(

(

From time to time the placid

shrugs its shoulders—

earthquakes, for instance.

                                Jane Hirshfield

                                Milk

Eyelash is an open or closed

parenthesis, depending on

its innocence.  Here it wants me

to consider all the space

it holds off for its own,

on the lower margin of a novel,

the cream pages breathing

in and out with my eye

on the story: I keep I see

I read about three people

on a beach.  It wants me,

small lash that it is, to consider

turning a page over more

slowly but I can’t forget

three paragraphs above it

was a dead ant, stuck on this

sentence:  “The baby slept on

in his arms.”  There’s a spot

of ant oil (what else would you

call it) between ‘his’ and

‘arms’ after I flick the black body

into the trash.  I’ve borrowed

the book, and I’m sure it’s past

due.  In the story a man is learning

how to swim.  He’s afraid

of the water and he’s just come up

for air.  It’s someone else, someone

who has a deep, treading water

grudge against him, who’s holding

his daughter in his arms.

There are loaded guns

and there is hesitated blood

everywhere.  But only hesitated.

Like when the book shut down

hard enough to take

the ant’s life but not hard enough

to squish it.  It was still so perfect 

I thought it was alive

when I turned the page.  But it

had merely been stuck waiting. 

Like the eyelash of some previous

reader: opening is an aside.  I

almost want to pluck one

of my own

and place it some distance from her

possible new companion, going

on to give its curve to catch

the rest of the thought, to consider

the next move.  But the story

isn’t read yet.  It’s written—

and some of it’s gone by me

in boats and stolen cars and bullet

holes.  And a drowned mother

who is still

alive in this bit, and crouched

“Japanese-style” which means

submissive? or spring-loaded?

Could mean she’s weak? Or

could mean she’s dangerous?  And more,

much more than the man

with the gun on his knee and the baby

in his arms gives her credit

for.  I’m here to tell you it pays

to read the parenthesis, even if

they are open, like cummings and his
experiment: (a

                     le
                     af
                     fa

                     ll

                     s). 

They are keys, secrets, like a ciphered-wink

between two people, given

quickly, but measured, while everyone
else looks somewhere else: to book

to pages to what's left to take
in to spine, to the entire binding…

while the father in the water

while the wife, while the baby

while the criminal with the gun

                                                                   )

Confidentiality: of Dignity

pause

Confidentiality: on Dignity

We shed our shapes slowly like moving water,

which ends up as it will so utterly far from home.

                                                                Jim Harrison

First maybe our thoughts are about recovering

a little dignity, stripped as it is and in pieces

on the floor, thin as mica and glinting and we

see it only if the light’s been left on.  Brittle,

it has no give when we pinch it, it isn’t stretching

the way we need it to, and the most of it stuck

to our blood, blood we’ll wash off, blood of the first

time for some and blood of the umpteenth time

for the rest of us.  I’m here to tell you that

the first step toward water will be a painting

in our brain and we’ll see the color of a blue

bruise pushing through the skin of our small

arch, as if we’d stepped on the business end

of the three-pronged extension chord just pulled out

of the socket and left lazily waiting for any at all
connection, the distance short, the hand in another

world.  And all around us is the unrecoverable: the lace

drapes, the stem ends of the late geraniums,

the way the hall, just past the cracked open

door pulls the dark out with it but does not,

cannot, replace it with a light that hasn't risen.

Fleetingly Revealed

outside the legion:
american flag

Fleetingly Revealed

And we, spectators always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses.
We re-arrange it, and collapse ourselves.

                                                     Rilke
                                                     Duino Elegies 

Two, like they were the only

and owned if not the proverbial whole

world at least the spaces

they crouched in cupping the end of whatever it was

to get it to fire to let them draw

in the hot of it while their bags soaked

up the puddles of slush.  They were so close

to the road.  A woman in a pushed back red knit cap

and her dreads cascading down her open

puffy coat, her spiny throat and collar bone.  

