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

blur
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…

Early Apples

bog
west quoddy

Early Apples

Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,

then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

                                                            Wislawa Symborska

                                                            “Under One Small Star”

And don’t, please, look away when I look

                                    away

when I am distracted by my own

longing

to gather all your windfall, all your early

strays

into my apron, into my pockets, into my

mouth

and bite down into your skin, between the soft

fontanelle,

where ants and drunken wasps have made early

cider

of the long spring and wind of summer.  All that

time

your stem, all that time broadening broad,

bulge

in the shadow of the cragged branch’s

peak

a summit achieved only in a freak high

breeze

when you are lifted up and your clasp, finally,

is undone.

And the fall to the ground wasn’t the pain

Why

you’d begun to grow at all, why you said

yes

for this not at all please don’t believe

random

hand brushing away the grass

the dead

bees.

The fatigue of your release is sweet.

Me,

cupping the split seam of you into my life-

line’s

shadow, the round firm unblemished

you

round , rosy, you’ve come for this: the tongue.  My

tongue.

It’s why you ripen and ripen.  It’s why you rush up

and fall
and split apart to show me your stars.

What Holds It's Own

pond.
stalk of grass.

What Holds Its Own

Whatever disquiet we sense in a room

we have brought there.

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,

pointing to hinge and plaster and wood—

You are matter, as they are.

See how perfectly it can be done.

Hold, one day more, what is asked.

                                                Jane Hirshfield

                                                A Room

Because they didn’t want to disturb

the living the parlor was set aside

to wake the dead.  I’ve read that

somewhere, how the term living room

came about because that’s all

that was allowed to happen there.

I don’t know for sure, and I don’t have

a parlor—though maybe that room—

in this house at least, would be

the den, and already the dead are

accumulating there: my grandmother

by way of her trunk, the one

she brought back east from Minnesota

after having been gone for twenty-

one years.  I can’t begin to guess

what was in it before my mother

put our old blankets, sheets—what wouldn’t

fit in her cedar chest, the one solid thing

she brought with her, that locked her

treasures when she moved them

from Salem.  My sister has that now, maybe

in her own living room.  I’ve never been

to her house but in other houses she’s lived

in I saw it, and the old rocking chair (another

piece from Salem), and maybe above it

my father’s 1960s Navy graduation photo

she won’t give back.  Maybe her house

is more a cemetery than mine, though

I’d argue it holds its own: a leather chair

a man I admired read to his granddaughter

in; a bookcase and the books inside; all

the books all around even, and still

living, the daughters and daughters of spider

plants and cacti, children’s children’s
children, new leaves, old root.  And too:

in a small wooden urn, a teaspoon maybe two,

of my friend’s ashes—what didn’t

get scattered, ten years now

at my elbow.  When I move back

home I have to find a suitable spot

somewhere, and in a brighter room—

maybe on that trunk next to the leather

chair.  What’s all in it: the kids’ stuffed toys,

a Brother typewriter, rocks I’d forgotten

about, coal maybe, and of course, those old

love letters, still holding their own,

closed up in their carefully cut open

envelopes, whispering the only

words they know to stave off the dark: Dearest,

I love you, I miss you, I’ll wait

for you, when are you coming back.

I put them under the pillows I’d meant

to decorate the couch with, where

we sat, lustful rush of arms

and legs and breath, hinging

and unhinging, coming up

for air after all that plunging, like any

lovers do I suppose, when they are

living and alive.

Ravish or Enrapture: Still, It's Toward Transport

Ravish or Enrapture: Still,
It's Toward Transport

Sometimes arriving late means coming in from behind,

spine first: the tight delight of a cuff perfect and tucked

tail, not a dart or pleat out of line and the review too good

to miss.  It’s like this: the whole rack gets along quite

well parenthetically; each collar and yoke a susurus, as though

they've been told to go the opening of a private show or

(this is provocative) during the moments the placket's 

laid down on the podium, shuffed and lined up

and tipped in favor of the audience, catty-

cornered and face down to only lamp in the hall.  Arm rising,
the whole congregation shuts up abrupt as snuffed kindling

in a mid of March wind.  Someone's spoken.  Soon, what

was quick to stiffen goes limp.  Soon too soon the heat goes

over the cliff cold and its only on the way down

you know you’ve arrived and you'll lose

your shirt entirely, and the parting

(while maybe not starting with fire, while maybe

hung on to with two hands at the base of the taper

and shaking so the liquid light spatters) isn’t glided

so much as (right?) guided spine first then held like 

two seamed gussets (thumbs are useful too, at first)

