Getting Word

Getting Word:

To rid of, then, of the smell

of fish,

               

                (and I’m not

                ashamed but just disgusted of the way it’s suffered

                under the boiling

                oil) I’ve taken as many votives

                as I can muster and , lit

in every downstairs room, they come up dumb

as a dried tongue of river

stone, one that rubs up on bones

not entirely their own but claim it so once the milt

and spawn of the ocean we’ll all spill

into eventually is reckoned with.  They hold and hold and do

what they’re told on all these, froze

not full grown, never to be

full grown, backbones and remains of the hastily filleted.

                (mind the one bone not gone

                soft in the hot fat)

Yesterday and again

today the small lights are offering a sort

of homage, a kind way to elbow in

and touch a friend on her arm and say

I’m sorry for  your loss.  The grand plan

of what we thought would outlast us

has been cut up in chunks nonchalantly,

the way men take

to the great slick fins and

bodies of the stocks of cod or they quick flit unzip

the scallop of its halo and caul to lift out quick the little

                nugget of muscle—

                yes, yes, I’ll love it, I will, and I do, I love it, against the press

of my hand,

                all that shell and bone and tongue

                I do

                and I tell you if I could eat it all

                raw, if I could come out

                roses as they say

and not for the next month or more of days

stumble into the room after being

out fresh to have to succumb

to the warm heavy weight of cooling

and congealing grease and fish flesh I’m telling you I’m not

ashamed of where I come from

but the winding sheet of it sweet Jesus

yes the winding sheet of it           the way

                the tails trail and wick up mud

                and blood and squeezed through liver slick as any ice in winter

                I’d be, I would, I’d be

                rid of that goddamn it I would

                but listen

it’s nothing.  It’s nothing.  I don’t mean anything by it.  I’m here

I got here

as fast as I could once I got word.  I’m here,

fast as I could bring the fire

for the Christmas, clean as any fat, beeswax.

If Your Lids are Halfway Down the Sunrise Throbs. Try It Before you Go Blind

If Your Lids are Halfway Down the Sunrise

Absolutely Throbs.  Feel It Before You Go

Blind

“What vain weather-cocks we are!”        

                                                Emily Bronte

                                                Wuthering Heights

Maybe, if I look at it as though my heart were

beating in my irises, if I see without letting

or allowing myself blink, I'll be the in the breach 

of each thump

of blood going, each

thump of blood coming back, and at last

it will do to see, see! I'm really breathing, along the least 

of seams, the insanity of it, 

to be breathing, hum like a hammer-

struck thumb

before, you know the moment,

it goes into your mouth to cool the pool blue-all

tight as a trojan cinching the possibility

of new life.  In this moment it’s the sun just coming

up in front of the river, the lids

of my eyes go idle and lowly in the sense that they have nothing else

to do but stay halfway open without needing to

rush to be the maid who’s just come in late

for the morning, who’s dressing the table

with plates, who’s making eggs, who’s layering

the whites just right in the washer's drum.  Yes before all that, please,

I make myself

relax to the glaze, the wet, wet glaze just as

the salt's about to be slung.

Don’t you know all eyes have an atmosphere they see

through, breathing, taking the air like a consumptive

like the needy needing to lift

those lacy lungs until a choke hold

squeezes to know

anything: base, abusive, harmonious, erotic…

come let it what you want it

to see be seen breathing beating increasing

then slow as a pin-hole decreasing, easing out to such an edge

as unhanding is the next and only possible goodness

you can achieve.

At the Red Light

At the Red Light:

                Drops of Water

                On the Driver’s Side Window

All steeples are upside down

in the drops of rain on the window

and they multiply and they are many

bending shapes: and see how they make

balloon animals!  Can’t you

see a man clowning around with the limp

rubber wiener and how

he’s practiced holding it

randily, the bounce of his rhythm... it makes me

wonder if when he was first getting used

to thinking he might like to take up

entertaining a crowd with make believe

he stood before a reflecting glass

to catch the sass of his real wish and he’d add

act after act, gesture this,

subtle that, the rubber blown

to near popping, blown and popping

too full of him: until he learned the burst

of the bang was one of the challenges

he could push back on to the crowd, he could

control their own breath and the throb

of their heart, how he could have them

riveted to the twists in his hands

and rubs and squeaks and tipoffs and come

to what it all will be: the legs the torso

the ears and viola! it’s a long

necked giraffe or maybe a green alligator.