It was probably, if even, upwards to thirty

degrees.  And a man, his back

to me, covering her hands

with his, her knees his knees brought up

to her cheeks in an intimacy I’d see

only later, right now in fact, her whole life

story brought to an almost halt just feet

from the three in the afternoon street these

two people reflected back to me

like they were each of these things: muddy
puddle and breaking sky and all the wind in it and fire

most of all fire, though if it were the sun

or the lighter I’m not sure

I’d be able at all to tell and if I could even

explain the difference.

Behind them, behind us all, there are trains,

rusting relics of another age.  And churches. 

Some old duffer’s huffing up the stairs

in his basement conversion.  What was once

a mill.  What once rose up hand-laid brick, now 

withered, her summer seeds still in the mortar.

And some judge is bringing down

his gavel in his last case of the day, and maybe

whoever they are will get out and look up or down

and see something they’ve never seen

before, all of them, or maybe they’ll crouch

on the edge of a busy street and try to get lit

like they were the only ones in the world

in this whole wide rising falling down world.

On Second Chances

beneath, a leaf
old mill door
greenville, nh

On Second Chances

You’re shivering, O my memory.

You went out early without a coat.

                                                                Charles Simic

                                                                The Immortal

I’m beginning to like you and because I didn’t

at first and that was long ago when I cut you

off I thought I’m older now I can give you

a second chance I mean it’s not like we know

each other it’s not

like you would have liked me even if we did but at first I was

reading you because you were the only one

there and I was unpacking everything I’d thought
I'd have you in the bag

to save and somehow I must’ve begun to relate to
the skinny spine selection I got
from a friend or a for a bargain

and I’ve looked at over the years

though like all second chances (and hear I want

to interrupt myself by saying baby if I’d let you

touch my neck with your finger and maybe move you
to open your mouth if I felt

the wet pressure of your teeth

beneath the place where it throbs the most when

I’m thrilled (which isn’t to say, don’t mistake

me, unafraid) I may be

a completely different woman today Jesus

where were you

when I needed you where was I god

damn it when I needed you? And what’s left

to be said of second second chances other than

some people bow their heads to them

like they’re lions come stalking in the tall grass
and some people

take them by the genitals like they’re

the future and begin pumping

the life out of them.

winter mittens

copper beech
in winter
greeley park
nashua, nh

winter mittens

How strange it all was . . . The world’s raffle

                                               

                                                                Charles Simic

                                                                Shelley

It’s enough seeing it as just

snow falling or fallen it’s enough

coming out to it on its own

terms with feet in shoes

who’ve seen this much snow

and mittens that in the end will

be wring-out wet and smelling

as I imagine sheep

might through nights and nights

of such another snow

that meeting like this is like

old friends in the end

zealously separated, shorn

to the floor in a lean-to and

heaved and gotten all the way

through to spun and maybe

hand-knit maybe machine

but who's caring drawing them on

before the door’s flung

before the handle of the shovel’s

taken up, before the back

and knees bend in

their monastic diligence: one

scoop: one scoop: one

scoop, the terms still

coming down from the sky

to settle it all as friends

as on still and huddled ewes

or their cast-off future

here in the palm (and more!)

of my hand.

consider it

hamilton house
south berwick,
maine

consider it

begins quicker than

lips and finger

or thumb tips

that it begins in the tilt

of your tongue as it

resists soon insists

is lifted threads

of a cello your head lists

into to when

the hum and buzz

are just begun under

the crust never having

been touched as your

nerve ever near

enough to the hip

the wrist of this musician

her three arms

two taut in the cost

one drawn on

and on the wind

that tips it have you

ever ever been stunned

by such an instant

quiver insistent ripple?

'O Taste and See': Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the ...

'O Taste and See': Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the ...: Maybe the problem is  that I got involved  with the wrong crowd  of  gods when I was seven…. …    It would have been an easier l...

Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of gods when I was seven….

Maybe the problem is 
that I got involved 
with the wrong crowd 
of gods when I was seven….