until swift as a swallow- switched- mid-

drift, lifted to go in past the front pocket taking

their time taking the squeeze the shimmy the jockey

on the back if in a waxed saddle of words there's slipping

the tongue tip alone but the only thing to go dry on the outside

while the root, the root, the root is pulled pulled

and there’s edges sweet and smooth there’s edges

thin and serrated, there’s edges of lips almost always

behind the light of the late arrivals and taking off

the jacket only reveals a straight spine

not the curve (at last) at the middle and suspended

at the hip

Thought

Sunrise: Fog: Bald Eagle
South Lubec, Maine

 Thought

If the gods bring you

a strange and frightening creature,

accept the gift

                                                                Each Moment a White Bull Steps

                                                                Shining into the World

                                                                Jane Hirshfield

But then, if we understood

or tired to or even wanted

to, the birds that

our thoughts are, how often

unlike a pile-driver, or should

be, how flight

is what they require

to live, to flit

from post to post, even

the top, capped to keep the gulls

from resting their bum,

or the crows, harassing

the nesting hawks, the eagles… still,

to see that fledgling sit

facing the sun all day

(and not far away those

crows, squawking their cacophony

of angsted delight), from far

he (she?) seemed to me

a spruce branch rooted,

posted guard,

while there’s herring

while there are humpbacks

while his (her?) mum

hovers over then clutches
her own: a birch

for her, not far but down

the road, and too a hooded gaze,
her brain taking it all,

everything in. 

And it is that eagles take it,

or hummingbirds, their long

proboscis almost seeming

to ravage 

the blossom if wasn't for
the blossom 

opening for it,
welcoming to make

more and more

nectar, not regretting

herself when she lost, slowly

if the weather’s good, all

desirability (but they’ll be
beetles wings later, right,
when she droops

too low on her stalk,
to caress her  

to anything limply needed). 

I haven’t gone

far, have I?  I thought

maybe to get, at least,

to the end

of the lane before the bird
fledged, I wanted

to be able to stand

beneath the tree, to be

standing beneath all that

waiting, all that serenity…

but the limb was abandoned,
forsaken

when I finally made it

and even a feather, after all  

that grooming, drifted too far

away to be enamored with
and cherished: the tall
cordgrass, toward the saltmarsh,

or and I just noticed,
I'd missed it all this time
sitting there,

the snowshoe hare—I thought:
how had it lived, hidden
in the rugosa

outwitting four
eagles, 

all these weeks?

In His Studio

Mount Ascutney,
Vermont

 
 In His Studio

Every quick feather asserts a just claim;

it bites like a saw into white pine.

I communicate right; . . .

well, Right has a long and intricate name.

And the saying of it is a lonely thing.

                                                                William Stafford

                                                                Lit Instructor

Even the dust of it seems too much

cleaned away to take a chance

imagining it as a space

where blocks of clay

and shaping tools

scraped away and made

in stage after stage

after stage the greatest

men and women in his mind

at the time.  They played

with his hair sometimes, the way

a river wind might

when he took to looking

toward Ascutney and Vermont or

tools thrown down in a plume

of dirt rising, the very one

I’m missing, walk down

to the Connecticut River

ti throw stone and stone

and stone into the sinew

of the water.  I wonder

if he liked looking

at the way it would open

itself to anything arriving,

the way it pulls it all eventually

down.  (the great winters had to

crack sometime, didn’t they?)

And maybe it was

that coming down to

the water was enough

to plumb the reach of the nostrils

of Shaw’s stallion’s flare, and lip

and severe wild fear

in his eyeballs and with Shaw

so passive (but don’t we

if we’ve known war, know nothing’s

passive, that maybe, if Saint-Gaudens

was today a neuro surgeon

he’d see the deep time

of the brain, how much like clay

the surface seems, until

the probe in where there’s some

natural curve and it yields and comes

to brilliance.  What we see is

what’s left behind and afterwards:

the studio propped with broke

(as though found in a local dig,

a Saint-Gaudens pit

for all his refusals) and drawings

we can’t get close to

and walking in and out

of his studio where some of it was

drawn and erected, where Diana

pulls back her stringless bow

(she’s notched the arrow though

goddess that she is, on nothing

but intention) where busts

of children and women and one

Jesus tucked up in a corner

are what we get when the dust

is enough out of all the window

and its clean.  Though somehow

for me it’s wishing I could see him

touch the stuff, to come away

from the face or the elbow

or the great stallion’s knee rising (and

to think it was mud that Jesus

made, with his own tongue working

enough spit that made the blind

man alive again in his eyes)

and say see, it’s moving, see it really is

moving.  A river of it, and

if I’m brave

enough to reach the river and follow

it too, all the way down,

a bass or a salmon or a trout,

having spawned earlier

in the spring, will be far enough

along to reach the salt of it all

dissolving, but, (lick your lips

because I do when I’m about

to see something remarkable)

thick with the work

of it, of everything now

being mud and grass and milt

and gills and, once seeing this all

and making it pause, a man still, moulding.