Bone

into...

nickels-sortwell house
wiscasset, maine

Bone

When my mother would fall

and break herself, we’d take turns

washing her clothes or making
supper, braising the soup bone the way

my grandmother said to, on the phone

at night, after seven

because it was the cheapest

time to call.  I’d make sure

the potatoes were clean after

they were peeled, and the carrots

too, I’d change the water a few

times and the mud of the last summer

they were in the earth would drift
down the drain.  It would swirl and drift

past my wrists, water up to my

elbows really, the gleam

of the marigold peel, the cream-

white of the potato, their black sprouting

eyes now in the chicken feed bucket

and a thicker, lobbed-off  piece I  had to cut

and squeeze the rot out.  Tell me you won’t be

amazed when, come the early spring,

what we've  thrown out behind the barn

all winter long hasn’t come back and with all that

soaking ammonia, the whole November

to April of the shut-in chickens is pitch-

forked out and dumped, barrow

after barrow, some under-dust drifting up

my nose, or to the doghouse, or some

way on down the driveway where

last week in her cups and in the rain, the car
stalled on the edge of the ditch, the culvert

crumpled with the weight of it all, caved

in like my mother’s mouth after

the stroke, inaccessible, a vice.  I’m

saddest about this in winter, that crimped

culvert, because when I was small I’d scamp

like the cats left outside and get to the middle

under the driveway, before it went out into the dead

frozen ditch again and the broken blond

grass and all the world, all of it, would have

no noise at all, not the sluice, sluice, sluice

of thin carrot peelings or potato too

or the wet slump of it going deep from

the top if there were that January thaw,

down from it all behind the barn,

not the pause (but closest of all to that)

between the tip to the fall and the landing,

the bone still whole, undamaged, quiet

quiet before the impact of it broke

the gates open.  And the scream is the first

thing through, and the skin peeled back,

not the second but close, close to

the bone and going, going, like breathing

out of your nose when your mouth’s clamped

shut refusing, refusing soup, warm

enough to melt the marrow into

the broth we make, the broth we strain

and then take to her, and she pushes, like

trying to catch herself falling, away.

Remembering: The Start of Self-Harm

moss
before noon

Remembering:  The Start of

Self-Harm

                It is the one he chooses,

                yellow, plump, a little bruised

                on one side from falling.

                That place he takes first.

                                                The Groundfall Pear

                                                Jane Hirshfield

To seal it, I brushed some of my daughter’s black polish,

from the nailbed to the tear, to prevent getting caught

on anything.  Anything at all.  Because what requires

fastening and the frequency of fastening is distracting

to the small injuries: the thumbs mostly and lately: (I

shut my right one in the car door last March and it’s still

coming through) a certain split on another over and over,

but only so, it’s subtle and I bother it when I need

a small pain.  Who doesn’t sometimes?  When I was

small I discovered it was more grounding than gravity,

to draw blood up from under my living skin, to mark it

now and forever and be made again and again while

it healed while the scab hardened and sat firm, a man-hole

cover of sorts, the rushing by of blood just below, on

its way to or from the heart, but slowing down when

the road got narrow, right there at the wrist.  I felt it give

a nod on the way by, the way any good penitent would

when he or she passes the gallows say, now grown over

with honeysuckle or morning glory, the gibbet only just

visible from the road, the brass commemorative plaque gone

chaotic green.  Lacking polish, it is more important now,

wouldn’t you say, than the day it was tacked, and the con-

veining days and the silence, the power of the sky

bearing down on my small hand, the sharp tip of the glass

(once it was sand.  Sand!  It was soft enough to walk on

at night in the dark) poised just there, just there, small

injury.  Because they start that way and make it, brave,

through healing and decay, through blooming through

fruit, though not before, and this has to be considered,

the he-bee drone: the proboscis touch to me after he cut me

and drank me and had his way…and I have his mark to this

moment, and I touch it when I need to, a compass when

I’m derailed, when those gallows are cleaned with a frenzy

by the community, and the rope’s hung, it’s tested and hung.

And a spider, a very small one, knits her web in the noose.  I’m ok

today, truly.  I’ve come through, thank you.  It’s enough, black

polish.  On a thumb.  On a nail cut short to avoid randomly getting  

caught.  Thumb that blood was drawn from.  That was pressed

into the cheek, the soft meat of a tender beast, opening

me to close me, the nailbed silent as the king-

sized bed upstairs, blood a pestle: morning glory, honey

suckle.