…  It would have been an easier life 
if I had allowed a ring in my nose, but so 
many years later I still find the spore 
of the gods here and there but never 
in the vicinity ...

                                                                                                Jim Harrison

                                                                                                The Quarter

as when you slid your window down slowing you
drove by in the snow and cold rain when you
saw me waiting for you. to ask, i thought, if i was fine.
and i made for the door but you said no seeing me
wet and slid the window up again and slipped away.

as when your head were where you kept

your soul like they do in Vietnam, knowing

when you pat it against the satin meninges and

your breathing you suppose you’re a child

of god, slowing and folding into a paper death.

as when while i’m soaking through in the

straight down rain you’ve arrived at a change

of that soul and you’ve arrived again to save me

and then change your mind again and drive

halfway home and i walk after  you

as when your soul floating in the current

furry is stunned and turned to a small bird

that's cuffed again and again against the glass
and falls finally spent to the car floor since you’re
still driving and you don’t know how (as

when you believe you’ve seen this before)

when I arrive at your calamity and pry

your door and pull you out bloody

and breathe on you and try to save your soul
but it wouldn't give me currency

and when you floated entirely away you floated
beside me and inside me like a mother dying
a mother perceiving relief at leaving
and maybe guilt but mostly relief at being
held so tenderly after all this time
of waiting for such a gift to arrive.

*title inspired by a direct line
from Jim Harrison’s “The Quarter”

intimacy

intimacy

one:

which do you touch first

to the rim

dialect or lip?  do you

close your eyes?

does it matter

what is in the glass?

or its heat?  do you

cup it all

in the bowl you’ve

made of your tongue

and let it rest

in brief aroused restraint

before it is allowed

down and down

into your dark?

Detritus: Pink Plastic Pony With the Wispy Blond Mane

roof/
lines

Detritus: Pink Plastic Pony With the Wispy Blond Mane

Finding it
I imagine it to have

fallen or been felled

out or from the car window

a window half way

up or down depending

on who you are

and the child
and her horse were

galloping next to the edge

of a fence on the edge

of a ledge on the edge

of the rounded
glass and took

the turn too tight

and spilled and spilled

and spilled first

slipping dumbly past

the thumb that held the flanks

or the bum depending
on who you are

the wind is what they both

loved the most

how when the car was

going full speed there

was something soft

to push into and they’d

both agreed the girl

and her horse

that the haunch

was the most secure

place to ride

a thumb

on one side a finger

on the other it was

the only thing

she ever did right-

handed her brother

sat on the driver’s side

and he played

a different game

and it required batteries

and made him distant

and frustrated but today

something startled her

and she let go

she fell

off she was caught

completely

off guard—

rain in her
face
a splinter of wind

and rain and one split

of thunder

came from the mouth

and hips
she did her best
not to think

of the babysitter

and then what was left
afterwards

of the blast of rain

and wind and lightning

sizzling up while

they blazed through

and took the corner

too tight and she was

sliding and her brother

cried and by the time

he was dry eyed she

recognized her hand

was bare from here

on out and it was

gone and in her crotch

was cotton

what mopped up

sorrow and she soaked

it and fogged up

the glass

of the rolled up window

and wrote a name

though no one knew

what it was and she asked

for the window to be closed

from then on and the huff

of her breath on a sunny day

could still be

visible especially when

the sun dosed behind
the car roof

and made her briefly

and momentarily

and mane-ly

free in the dark.