Or a pucker with that tied-off end

of a flower…and yes, all this right?

from one and one and one drop of rain falling

on the window, the tilted spire

in its curve, how maybe the only other

time it leaned that way was when

it was being erected, the steeple-

jack's asked his opinion and consulted the crane

to take the strain of the pullies instead of the men

yelling all their Saturday afternoon

expletives.  To think it could all come down

spire first but finally up it falls

into the heaven it was erected

to point to, nailed to the roof, all

tower housing and a tired set

of bells that have their go in betrothing 

the ears and spirit...but only after the fall

carnival and ox pulls and tent

events and extra fees in the back

for all the men and boys wink wink nod nod.

And judgments need to rest (tell me I'm wrong)

in the paw of a small boy sleeping

next to his deminishing-even-as-he-breathes

blue twisted balloon that makes me want

to wake him before it goes

flat as a sermon on a rainy morning, 

a thousand spires hard, still rising,

while the men yet to repent their sins drive on

before the light turns green.

Other Than: What Are Brooms For?

“Shall I Make Sense Or Shall I Tell the Truth?  
I'm Not Sure I Can Do Both
With This”

Mercy’s at best approximate,

like the first weeks of blindness

before the other senses' stunned quartet have learned to translate

inside the skull’s black paradise

some recovery of touch, this odor of apples, sea wind,

hearth-fire, this prophecy

of rain or danger,

this autumn of spring dryness in the leaves.

               

                                                                Deborah Digges

                                                                Late Summer

Opening you, I am remembering I had been dreaming

about a woman.  She was gentle and she waited a while but I was still

afraid, a long wave of unfinished afraid, but in time a going out wave.

I think I dreamed of doctors because earlier in the day I’d made

some comment about seeing only those who’d treat me

above the neck: and specific: the dentist and the optometrist.

Nothing but teeth, and then nothing but what I can

see.  Nothing but what I can chew and read.  I don’t think I’m unique.

In the dream, I never sat down and I mostly

looked away, and the room was a subtle grey:
hair just washed/just dried
soft, you know the kind, or fine as a new baby’s hair if we’re lucky

enough to be able to think back to that.  Mostly though,
and only after course examination, after taking it all down

and into the skin, after lesions, lacerations, and life-saving
stitches, my head has stood up enough to what’s

been offered: and now I know I go out

with my clavicle and scapula broad as the prow

of a small boat, used new and not new used if that’s possible
and it is if you think about sex.  And it's safe to say
you liked it and wanted to and made it an intimate
part of your life until your life wasn't anymore and that
is what makes me ache because I wanted to get to
know you and now I only can with these few
books.

I don’t know why, but I made myself read you lived now in Mass-

achusetts, I made myself read that, even though

I know you’re dead.  I’m not right now remembering

the year but that will be on another book,

your last, published posthumously I remember. 

And it is.  The tense is changed.  You still lived

in Massachusetts, (I put the still in, because what else

are you now?) until your death in 2009.

I’m looking for hints and realize I always have,

that offer me a reason you chose to fall

from high enough in the air that it killed you.

In “Broom” I read you’re sweeping, of course you’re sweeping

and really there’s a lot of power in making things

clean.  You take lovers and husbands and you make sons
with one of them.

You fuck the lovers and fuck up husbands
and fuck-up the sons. And you say this later, describing some of it wild

enough to gum your hair while you sweep and sweep

them with your body and your mouth, hoping, I know,
that the whole motion will be about getting you

clean.  Maybe I reach for you every fall because of all

the trees that are starting to let go of one another and yet
one more year and I was drawn

since the beginning by your keeping
from house to house and room to room, especially on
moving, broom:

because I've been this kind of movement too,
and I remember wanting to be in your hands as your straw
monument, longing from all that's bottled on the first time I saw it all on the line.

You were alive then.  I was drawn by ending my time

with a Buddhist community and dumping myself
back on your shore.

I opened you (and maybe you’d find this poetic and then dismiss

it as sentimental) and there was my friend, and a thin

slip of his beard that I almost brushed away.  It’s him,

it’s what wasn’t swept up it’s what wasn’t ignored.  Did you ever

save anything of what you tried to sweep away?

