Leaving.

Leaving.              

As if they believed it possible

I might join

their circle of simple, passionate thusness,

their hidden rituals of luck and solitude,

the joyous gap in them where appears in us the pronoun I.

                                                                                Only When I Am Quiet and Do Not Speak

                                                                                Jane Hirshfield

I was leaving the day

I noticed it, not new

but new to me: a path

to the woods I’d never

taken because it wasn’t
or didn't seem to be

there and in time

the amount of time it took

me to be gone and get

back again, saplings had

rooted up through the once

cleared off moss.  A keener green.

A fresh radiance, timid

in the wind.  A bethel

of crows meet there maybe

before they glide to a field

of corn not come to tassel
yet.  He was late getting it

put in, hoed up.  So they’ll take

what blueberries they can

find and make their way through

the new nave our neighbor's made

with his apathetic skidder.

If I had a day or two

more—if the rain would leave off

—maybe I’d walk up there, past
the tassleless corn, the clutch
of cranberries, the grave
stone for my father (who still

lives mostly alone at home)

and mother (who still waits
mostly alone below

that stone) and into the broken

swale that made while I was,

all these years, off on my own. 
I’d see  all the new shoots, far
enough above my head 

that if it were dark

they’d be sky, fold themselves

over me the way an aching

community would, stoic
in the parade of the respected
dead, finally in their

own home after decades

away.  It's only grass, but
some will lightly kiss, with

fingers on my shoulders,

a decades gone thought

of going off and not

ever coming back.  

And I'll imagine it, but
there will be grips of each
of my two shoulders to bring me
back to myself, and later,
casual buck up backslaps, some

awkward thrusting hugs, 

some stumbling

and some picking up

where I, we, all of us, left off.

Epistle/One

Here's the house with childhood

whittled down to a single red trip wire.

Don't worry.  Just call it horizon

& you'll never reach it.

                                        Ocean Vuong

                                        Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong

Isn't it this: that epistles

are about listening, 

that the tip of the nib

is really just the beginning

that it travels back the entire

length of the arm & knows

instinctively it must turn

at the elbow and keep

going to the neck?

This is where I want

to ask, because there's 

this fork in the road: 

how does it know it needs

to split itself in two

like a blade of grass

that if torn down its middle

and held to the lips

and then blown gently 

                        through

will produce if not music

then a sound truer

than music because it sounds

so like the body letting go

of something it had been

holding on to afraid

to hand it over

in good company.  And see

the pale root end 

of the blade of grass

is intact like what remains

behind while whatever needs

to split takes its time 

past the clavicle to the throat

and parts - one to the chin -

and one toward the nipple - 

tell me do you know

where words live?  Behind

the bronze areola & through

the fatty memory of a baby

living there while life was

pulled out?  Or otherwise:

into the mouth or nose or ear

on its way to the left

hemisphere where the experts

say language lives?  How,

do you know, does the marriage

come together once 

its all the way back

and down, dilating at the wrist's

anchor on the page, the fingers

pointed and apart like two

knees and the nib between

them remembering, remembering?

Someone's come  a long

long way.  They're soaked 

from the dark and foamy

roads. They've stopped off

at their old home 

only to turn off at the bottom

before going in.  Someone

else lives there now.  A stranger.

A family of strangers.  

Maybe they're sitting 

at the same table

where years ago you threw

the hot broth at the wall.  Drops

of it, fat as snow, would fall

on my neck.  The scars

like commas.  This poet I know

calls them fetuses, those commas.

curled, paused, as awfully 

dependent on what's come 

before and what's yet to 

arrive to be completely legit

-imate.   It doesn't know

the first few words, Dear

_______, have been climbed

all night just to arrive, are entire

ranges dependent 

on the weather and only 

complete in the easiest 

of seasons.  Or the few words

beyond, flat as a johnny

cake you forgot

to add the leavening to

and tasteless after all that

stirring.  Epistle #1: should say,

then: Dear ___________, please

forgive the delay, I've been

detained in the worst way. the two

spaces that resemble each

other on the body like no other

twins- even eyes - even lungs -

even limbs and kidneys - even

testicles and even ovaries -  

maybe because they're resting

places: the divot above the lip

where Gabriel kissed 

the entire Torah and then made you

forget it, and the divot just 

below the neck, the jugular

notch, the yoke of knowing, 

the jumping off the croft

with all the words and worlds

swirling and twirling you've seen

them, you must've done, some

are at the foot of my bed

some are at the bottom 

of the pond and paused there

from when you stepped in

like a sachet of tea

leaves and steeped and steeped

the clean water,  Dear___________,

you are no longer thought of

as a body.  I want you to....