Your Ashes and Frank O'Hara

at sunset
Mullholland Light
Campobello 

Your Ashes and Frank O’Hara

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

                                                                                Frank O’Hara

                                                                                Having a Coke With You

                                                               

I’ve taken you down – I’d suffer if I lost you I hate losing

                you you’re always

                behind me I should put you behind

someplace else away you have no place but you do

                here and you after willing me

                exactly this (on other days it would’ve been

someone else today the Selected of Frank

                O’Hara who knew you or seemed to

                and any other time before I knew you I would’ve

listened less but I touched it right off

                like you handed it to me

                directly from your own

hand it was right beside the box

                I keep you in handcarved a mala box with OM

                on the lid some of you at least a pinch

or two in a zip bag before the rest

                of you went into the wind – here before

                I foget to let me say I know nothing

about Frank       

                O’Hara.  I’ve touched him less than I touched you

                and that wasn’t much and less at the end

of your life when your blood was shooting

                through your nose and urethra

                I never saw you again not after

your loneliest out and out drying days again soberly

                aging a breathlessly scaled labor.

The fingertips, when drawn to house a wren, are rib-bones, are bars

The fingertips, when drawn to house a wren, are rib-bones, are bars

Take nature first.  The word nature is from Latin natura, “birth,

constitution, character, course of things”—ultimately from

nasci, to be born.  So we have nation, natal, native, pregnant.

                Gary Snyder                                      

“The Words Nature, Wild, and Wilderness”

Maybe the agreement has nothing to do with flesh

and blood and all the concoctions that come

to the celebration of something fresh being made.

Maybe the agreement keeps mouthing the words

that ears and noses don’t know a thing about nor listening

nor sniffing so when the wind picks up everyone’s off guard.

Maybe the agreement was struck so long ago in deep time

before there were bones to be folded into skin before

there were feathery things and scaly things in air or sea.

Maybe the agreement is only recalled when prone, when

it all comes down to we need or have to and then whichever comes
first: to relax into this wind or this ice.  And there it is and take it

like the agreement our people, though never present for,

felt passed down to them like a reading of the will,

a legacy one can never refuse or run from there being such

A thing as gravity though like the agreement that has let the rules
be, if not changed, at least stretched, there being some distance 

between the first draw and the last, the carrying it home straw.

Getting Vintage

Getting Vintage

It’s all alchemy, isn’t it, trussed

like oven birds to be delivered

into the kiln the crucible the still

whatever hot oven will bake or

boil or steam everything we ever

                                                taste/see

                                                sniff/listen

forgetting something?  

the bake of it with herbes de Provence

mash of it with sugar until

the steam through the copper

tubing converts it into a few

of booze for special use only

please ink the green

bottle, keep it out

of the sun
light, let the basement

spiders                 step/lift

                                step/lift

all their eight leg tips along

the hips of this or that glass

body while we wait on our own

making, while our days

take us through our noons through our

dreaming and all that goes

nights to steam through that tubing

remember all that

tubing
to be reduced      drop/

                      drop

                                                drop/

                                       drop

raw into the honest sepulcher –
be --

and this is of the utmost

cruciality:
– be

a god paused a quiet god paused

while the drops drop

or better be

                                                brass/glass

                                                 cask/glass

and suffer

suffer the fill to the fill line

suffer the gag plunge cork bung

suffer above all that shelf of dark

suffer waiting

suffer waiting – making

what you made

                                vintage with a year

                                every auctioneer will breathe under

                                their breath, like mystery

                                like you, barely

                                                                (but for the brave few)

                                exhumed, slip easy as grease

                                between the fingers of the flummoxed butler

                                all of you shards and self

                                all of you splashed and spattered

                                                while the cork in the neck is still wet

                                                and unslipped.                  

λόγος – word

λόγος – word

One of life’s quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.

                               

                                                      Norman Maclean

                                                      A River Runs Through It

Telling true stories is different

than telling stories that are true:

regarding a found grain of rice

I say: I want to live

in a house where every fork

is used the night before

and in putting them away

washed of mouth and speck

and meat and cling

of water and still: one small

crumb of rice I missed

how it went through its entire

wash to get to this and sits

between two tines of a four

tine fork and just is – it doesn’t do

anything but wait

it doesn’t do anything

but sit

its suffered rise up the beating

glean free from its stalk

of grass and the cede

of all its water to now

come to this: the steam being

the one thing redeeming

that stalk from that husk

from just enough water

to be eaten or to be flicked

to the heap of bones

friend if this came down to you

what would you do

reading e. e.

reading e. e.

if sometimes in its box of

sky lavender and cornerless, the

moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

                                                               

                                                e. e.