After Kathleen Jamie's Autumn

After Kathleen Jamie’s Autumn

…see the leaves hurry Shy but dirty…

they’re here look…

blown into your stair

I see them too, Ms Jamie,

                the leaves skittering without all that green to wait

                                them

                                                to weight

                                                                them

                the waiting the wind that weighted they won’t

                                all summer long (and through their chrysalis curl

                                                                                                of April and into May)

                                                submit to juiced like they are

                                                                when the roots they depend on

                                                                                                                pull up from the warming

                                some of the thicker sap

                                                                (not what the sugarman taps)

                                                yes it’s the thicker liquid and it winds its way through

                                                                and all the sun to flatten, let me address you leaves, leaf

                                                                                                you

(though this

                                winter it’s been blizzards             

then days

and days

of fifty degree (even in February)

rain.  First

                                it’s snow

                                to the knees

                                                                then it’s hip boots

                                                remember, I passed under the memory

                                                of you

                                                it was Monday

                                                and the tide was going

                                                                                                and so—

clam hoe and a pack of smokes

                                Wasn’t I just a day or so ago

                plowing out for Paul, who, home now

                                                from that save-yourself-old-age-pain

                                                                knee replacement

                is elevated and taking in

                                the smell of hay and horse shit

                                                coming in the back door

                                                                and it’s not latched all the way and it bangs

                                                and bangs and last fall's the all of yous

                                                                maple leaves congregated

                                                                                and now you’re stiff and limp

                                                                and bent as men who spent all winter in the trenches

                                                                                                yes congregating

                                                                                in corners with the assortment

                                                                                                of butchering tools: pullies

                                                                and blood crusted rope,

                                                                                an occasional glass buoy float

                                                                                                and it all, when the foot’s timed right

                                and the wind sifts it there

                                                                ground to powder

                                                                                and chaff

                                                that if the window across the room

                                                weren’t stuck shut by a decade's worth

                                                                of old paint

                                                                it’d all blow straight out

                                                                                the door

                                                                                                if it were open

                                                                                and there were loose leaves

Mizzen

FDR's model sailboat
Campobello

Mizzen

noun

1.       

the mast aft of a ship's mainmast.

For Jamie, my dear friend

So if you don’t mind, heather of the hillside,

and it’s alright by you, small invincible bird,

I’ll lean on this here boulder

                                                by the old drove road,

and get my eye in, lighting on this and that.

                                                                Kathleen Jamie

                                                                The Glen

It’s a silence that, like the bottom stair seen

from the top of the crow’s nest, sifts

the wind with its mizzen cut fingers,

through ropes set straight as sheet

music and salvaged maybe from a wreck

once, long ago and offshore, one all hands

were lost on.  How they clung to, as the water

lifted and let go lifted and let go. 

When the mizzen was raised new, least

and aft and all in one piece, she’d seen

trees, sleek and free of every need

and each branch cut welcome to be any-

thing else but inhibiting the main mast.

How her hoops and rings each and complete

as a first wedding when the sail’s lifted

to the wind and it all floats! heavy as

everything is, and cuts the water and dolphins

play in her wake and maybe outrun her

in the game before they tire and sink

below the waves and the men heave

hoeing.   Aft mizzen: she takes on all the back-

ward the wind cuts and heeds to each

creak and bend of the mainsail, every

strain and near fracture, she softens

the inevitable.  Small, and her sail’s least

in the breeze, but stern and full curved

the way a half shell is, picked up and listened

to, held close to the cheek by the boy

looking up the beach for the other half

looking and listening, eyes ahead, and ears,

since Sunday, behind.  It’s windless

in this break of land.  The ship’s just

above the horizon, or below it, he can’t

tell which.  Mizzen, mizzen, we all say, reach between

the space that’s been split open, reach

one piece of you in the breeze, one piece

of you in the apathy.  And cleave them.  Please.

You know which cleave I mean. 

Top of the Stairs and to the Right

Leaning In--
Pin River--Kissimmee, 2008
by Maya Lin

Top of the Stairs and to the Right

A perfect teaching,

complete and stopped…

for stories persuade, cajole, tremble the language

to honey that clings to the knife.

                                           The World

                                           Jane Hirshfield

Even though it’s stationary and the threat

of it falling is all in my head, I make it

enough of a problem that I stop

whatever it is I’m doing and attend

it.  Today I had to postpone the coronation

of a dead Japanese emperor, the de-

facing of Sylvia Plath’s grave, a Chinese

emissary from jumping into the fire

or blades of sacrifice and shift everything

that lives behind my back: the flopping empty

pack, mouth opening like a terribly worn through lip

or lobe that’s lost all its support, forever

and entirely.  And there's the old pair of Birkenstocks
I keep meaning
to take to town to see to

their repair.  There's a book I’d wanted to

lend to a kid I know about a girl living in her own

dystopia who is the only one allowed

and maybe the only one in the community who can

see the color blue. So once everything is made

shipshape or mostly, the straight edges

of all these voices begin again in their falling:
off the appointment

calendar or mostly just shut up in their bound

houses of paper: paper spines, and yes, paper

bones, paper brains, paper lips, paper (hidden, mind)