Faults

Faults

The truth is they know us best, our flaws,

and we shun them like the brother

gone to the brothels and pigstys, or the

lover gone off to fortune and come back

with mud on her tongue, or the more:

what he taught her to do: more

than her body of rub and suffer, to be
the palm, the tips of things where all that is 

is the hot/cool pool at the hem of the unscale-

able peak; is and all that’s wanted and beyond
want; as the water and flaws and faults fall off

ecstatic, as they ply every debt

we owe and could be finished with
and chew it and settle it on their tongues, lusting,

going soft in the jaw.  Finally they are slack

and laid out in state.  Look for them in the middle
digit of curled together fingers, in the middle
insides of knees that still creep through, collapsed

flat serene on the hardwood kneeler at mass, esp-

ecially during the transubstantiation.  How their

penance begins in the unlit censer and depends on

one little crumb of resign to melt and smolder

into the dark hollow of the charcoal.  The smoke

could be the boy who kissed without permission

but not without desire, something so brand new,
and never near to pigs or even thinking to.  Still,

let it be known that it’s the pigs

who access us best, and it because of this

we eat them, we know their snorts and chortles, 

and we eat them, don’t we, eat pieces

of ourselves to convert the witness
and toss the linen to the girl or the boy who we fell
against like water, the water we’d come to wash

ourselves in, abrading our flaws

and faults that slough off our skin like pox

scabs we’re done with now and not

by some haunting magic not raise a scar. 
Listen: it’s like that isn’t it

but they stay, they do, the scar of girls

and boys from eye to mouth and very easily

they are mistaken for the kind of smile

a face makes when it sees

something it can’t name but knows, oh

I don’t know what it is, a slip into a close

warmth and the claustrophobia is gone,

and the ecstasy is in the lids of the eyes

and the blush of the lips and the caress

the kiss, and practice makes us say:  I’m good

I’m good with this, it is wanted! and the chains
and all of what we've called flaws fall and are gone

and almost never were.

30 Day Leave

30 Day Leave

Smoke rose through the close strung one hundred

posted on the pole stacked high enough to open

to the dry light and make the fair or unfair exchange

(it depends on your childhood desires) complete. 

Days after you died your mother accidently burned

down the herring shed set back above the tide

and she’s forgiven even the loss of the entire dory

load of the glossiest by Jesus fish she’d ever been told

to stake, mouth to gill, to smoke after they come

from the brine soft as your cheek three weeks

into your last leave.  See the blood and grease and you

seemingly asleep beneath the wheel she made her way

past and that end you came to after come twenty some

odd days of being a three-year PFC.  Home by

Christmas 1968, a changed from the shoes to the cheeks

lost soul going through entire two or three entire nights

lighting fires in that shed and closing the wind in

on them and subduing it all like a mystic you’d read

on some months before your complete conversion

and how you’d come to see yourself only ever

leaving the living villages and smelling instead the every

day lamps within them like dinner invitations

surprised by the quiet Buddhists and their shy obliged

smiles while rice hoards were turned over

into the sky while some French Catholic crucifixes

and their last to collapse brass (sifting through once

you thumbed the verdigris rib and abs and throat

of the God you wanted to take your hope as that open

invitation hospitable as smoke the way your mother

stoked the smoked bone you left off tending one night

to go for a drive a quick drive and she pulled the stakes

onto her face and opened every smoke stoked bone

and showed your ghost and the both of you told

of knowing the other now the way fish know water

after they’re removed from it and after it’s removed

to foreign places like rooftops on dry land and give up

everything they were ever made for and smile

a practiced, ironic smile while doing it.

