On recovery: of the bonny swan, drowned by her jealous sister

within
s. lee photo

On recovery: of the bonny swan, drowned

by her jealous sister

When the tide returns

from its other life,

bearing its adulterer’s gifts

and the wrack-plastered reef

becomes again a sunk unknown,

then we should take our leave—

                                                                Kathleen Jamie

                                                                High Water

We’d arrived the both of us exhausted and wet

from separate storms and shore battered getting past

the shoals and every bit of clothing ripped

with teeth and feet or the broke mast pole I hung

to and you you’d said for you it was an upended keel

above a water field of swans you’d say even later still when

you regained your lungs and emptied them of salt

of scaring sand scraping your throat and for that you

were voiceless longer still so you told your story

on my body when your lips were healed

enough you kissed every bruise and scab I had and

each was the bowing of the way the swans

mated when they regained the same shore we were

stranded on.  We couldn’t fly or even consider

beating our wings in acceptance or retreat but we

could lie down together and stop being

naked or stranded or even married to another

who and so far off shore and saved from the storms

that threw us overboard to drift in and through

the early migrations for you the swans for me

one solitary albatross who’d glide like calm
shadows glide and let me grasp (by now the fever

being on solid ground) her tail and slum through

the deepest months of winter until I couldn’t

and my thumbs broken and my fingers and later

waking up and being loved by a deaf-mute and who knew

better who tells me to listen how far I’d been drifting

and how close so cleverly close to taking my skin

to the flat end of the earth and hurling it off so that

turning back I am all curve and bone and the sun and the wind

have their way hardening and hollowing me.  Tis the banister

of each the clavicle and the pelvis and the hair of me

you make me boy you make me and you pull each string

through your mouth and pin with my finger bones

and thumbs and keep them fast your chin to tune to
stretch to strum and pluck and speak free of water

of skin of single each you me becoming finally we.

a hammer and my finger bones fourteen each a sweet

note each hold me hold me broken without

but at home under you strummed plucked harmonic
throat.

Something of Lazarus

Something of Lazarus…

The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.

                                                                The Weighing

                                                                Jane Hirshfield

                                                               

Is it possible to want nothing

in return, knowing the motive

is the only armor we have left

after salvaging the remains

of the gutted house, top

to bottom, all of it gone com-

pletely or gone enough that

needing it is only the beginning

of a melancholy we don’t know

how to negotiate?  Because I stood

there, in my burnedout house,

the wind easing in through

the broken glass living room

window (axe smashed and thick

handle or glove leveled, run

along the jamb and sill, it all

perfectly relaxed now under

my feet (heavily booted they’d

said) and everything else

broiled, rotted now to the heart-

wood, insides out, visible:  were

its true natural state all along

and we’ve just stepped in

and had the staves taken

from our eyes.  What lives

we lost or saved there temporarily: 

my mother, out of the house

with her portable green canister

of oxygen: saved.  Cat after cat

slinking from the smoke, curled

finally and together up in the tub:

lost.  It all makes itself known, taken

down on a list of what there still is

to be grateful for.  Of course

it’s all lost one way or the other. But

of course the memories are still

intact, right? Because who can lick

those but another kind of fire, or

sometimes a slow burner, in

another prison in the body

altogether, and quiet, a model

citizen.  My mother, in her ending,

was forgetting this way, and asked

for the old house the way all the lost

ask for the way home.  I’d grieved, truth

be told, for the spark itself, all that was

sentimental in the keeping

of the corporeal (even if it’s ceramic

or paper or (because some

of the harvest was in and piled

in the cellar) flesh and potatoes,

a record yield.  Lost.  Doomed to

spend their entire lives now

in the dark.  I think

of them from time to time, and when

the demolition team came to take

the old house down after all had been

gotten out, how bushel after bushel

took on the weight of that house

as everything fell upon them

from above: the charred gables,

the twenty-year old apple

tree beside my mother’s then sick-

room.  All of everything buried.