I look at it the way I try to look at the woman

in my dream, how I let the whole room go

soft, like an experienced deadlift athlete who imagines every muscle at the last

of it letting go the joint and going slack before they’re torn

to perform the most impossible, ludicrous task: 

thoughts

gate city church
nashua, nh

thoughts      thoughts      thoughts         thoughts        thoughts            thoughts              thoughts              thoughts              thoughts              thoughts              thoughts

t                 h                    o                             u                 g                      h             t             s             

Thoughts are drops of water falling

                on the driver’s side

                window: a pause at the red-light

                railroad crossing where say

                on a day like today

                the church steeple

                is upside down in the water

                whose shape makes me

                consider the pelvic girdle 

                —and because it all glides, 

                watch: that drop has a west-

                north-west wind pushing it

                in the belly. It could be

                a boxer bent over and all

                around her is her raining

                accumulation…see how certain

                windows of the church

                are stuck in their up-side down

                selves while they roll

                devotedly, and only just now

                to the edge, to fall off, maybe

                fall apart, maybe, or be

                held together

                on some other surface to be,

                maybe, expanded, maybe

                quivering for some time

alone before the sky

her heat and her shrouds

and her mensurable eunuch

call her back...my

how she’s different for

where she’s fallen, my

how she’s changed.

After Sitting With Wyeth

After Sitting With Wyeth

We can see the tragic forming

hurricane and victim;

and a man comes like a cat

to visit by the colorless forest,

his blue hands stuttering welcome.

Richard Hugo

Resulting from Magnetic

Interference

Going back I notice the old potential

lover has lost almost a whole row

of teeth.  Before I see him

smile I say he looks just

the same.  It’s far away and

he hasn’t made it all the way

in to shore yet.  Tying off

their caulked and patched

bow I wonder how he’ll get to

shore, and if he’ll be pleased

seeing his yesterdays walk

ahead of his children today, the way

water may, in winter, walk on its

own cold hands and feet, before

the wind, before it’s entirely

ice, and is blown like sleeves

like pants legs, strings of hood…

I wonder, when he plunges

into the bait barrel where salt
and eyes and bent bodies of fry

look out of the grime like he might

look out, the bait-shed window

with greased ease.  He’ll pass

a few laughs with the raunchy old

men who flash their shriveled

eyes and lift their lids with their

empty glasses off the counter,

the felled bar their grandfather’s

grandfather flattened, planed

day after day in the warm winter

barn, and made it so to see his own

face rise up in the varnish gleam.

I want to say you look the same

sitting there when you get in

off the boat, after mooring it

in the wind, and I saw you saw me

watching you.  And maybe it's your

deft and careful hands that are
the same.  And  I saw you taking

the years off me too, the way the old

take clothes off, first the fumble
with the belt, the button, the fly, and then

the rush in without waiting because

who’s getting younger?  Listen, 

the water’s a shock, especially
at my age, and going under means being

struck a moment, and then stuck,

until the coal paces her glow in the brazier

and sets the simmer, when the load shifts in

and settles and has enough Pray Jesus glow

to hold through: God

you look good how you been  

it's been a long time, you aint
changed one Goddam Bit.

At Bailey's Mistake

smokeshed
bailey's mistake
trescott, maine

At Bailey’s Mistake

Who can say which sadness when takes over,

becomes rudder?

Who can name for another what moors, what charts the date?

                                                                                Deborah Digges                               

                                                                                Nursing the Hamster

If you stand back far

enough, the second rung

on the ladder is a trick

of the posts.  Holding to

what they’ve held to they

are the last of a once

was fence, a stronghold

some long gone swinging

door may have rested on.

Moss lost in spots and shingle

grey, countless times a hand

hadto’ve laid on the round-

ed head of one, then maybe

the other, and took it all

in, whatever time of day

or tide, whatever thick-

of-fog or wisp, the way it

is with ghosts that may

float alone in the old debris

in the smokeshed that makes

this post-ladder’s second

rung.  See it?  Just so, the window

and doors are their own a

snow beaten salt beaten

sanctuary.  It’s maybe if you make

it work for you, a priory

soaked in its own smoke.

The millions of fish bodies

hung throat and gill staring

up to the rafters in the calm

way of such smoke, as though
to God.  And don’t you want to

imagine it still happens like that
in there at night, the straight-up

flight of pliable flesh rendering

itself out to a tight

and preservable delight?

