

Spring hovering like steamed
clam water...

I’d scrape with one

thumb and bring up

something like clean

beneath it, something

almost

brand new.  And too,

I couldn’t

go by a dry side-

walk when it started

to rain without

stopping to watch

the splotching it all

came to and not

remember how

all those years

you pushed your way

into me

without warning

and I took it

all the way the way

I was taught

to take it

and when  you

were finished and sleeping

I’d take the suckling
baby

of my shame

and submerge her

into the hot as scald

water and watch

the blots float up

to the surface

and bob and fall

to the floor

of the tub

and be reluctant
to fall,

once the water was run

out, once the plug

was undone

how those clots clung

and how I pushed

them gentle like

on the small

of their backs down

the long lane

of the drain saying

what you pour into me

aint nothing aint nothing

in a cave of nothing

it aint nothing

while you grunt

uninterrupted in

your sleep, nothing.

may morning: the nineteenth: five: fifteen

may morning:

the nineteenth:

five: fifteen

the color’s done coming

and the sun’s not up.

and whatever

pellet fed farm-raised salmon

pink slid by the roof

of our new neighbor’s

house is faded—either

drunk or puffed or drawn

apart or away.  today

it will rain.  a may rain

and gratefully it will make

the bleak maple more

leafy, it will blot out

maybe all of the male

cardinal I saw yesterday

in another tree, a mature

lilac, and he didn’t wait

for me to see anything

else.  doesn’t the word

beauty come closer than any

other word to a cloud

that is always away from

now even before anyone

can say what they see,

before today, when I’d begun

here to put it all down

in the first line, how it’s all ready

finished and done?

After It's Finished: First Marriage

After It’s Finished:  First Marriage

Indescribably noble and imposing…it is full

of poetry and suggestion.  Infinite wisdom;

a past without beginning and a future

without end; a repose, after limitless

experience in this austere and beautiful

face and form.

                                                John Clay

                                                Describing the Adams Memorial

                                                                to Henry Adams

At Rock Creek Cemetery Eleanor

Roosevelt strode close and closer still

to the stone and metal bonded grace

of Clover Adams—both alone.  She'd been

told about Lucy Mercer.  Did she know

about Lizzie Cameron?  Common? Some-

one they love doesn’t love them

as much? And their carapace is struck

is broke off from their throat, their

voice’s home.  It’s impossible not to be

pulled by the chemical serenity Clover drank

when she was 42, pouring down

to the ground, pulling up, finally, the earth’s

solid balm.  The five Sibyls, and the one

Kwannon were St. Gauden’s force of

uncoming, of arriving the women from

what’s suffered.  But from what mile

mark?  What mile?  I’ve seen her only,

Clover, in Cornish, cloistral in the cedar

hedges if that’s what they are because I can’t

remember paying them a name, only

the space they caved toward, forward

to her hooded, almost genderless chin

and cheek.  Did Eleanor come to this same

place too—not Cornish necessarily but 

maybe she walked past Abraham 

Lincoln and some of his

generals, past the Puritan too if any

of these were reduced and installed.  I’m

not sure it’s her steps I want to follow or some

how Clover’s, the coming undone

as plain as taking away a marriage

maimed overcloak, a dress, a still thinner 

robe, a step up to the glass as naked as I can make 

myself stand

and see into the rock water not myself rising

up reflecting but maybe  a glass negative

of a photo exposed to the perfect within a rational

fraction, time of  dark/light when, just

before it’s too much and burns to scar, it is

clarity on the lips, it is honest, it is being

betrayed and still, after all is lost and blown,

walking out alive, broke open by it shuddering

aftershock but full somehow and, (though 

it may be some time coming up out 

of the chemical cleanse) whole.

Cat, Two Crows

Cat,

Two Crows                         

On high, the love

that drew the bath and scattered it with salts

Still radiates new projects old as day…

                                                                                James Merrill

                                                                                Downward Look

It’s because it’s what I might say if

                I were one of the two in the sky,

                one of the couple of crows three or four

                wing beats behind.  Even the lead

                is slow, though it’s the poke who’s

                calling, soft enough, a trill

                or a purr.  Maybe it’s I’ll meet you

                there save me one of the whatever

                it is we’ve set out for: a bare

                oak branch, a cross’s arm at the church.

               

                They’ll scan, they always do, birds,

                ahead and below and tip their rudder

                tail and dip and the wind will be dismissed

                the way I dismiss the ones who claim

                to know it but have never felt it.  Like

                sorrow over the way the school kids

                walk by the body of a still warm cat, her

                black length spread long on the side-

                walk.  Car-struck probably, and even though

                I’ve only got a quarter mile to go from

                there to here, by the time my business

                is done and I drive back by someone’s

                taken in the poor thing and maybe

                will cry all day and later and tomorrow  

                too when they see the crows because

    they’re the same color.  When the owner

    looks up at the coming cloud, maybe

    they’ll stop and gawk and for an instant

    all will become weightless as flight

and how come they never saw, when night

stalked on the shelf and the mice

trembled in a pocket of darker than dark

how the crows were no more crows

and maybe it wasn’t seeing them but

hearing—listen: I’m out raking the winter’s

sand away and between one pull

and the next they swish by and it’s

at first a tail in the grass and then its wind

lifting the paper salvation the Jehovah’s

Witness left (it’s in the gravel now, all winter

buried under the snow, they’d left it

when I wasn’t home) and the sound

of God on the crinkled dry wet now dry

again pages are the same as the kids walking

by dragging their feet, slipping and skidding

in what I’m trying to sweep away

and the pattern it all makes curls around

the stationary stones, lines and swirls

like a Zen monk rakes, like two birds flying

and one behind the other and coming up

to some obstacle and breaking

away to meet again soon or late

when the brick ends and the purr is just to be

sure they’re heard, because let me tell you

winter’s not through with us yet
though we can't know that for sure,
not ever.  No, not ever.