And they took it onto (into?)

themselves in the dark.  And sensing,

maybe, their end, they kept

their eyes shut to it all.  I’d like to

think that come spring, (because

there was a great heat in the earth

and some of those potatoes

must not’ve made it) there had

to have been a few at the bottom

of the barrel, a few among them,

that were saved and waited out

the winter.  That come spring they

ached to do what was in them to do:

reach and stretch and get by

every rock from the cellar wall,

every charred and buried beam,

and make it up through to sprout

in the lilac bush, flourishing

my father would says when it happened,

because they’d been able to save

that, by Jesus, they’d been able

to save that.

Undone

bow,
aground

Undone:

Eyelet, Throat Line, Toe, and Tongue

how can water die

with drama, in a final cascade,

a suicide, a victim of terrain, a martyr?

                                                At Stilli’s Mouth

                                                Richard Hugo

We watched your life slide by

like it was a quiet winter

river of ice, like there was time still

to make it through the cooling months you set

yourself down for.  But not used

to rivers I couldn’t know where

I walked back to, or where the mouth

caught all the salt and silt of you it could

and everything else the tide might desire.

You’d taken enough to get you

through, I'll grant you that.  I watched you pack

the only bag you had and stand

with your back to all of us, good

riddance written on the bottom

of your feet.  Seeing you

walk off like that at the start

of autumn, to ‘broker

with your soul’ you’d said, made me

come to feel a building, bulging heat beneath

my fingers, as if I’d shut them

in a car door and never cried out. 

And I didn’t know what you meant

then, I thought you’d walk

until you got half tired and then

by some pluck of love turn

round and be our mother

again.  But there’s some

hunger under the river you bank

on and when the tide rises up 

to your good riddance shoes,

whose soles are worn and rubbed

up with running, whose tongue

laughs under the knot-near-the-key

hole, whose strings sit mute by virtue

of what they try to close.  They are the first

thing I find  you’ve abandoned

when I come looking for you, when I

finally knew we weren’t enough to make you

want to live.  Listen, I followed

almost right away.  I walked

where you walked, I ducked under all that 

thick-limbed reclaimed pasture, all those trees

startled birds and the chittering

vermin, they were as close as I could get

to saving your life.  I’d find you

the following spring, feet bare

and not very far from where I started

looking, the river receded by then,

or at least on the bank of that

particular jut, the rim of the rocks

all salt, all crystal, like agate, like bitumen,

like hunger on the mouth of one who constantly licks

when it thirsts for something.  But nothing,

not river, not children, your own even,

can feed it.

Choosing

facing south
Lubec, Maine

Choosing

Why am I afraid or sorry you are dead?

My hands paid contraband to be this still.

My mouth rotted with the truth

to be as tough as wheat before your stone.

                                                               

                                                The Other Grave

                                                Richard Hugo

Maybe I I need to read everything, every

word I’ve written, to choose to be confident

I’m not repeating myself here.

Now that you’re tucked in some virtual

file we can go back years and years,

you and me, and then too into the small

drawers, my first blank books

of self-destruction.  Is it only now

that it occurs to me that I had nothing

at all in me that you could love?  I walk by

those little books every day, like

the way I walk by your stone in summer

on my way into the woods.  I'm always, I think

on my way past preserving you.  Once, for formality,

I stopped, or maybe a couple more times

to water the gargantuan plant

my sister brought, as caution that her grief
was larger than mine, a plant now crumbling

crumbling to rust, down to its roots, yessir, now

that I’m gone.  It pulled the hanging hook

low, driven shallow above your stone,

like a heavy glass bulb on the low branch
of the Christmas tree, so that it leans with its cliché

star or angel, a little drunk, propped

on nothing but it's own sweet hanging

by and by.  But by looking at it (the tree
I mean, not just that one drunk

bulb) I would swear it was hitched up leaning

on a wall, something farther back

from the crowd, cool, aloof, observing.

                                (Here’s something new:

                                I remember one year you only

                                decorated the front of the tree

                                and it fell face first into the wood

                                stove.  To satisfy four kids

                                you rummaged in the shed

                                for bailing twine and screwed

                                two big hooks into the horsehair
                                plaster walls 

                                and strung the tree up

                                to bulge out into our Christmas.