Right?  It’s enduring now and old

in a way gravestones are old,

you know the ones the town’s

the most stoic of: a founder

maybe, a first white baby, a couple
of men gone down with their ship

not far from where this shed

will be built, will be worked

in for years, by whole generations

of families, will be walked away

from, but not entirely, because

there’s always looking back,

there’s always that moss covered

ladder that only our eyes

can climb safely, and the crowd

of goldenrod blossoms, and, out

of the frame, but there I assure

you, the rugosa lined road, opening

their mouths like taps horns, some

wide some gone to hip some shut

in their bud waiting for rain

to be rung from their sisters

drop, drop, don’t walk away

till you see it lined up: see:

drop, drop.  Stop.  Pause…it’s

optical.  It’s caught.   It’s soft

as the memory of a friend

walking ahead, not far, but just

enough in the fog to be almost

gone, almost, but not.  See? 

Yes, yes.  See.

Opposable

Kingsbrae Gardens
St. Andrews, NB

Opposable

If the leaves.  If the singing fell upward.  If grief.

For a moment if singing and grief.

If the blue of the body fell upward, out of our hands.

If the morning held it like leaves.

                                                                If the Rise of the Fish

                                                                Jane Hirshfield

I have to ask if men fishing are jealous

of the osprey who from far away

can see to take the rainbow trout up

into the air in such swift independence

it’s possible the fish considers it's suddenly

wings, that on each side of her is new

body.  If men, looking up, mistake

the fins for feathers and pull their vests,

jealous: all that time tying flies, the sigh 

tightening the weight of the knot that will be  

tested against the feather, the way, while making

each tuft of fawn hair (don’t worry,

it was stuck to a barb of wire lining

the old property, he’d walked

the boundary last spring and it was

a wisp in his imagination, a certain

fly he was godding through under the lit

magnifying glass) he’ll think: the one

I’m going for is swimming right now

and really what’s the difference

between my fingers stroking this

string and her fins stroking her stones

that rub her belly erotic (are fish

erotic?) and time her surfacing to

the dark shift in shadows, old soul

she is, knowing the water, the silted milt,

the cool/warm exchange of rain or snow

these so many seasons we’ve been

knowing one another?  Does he think

that?  Tying flies?  And all the way to

the pond, his worn path, his patched hat

and vest, his tested line?  What can be

known of this or cared for in the eye

of the osprey, owning her own piece

of sky for the length of time it takes

to feel the shift in shadow beneath

her breast feathers (isn’t this knowing  

known before it’s seen, and isn’t it in

the bones, the ones that cage grace-

fully our aching failing hearts?) and aims

straight and faithful for the shadow,

that will, when it’s lifted, transmigrate: become,

muscle, become scale, become a reached for

creature the fisherman in his whole

lifetime imagine he alone lifted from the water's
grip in the form of a fly, and breathed on it

and watched it come, finally, briefly,

to life?

Eastport, ME

Bare With Me:

Bare With Me:

I

There is a place in the ocean where vast waves

ceaselessly rise.  Without fail, all fish which pass

this place become dragons.  For that reason, the place

is called the Dragon Gate.  The vast waves

there are no different from the waves anywhere

else and the water is ordinary salt water

as well.  Yet mysteriously, all fish crossing

here become dragons.  Their scales do not change,

their bodies do not change, and still

they become

dragons.

                                                Dogen

                                                Shobogenzo-Zuimonki

II

Freshly poured (though they start popping almost right

off) the coffee looks like a small pond of spiders’ eyes.

Different sizes, they keep close to the warm walled- off-

from- breezes sides of the mug.  I’ve given them

a fair start in the morning: while everything brews

an old favorite cup of mine sits in the sink with hot

water starting her off.  Because who wants, being cold,

a sudden rush of something near toward boiling,

if even a lifeless and faded to almost white through

the years through the lips and teeth and an occasional

(tricky, this, having been burned once and once more)