Sweeping

Sweeping

Only brooms

Know the devil

Still exhists,

That the snow grows whiter

After a crow has flown over it…

                                                Charles Simic

                                                Brooms

Maybe sweeping  becomes innate

when heaping the random bits and blow-

ins make the way as safe coming

as they do going.  It’s how

you welcome a guest, by the pristine

boarders you keep, these and your

crisp invitations:

see the lines are straight and safe

to my door and to the warm

way in.  It takes years

of practice.  Of heaving off detritus.

Of watching for the snow you’ll event-

ually shove off, all those flakes that fall, fall, fall

all winter gathering just to take

themselves into the melt of spring

to make monuments for the sky who has

offered so liberally of herself,

and to shape them like they are understood

all along, even, especially, as they melt

away,  the way a bear melts

into her woods, or a bird into her branches

each of  their coming in and going out

driven by appetite

or fatigue, tongue or loin,

beneath this sky and alongside

a quiet eye, without deciding what all

it will become as it is met

and swept off, a shovel or blade or broom

straw, the way known before the hand

takes up with the handle

with the strictest of confidences

and not a word, not a single word,

except maybe shhhh, shhhh, shhhh,

shhh, shhh, shhh;             shhh, shhh,

shhh      hhh,                              hh,   h

the terms

the terms

The colonel praised the use of moderate electric shock.

Charles Simic

because finally

I purged myself

of the think:

I want you

again and deserve

what you do

to me again and again,

I open you long

after I’ve shut you

off as if on this

day

you’re a faucet you’re

a hot and cold mixing

valve finally fixed when

I chipped away 

the crumble

of the once

 adhering

corner on corner

spaces 

and reached between

the two

that needed

replacing

the two

I had

finally

(although this was later)

s  m  a  s  he  d

to get at you

I can’t say how

simple it was

to finally figure

I didn’t need

to stand

shivering in

the mist and trickle

of the shower

and quicken my invisible

splinters

(spinsters you'd call them)

the way I always

did that it was

it really was

a simple repair

and depending

on whose brand

I needed behind

it all

I can get off

with not having

to spend a week’s

pay to watch

some cliché

plumber come in

and diagnose me

as easy

as shit

I can do it all

myself, twist

consistently one way

to take it

out and the other

way to put it

right again.  Now

the crack

in the tile is mine

and depending on

the way the steam

rises

can be

a smile

can be

a wink

and if I join it

with the others

I didn’t put there

intentionally

I can

make

it

out

still

wet

and still

alive

Tell Me What is the Door to Purgatory Made Of But Your Own Belief?

Tell Me What is the Door to Purgatory Made Of But Your Own

Belief?

Help me to find what I’ve lost,

If it was ever, however briefly, mine,

You who may have found it.

                 Charles Simic

                       Mystics

Days it’s just letters the way letters loop

you know together and make words making

sense and maybe even praying  and pages

of them slide like they’re on someone’s lap

clasped by a hand a couple of fingers

a fist and the world’s coming on and going

by and wants for nothing not ever not even

needing to be seen even though look at me

here taking it all down by shape and time

and hue and heat (or not, of any of them)

of day and making it make happy or sad

or love or hate but who’s paying

attention listen I’ve gone over all the lines

all these times and brought them up like

a child is brought up from the bottom from

the very bottom of their bottom which isn’t

my bottom and can’t be and we situate even

so don’t we the way if you think on it like this

clouds begin by being drawn up and taken

to be changed and blown across the front

of us and the back of us and if they could right

straight through us and finally (briefly) set on down

in a foreign place who’s paying pray attention

round as their eyeball is or hard as

the very center of their hand when it opens

finally and the knot that’s been pearled there

is small and it’s rubbed by a thumb or a tooth

and tongue and is called to surrender to

if a thief ok a thief or a dismisser ok

a dismisser or believer ok a believer

to all whoever can take every feather

of every bird and give them their just indulgences.