                                That was the year I got the doll

                                that peed herself and got a rash

                                if she had one of the five red-carbon paper

                                diapers on, little dots of raised plastic pain

                                and I was supposed to clean her

                                like any dutifully good mother…
                                they looked like little stars, or better
                                still, connect the dots, which my sister
                                did, in blue Bic ink)

And talking of walls and leaning, those

places where you take in the crowd without needing to

get involved, I think I’m starting

to take that same composure, and I’d dare

say I think I am beginning

to know you.  I think truly if we met

on the street the first thing you’d do

is slap my face for one or more of these

perceived betrayals.  You hated almost

everything about where I was and where

I was going.  Believe me when I say I tried

whatever a nine-year-old knew

to try, even lying about the knife

my sister held in her fist over my throat:

she chased me and pinned me

and was caught by the babysitter.  But you know

that already.  I’d argue, having

slipped this life a mick now, you know

more than you are obviously now able

to let on.  I’d argue too if I wrote down

everything I knew about you someone

somewhere would laugh back that

you don’t know the half of it cliché. 

Today I make  your face float below me

while I look at your stone, which is

amazing in and of itself given you’re nothing

but ash and urn, a box tilted on a long

root.  I watched you when they put you in, leaning

maybe until spring, when the root

would rush its blood past you, called

as it was, on its way to the warming canopy. 

But all winter that first winter I imagine

you are in that small box, cradled

really, and safe as you wanted to be,

safe as I keep you, swaying in a stranger’s arms

just like when you started, premature

born and a little over two pounds,
all those years ago, abandoned to life

and choosing, somehow, to live

at least

sixty years
of it

                                

Acoustic Shadow: An Appeal

Shadow's Acoustic

Blood doesn’t go backward but it must,

once it's pumped, though only in the slack,

echo in the constricting chambers

somewhere, and only in sound.  I wonder

if this kind of hearing is like feeling a belfry

wall after the monumental bells are gone still 

and their ropes hung back and limp, how if my hand 

is perceptive enough and carnal

my palms on the inside of the lissom turret

stones, they’d read the vibrations sent into 

the veins and set there like a scar, ages ago, 

a deep agreement sealed in the lung of it when

say, a pneumonia’s diagnosis could go

either way:  remember that moment when God

            gets nearly pinned to the desert

road by Jacob and the referee, (whom-

ever he is) sound in his sight, nearly gives

the match to the man and maybe

he blinks, there’s salt

in his eye and the upper hand

shifts and the loss becomes a draw?

And what’s this got to do with blood?  Maybe

nothing except it’s my pulse that’s going back

and forth over the curves, beneath my skin.

I’m thinking if I touch the stones in the house

that hangs the bells, and when the bells

go still I’ll listen and close my eyes

and let the echo (like in any cave) fixed there

climb to my fingerbone and then my sternum

and then beneath it bleed through to those

oh, I don’t even know what they’re called,

in the dissected heart muscle I saw, the places

that resonate and pattern sound in there: hand

prints, reindeer, great extinct beasts without

ever any chance again at the light.  All shadow now,

a raised sonography, like something

slicing back, a scalpel, maybe, sliding its simple whisper

through the flesh, right through the roof

of it, into the bells outer edges and then, drawing

back to only, the true purpose, forge ahead,

always ahead, appealing.  

if it isn't it won't

if it isn’t it won’t

a theme for further reflection:

the arithmetic of compassion

                                                Zbigniew Herbert

                                                Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper

if you see them afterward

if they even know you or

if you even know them

if it is they and you and 
if you ar both absent of flesh and bone,

if it is you neither have and are without a mouth and tongue

if (we are so used to being

touched,

if even inappropriately)

isn’t it going to be hard to hold on,

isn’t it going to be like cold wintered over chimneys because

aren’t they long without heat

aren’t they long without smoke

aren’t they then suddenly when you come home flushed of all their guests:

humble the burst of bats or birds

humble the cough of soot

humble the sudden blue flame

humble the billowing creosote: up and out and still

if you see,

if you go back to,

if after that smoke’s kissed what it can of the brick

especially if it’s on to crumbling and broke clean and neat

if it is as it once was before it’s been set 

won’t it be cleared

won’t it be as if nothing

won’t it be as a slight limp

won’t it be as stiff

won’t it be as a word held on the tongue

like a bird under a thumb

like a little heart

like it or not, giving in, giving out

After Mr. Cogito's Mother

in darkness
rear servants stairs
vanderbilt
hyde park, ny

After Mr Cogito’s Mother

the left

given to leaps…

the right

nobly rigid…

and so

on both legs

Mr Cogito

goes

through the world

staggering slightly

                                On Mr Cogito’s Two Legs

                                Zbigniew Hebert

I have to do the math backwards although any

one with any shred of aptitude would simply say

eleven just like that eleven it’s been eleven

years already only eleven years and say it

like it’s only been a week it’s been a week a week’s gone

by already though I appreciate how we don’t

even know some among us when we stop 

counting or when counting stops meaning

something even though it slips perfect as

a master dovetail joint into place all that

cutting all that sharp angle sanded to dust has become

and what it is that makes us the us is just me

because who else does this in my life I don’t

know who else is seeing that this year your birthday will fall

hmmph, fall, like love I guess or glass or you

in the bathroom on your last of last days

on a Monday and you died the next day the day

after three weeks later.  You’d been given a few hours

at least to be sixty and my father wanted it

that way though all he’d say is that he wouldn’t let you

die on your birthday.  He couldn’t

appreciate the symbolism in that and so

he made you wait it out for a few more

hours and then left you before you

were finished.  I’m not judging that not in the way

people who can do simple math who arrive

at their facts just like that and if I could

I’d snap my fingers here and make

the whole crowd blink for its fist in the palm

affect though gentle gentle and without

a shred of revenge.  I bring it up

because I always think at this time

of year you would’ve been wanting to

bring the whole garden in all at once so

you could get it done and sit on the couch

and have a smoke.  I bring it up

because this year Thanksgiving falls

early on that fourth Thursday of five

as it happens just like the year when

you died.  I bring it up because lately

I’ve been thinking about Descartes and his

Cogito bullshit and two poets are happening

to be having a conversation on the radio

about Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito

Laments and it makes me take him up

off the top shelf where he holds

all the rest of them (Bishop and Moore and Yev-
tushenko and and Miloz and Nemerovski)

I have to move

the teaspoon of bone and ash I have

(stashed is the wrong word but tucked

might not work either) of my friend

Roger who died eight months

after you did and right away I know I’m going

to put down everything I’ve been doing

and take up with him again.  Herbert

I mean.  And remember all the things

he ever said to me, really said to me,

and fall in like a foot soldier on rations

having marched halfway across Africa

or Canada or for him Poland with some of

God in his pocket.  I could say his story

is so much sadder than yours and though

I wouldn’t be wrong I wouldn’t know exactly why

that would be except to say Poland

and World War Two and Stalin and you’d get it

you’d understand at least from

the perspective of suffering something

you did your whole life and held up

like evidence at a trial like it was

the missing piece in a complicated

it’s not going well for whoever’s side

you’re on and BAM! the whole ocean

is turned and Moses pats you on your back

for your acrobatics.  Ok, that’s a bit

blasphemous and cheap I get it and maybe

you’d slap me if you were here but you’re not

and so I read Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and think

maybe you’d go down on your knees

after reading ‘Mother’ and clothe your cold

bones even after that first line:

He fell from her lap like a ball of yarn.

Or would you have to wait like the rest of us

to get to the end to be broken to see

after the boy leaves her and continues

to fall far away from her she holds on

like any sound shelter far away from him

she holds on a station master a place

to wait ‘her outstretched arms’ that

glow in the dark like an old town

the only thing I see after you die and move

away and come back and move away

far far away at the foot of your bed.

in light
rear servants stair
vanderbilt
hyde park, ny