tongue.  Because how do you drink something hot

or have you ever noticed?  With caution?  With rush

right in?  Does your tongue hover over the rim, bottom

lip kissing the outside (we can call it that) because what else

is it the beginning of, other than a swallow, an acceptance

or rejection, and that comes after, much later sometimes,

if there’s something of a cooling down to do and that

lower lip’s the first to know if the approach first time coming,

should be called off, clumsy in the morning just

getting out of the dream and dark of all of night’s

suggestions (the window fan’s a wind itself, the wind’s

a rain, the rain’s a wave that makes and makes and makes

and never seems to bread, only increase or decrease depending

on the tide).  It’s how the dead come back to tempt us,

because it’s only awake that we know how lonely

we (we?) they are, and those dreams never bleed us

out and we come back among the alive unhurt, unscarred,

except maybe the clenched knot of the jaw, the break

in the lip, drawn, now dried, blood on the pillow 

so it does, it behooves us to come with caution to the hot

coffee we offer ourselves and let it settle, every eye

bubble in the light pulled up or back down into the drink,

the passage like a ride in a lake-boat on a calm day,

all those small wakes left behind while we sit and watch all

those lives float by, anchored as they are among

the pines and beeches, the evergreens, their needles

that sometimes bead in the heat in August and drop

the sticky pitch of their liquid selves onto whatever happens

to be beneath them, dropping as a bubble, falling

as a bubble, making it to the skin before it opens, so small

an explosion its almost unnoticed, its carried

all the way home, it’s kissed, if it’s allowed, and noticed,

but fleetingly, like a memory, like a barn

spider I watched climbing higher and higher into

the rafters, into and then out of the swiftly charging air,

temperature dropping, rising, dropping, rising, as I breathed

on it, out and then in, out, and then in.

winter chickens

meeting
tree fence and three
shaker village
canterbury, nh

winter chickens

where a tale begins

and where it ends

matters.  Who tells

the story and why. . .

that makes

a difference.

                                Epitaph

                                Mary Doria Russell

In January the

one rooster is late

to begin

the day, late

to wait at the door

and make his comb

flop and shake

over his face

and the cold

going out over

his whole brood

ruffed up

along the old stall

walls, unmoving,

almost unmovable

hens.  Once there was

a cow and her son

and they both stood

walled off, balling,

each on the wean.

Now a dry, froze over

mound of chicken

shit and summer

saw-dust and the old

trough where

my father pours

steaming laying mash

he’s stirred with

an old lath broke off from

the wall in the second shed,

where the plaster’s

cracked and crumbling

anyway, where if I look at it

at the right angle

it resembles that set

of broken off teeth

in the head of the same

calf, a skull I found last

summer up on the old

woods road.  The lath

makes up for the lack

of some other stick

and he makes do: it

comes in just to the top

of the five gallon bucket

and he draws from

the bottom what’s dry into
the middle.  After his deep walk  

out in the new snow,

his open coat I won’t

be a minute

when she asks

accusing him of the cold

but the chickens don’t

know, and with the arrival
of the mash

they stretch

and flap their wings

their rooster cops

his walk between boot-

prints and snow, following

them.  But only

to the threshold.  To

where the dirt ends.

To where the snow (it

was shoveled just

enough to get the swinging-

out door open)

begins.  The old barn 
holds to its own.  Opens

to anything, closes to
anything.  Wind.  Rooster.

Hen.  Mother and son.
Leading them in.  Leading

them out.  One at a time,
or two, depending on

the threshold, the man,
the bucket of steaming

mash, the winter falling
early yet in the season

early yet in the cold,
and what bawls will bawl

softly, like a hinge on a door
closing against the snow.

The Triggering:

storm:
out the barn door
hancock shaker village

The Triggering: 

While Waiting for Richard's Making Certain It Goes On

I Open Deborah's Rough Music.

Some things won’t translate backwards.

Some things can’t be undone,

though it takes  years to learn this, years

Such were the serial exhaustions of my beliefs…

                                                                Deborah Digges

                                                Rune for the Parable of Despair

Before you arrived I was well into someone else.  I tried

to be patient waiting but she was so…

her black spine freckled with the claim

of her given name, slipped thin between the rest,

but a reckoning, a vigor to be sure, and so

I opened her and her honest to goodness lust

sprung up from every curve every line every dot

hung above the ‘i’.  After it was finished I went back

for more, and so I know going on like this

I’ll be weeks and weaks away because I need some

of what she’s willingly put down in silk, in thick

unblemished perfection.  I’ve been with her before

and often, though she’s never about remembering. 

When she fell from the grandstand I carried her

around inside of me and she’d say this: wind

in the bells.  That’s it.  And sometimes I was the wind,

but mostly she was.  She knew what she was

doing and because I’d never not ever once been on my knees

looking up except to the dirk to the hilt of a Jesus red,

red heart, the only one ringed with the zisiphus spina, the one

I’d watch the sun set through every Saturday afternoon

mass.  I took my turn.  I waited.  I made plans to be

a nun in a far away place.  I wanted the veil

and the cloister more than the tip

of a finger on my lips.  Imagine my anguish opening

for her for the first time and she letting me be

in complete control: the clothes she wore

that day were pine green and black.  There was

a brooch of cream where her nipple might be,

but only on the right side facing me.  The left was velvet

and it was a glimpse of light that outdid me, unhinged

my lips.  I wanted to, I really did, I wanted

to wait for you.  But your silence.  Not knowing

if you were really coming, if you might even be

dead, was the clutch of my despair.  She read that in me.