pricks and paper clitorises.  I imagine a body

or two in a French sewer in the dark, someone like

Jean Valjean tucked at my elbow and that sudden

flood of light, how he squints and turns

away, arms flung over his face.  Maybe, in the dust

of the cover, he can manage a moan after

all these nearly century and a half.  It’s chilling

(if I were mad I’d go madder still) to think of all

these people in this room, and places, and

tensions and techniques, I’d needed

once to defend myself against a maniac (and I keep

those books behind the door like a loaded

shotgun, Ueshiba and his fist of peace ).  But today,
this morning, the one

who stops me is the saint
the poet evokes, but only after

the winter apple tree, or sleeping in

Plath’s bed, or the Crown Prince Sawara, and Wu

Feng the emissary who disguised himself to die

so the high mountain people would see

their own, finally, brutality.  Saint Elizabeth

of Hungary, who, (and this is her Catholic

description) “was provided with

physical beatings” by her spiritual

confessor, a Master

Conrad of Marburg.   Tell me, because I’ve

been in places where I held the chord

in my hands and flung it from my knees

up and over my head to my white bare

back, what was he trying to beat out of her?  She

was known for her roses, for her bread. 

Was she longing for her murdered mother?  Her

children she bore before she was

a vowed Franciscan nun?  Imagine!  Was provided.

Yes, I can and I do, all through these years

of trying to walk upright.  I confess: I was

hungry for most of my childhood.  If it wasn’t

food it was something else: shoes

that didn't pinch or embed my toenails.
And loose slacks and loose shirts

so the man would stop groping my crotch
and boobs.  I could’ve used an Elizabeth, and her lap

of roses.  Or maybe even knowing about her

so that it all came to purpose: those dead

emperors who stopped the famine, poets

who gaged the door jamb with tea towels,

ladies were made into saints after their skin

was lifted from the back they ‘provided’.  No

wonder, coming into this room some mornings,

I am driven, I take to straightening out

the loose things, the ashes of yesterday’s, last

week’s, incense, the scraps of paper my daughter

wrote on eight years ago, pushing her black

marker hard on the paper.  I’m hushing them all,

hushing them, shut behind those paper walls,  
the women bearing children, lying in beds, chocking

a whimper after the whipping.  You know,

she was made into a saint.  I said that already.

But what I didn’t know is that she was dug

up and scattered, her bones crushed under

the wheels of wagons on their way into the new

centuries, turning up in cities she’d never

ever heard of.  But for some, the dead do not go on.

They stay put, until they need a little push,

until they are opened, cautiously, to the light

and soothed, honey on the welts rising, warming

the unguent, the fingertips applying it.

Posturing

Second to Last: Melville's Pew
Sailors Bethel
New Bedford, MA

Posturing:

Or What’s the Difference

Between Hands and Knees Cleaning

And Down Right End-of-the-Day

Prayer?

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,

dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,

so the eyes could not be seen.

                                                                                This Was Once a Love Poem

                                                                                Jane Hirshfield

Consider this: the positions are the same.

And maybe: the end, our results.

We’re the both of us on our knees

and squeezing the cloth of all

its dirty qualities to wash, in a strict

self-developed code of swirls

so we don’t get lost or block

ourselves into the corner, the spots

off the floor where all our daily lives

drip and fall and splatter in a pattern

that same pattern? No, not possible,

but pattern enough that it goes

noticed as our own life falling

off the edge while we move, clumsy

if given a late night and early morning

its egg white it’s a drip of butter

it’s a grain of uncooked rice or salt. 

It’s mice leaving behind whatever it is

they leave behind.  Up close everything's taken

for what it is and scrubbed at and up

and polished off like supper to the hungry:

not tasted, not savored, only

as thoroughly chewed as can be

swallowed so the going about without it

is easier.  Listen, what I mean to say is

crumble this and crumble that

deliberately and let it fall off the stove

or the table and wait to take it up

cleaning.  Isn’t it, hands and knees now,

keen on being not just the mess you made

but too the knee-boned pressure of sweeping

it toward you to clasp, piled like saints

cards, like intentions, like the two spots

where your praying feet start to take you

down at the bottom of your bed, far

away from the head?   It’s praying.

Plain enough, it’s praying?

My Friend

reflection: Shaker Meeting House
Canterbury, NH

My Friend, My Dearest,

Dearest Friend

March 21, 2018

march blows and sets low

her wind chill so that

going out to meet her

face to face means bracing

a scarf to the lips and to

the cheeks, she’s being

demanding and we need

Jochebed (mother of Moses)
Franklin Simmons

(if we see ourselves being

in her for any moment

longer than scraping

the car) gloves that actually

make your blood stay

where it is in your fingers

instead of pulling away

instead of burning ironic no?

in the profane cold.

But she’s honest, isn’t she,

March.  She sees us through our winter

regret and begins

to lengthen our days, to make of

the face of the earth as it turns
low as for someone who’s been

waiting a long time and is

just about to throw it all

in and if it weren’t for the wind

if it weren’t for the ice

and snow and the broken

trees limbs down in it all

I’d be on my knees.  And you know

maybe I should, maybe

I bloody should.  She has

returned it for us to be able

to touch.  What better?

Coming in from the road...
Shaker Meeting House
Canterbury, NH