She took my hand.  She guided me with it.  I’m sorry,

but she was there.  She said she'd been waiting.  And I couldn’t

refuse.

"my day"
where Eleanor's fingers
tips and thumbs
and whole fists
touched, came down,
made her marks

Snake Oil

beached fog: dory bow
 at low tide

Snake Oil— 

There’ll be a day we’ll need to come clean

with the small lies we’ve told ourselves

all this time, all our lives.  Like trimming the dead

nail that’s coming up from the thumb I shut

in the car door last March.  While something

under the nailbed is making brand

new nail, while it cut through like a tooth beneath

the bruise and immobilized blood, the old and broken

tenor to maintain a hold, like a widow

coming away from two stones and waiting

to make her own, you may say what’s she

in all this whispering about lies and their perennial

opposites, because it seems to take

as long, getting to the truth, how the nail gives way

from the bottom when it cleared the thumb tip

and begins to fray and snag

every stray string or loose something or other

and is pulled up and what’s beneath it still

attached perverts its own compromising

bruise.  It’s the shade of cooling

calves fat if you care to know, the veal

remember? we sometimes eat and leave

scraps here and there on the plate

and we’re done and good and full.  Milky.

We’re both of us lost to the crawling

we do to justify what we go through

to consume. . .oh but isn’t that just

bullshit horseshit dogshit.  But it’s true

I did jamb my thumb in the car

door, in the falling snow in the winter.

I wanted to get a picture of the way

everything seemed gentle and patient

around the weeping beech, and I’d waited

all season, and the sun was just

right and the snow was just right

and a car drove by and I was too close

and doesn’t everyone freeze

when they think they’re going to be

run over?  All those does and lambs?

All those coons?  Because look: it’s falling

snow.  It’s as stunning as it going to

get, aside from being outright

struck.  And here it is mid-June and still

I’m looking at this injury all this time

and cutting away the dead that the new

pushes up because its always done it

that way.  What else can I say, the thumb’s

doing well under the circumstances.  Her

layered lapping laths of keratin stick

out more because of the blood maybe. 

Because I’m having to trim what’s lifting

up from the middle, near that little moon,

lunula it’s called, and the nail started just

beneath what’s risen, or if it didn’t,

I’m picking it up there anyway, and it won’t

ever clear the thumb tip now, it will be

interrupted and cut off just as it’s been getting

going and making a small fuss, ready to

expose the pink nail bed beneath, to reveal

it all, whatever it is hidden under the months

of bad blood, coming clean however it can.

Inventing Measure

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below me
stones...

Inventing Measure

Genius, perhaps, is making anything

worth the world’s stealing.

                                                Jane Hirshfield

Reading her Four-Postered

Beds of Mycenae, (and let me

read it through again and

again) she makes me

see not just the need of invention

but what was invented to measure

all the not- made- by- man things:

the moon say, that wasn’t always

but when it was and when it was

able didn’t stop being the moon simply

because a length and a spot

of time had been added, had been

stuck to comfort other objects

or animals that come into season

and pass out of season, not because

attention had been called, listen, didn’t

the doe, didn’t the opossum, the

armadillo, the artic fox already

know MOON and her tricky shifts?

Don’t they from their dens

of snow and ice and hollow tree,

drawn up in their tails or elegant

legs, having found a hollow

to wait the time out in, unmeasured

uncomprehending the hands, the sweep

of them across the face or

the way I’d seen the time flip

by on the little digital cards

on my grandmother’s bedside table.  Some-

times I’d watch, sometimes I’d turn

my back to them, but only so

I could listen in the easy quiet to each

little pad fall, a Rolodex of numbers on

a wheel, how they’d seem to sigh.  Contented.

But that too is an invention, isn’t it, a

satisfaction?  If we’ve given ourselves

enough credit, or too much, on

where we’ve been, where we are,

or where we’re going, the MOON remains,

always: at our feet, our knees,

our hips, our belly, our lung, our

clavicle, our lips and eyes, round

then as they are, and lidded, closing

opening, falling to come back around,

like clockwork, depending…