                                                cummings

when it’s all in boxes and you’re as slim

as e. e.

cummings and his

hundred.  On the cover Marianne

                Moor admires: “E. E. Cummings

                is a

                concentrate

                of titanic

                experience.”         The desk is under her own protection

a sheath

of dust and I’m coming round

to Brownsville in the memoir

I’m reading about Boy Kings

getting through Texas

and Mexico and

Brownsville

where my cousin Dennis was

beaten to death some eight or so 

years

ago. Dope

they said it like it was

his cause and fault.  He was gentle.  Nice

to my mother.  She loved him.  Every

one

did.  Cummings did.  Or would

‘ve if I can

say it like he would

‘ve.  : randomly flipping

through this one book I left

out for no good reason but

I’m glad:

                                what if a much of a which is a wind

                                gives the truth to summer’s lie

the first lines of 75.  Winter. 

No lie.  Her wind: still

no lie.  How about the second

stanza:                  What if a keen of a lean wind flays          

                !!!

                                !

His what if is re-

                solved is 

                ‘nt it? : all nothing’s only our hugest home,

                                the most who die;the more we live

Dennis face

down in a brown river

his credit

card still

in his coat

or jeansfront some pocket

but I don’t know which

I couldn't

ask…

consider

consider:

It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.

                                                Norman Maclean

                                                A River Runs Through It

if it’s this: jack trout won’t to be shamed

by someone who isn’t fly, they know, some-

how, the bait, the line, the way the light

of the silk of it is astride the bright

rise of sky summoned up from the river

bottom that no one will be to blame if

the contest is decided, is tied, is

riding the current, the hip of the fisher,

each on their respective way over stones,

on and on nonstop on and on toward home

Assuming God

beauty            . how

often have religions taken

thee on their scraggy knees

squeezing...

                           e. e. cummings

Assuming God

had a sense

of smell what smell

was her first

smell? And assuming

God had a sense

of taste what taste

was her first

taste?  And

assuming God

had a sense

of touch what was

the first touch

to be touched?

And Listen—assume

God has heard

it all

and the last of it

was suffering?

And See—assume

God saw

it all

and the last of it

was watching

God, the great

sky eye-

ball unlidded,

lidded,

unlidded, lidded

lidding, lidding

like fogs flowing

over coves

over faces over floating

boots

of minor moons

reflecting

and all 

the unavailable

stars invisible

to the stark

carnal bodies

come to light

for Diane...

for Diane…

They look out sideways from under their brows which are

their only shelter.

                                                Rain

                                                Ted Hughes

You’d come back for two months

though at the time it was just a day

or two to get on your feet, try

on the clothes of sobriety, the loose

or too tight coat depending

on the weather.  You’d spent

your whole life out

into it, clouds making every day

shapes for you, every day a something
to live

in.  And like every farmer

or vet or straight up savior, you did

well enough in the sun and mud

and drove the fence posts

of your boundary lines in regardless

of the sky water or sky dry

or whatever kind of sky fall-

out.  Best maybe I’d say

and the others would too, you were

at your best at rescue, the long

haul across the water to some pitched

belly-keel.  They’d fallen under, fallen

through, poor bastards, and wasn’t

your boat and crew really meant for God-

given wings at every single

success?  Why is it, tell me (though

you can’t now can you) because you know

better now seeing

you loosed of your own flesh and self

when you are the one under

the roll-over, the squall, and ever

trawling wind beating you down

to the deck and the boom let go, why,

when that wind is lost of all her traces snaking

above your skull, why is it the radio’s

out and the men

are on break or more likely to true, you

glued your mouth top to bottom

mum and slipped and stood and took it

man to man with yourself

and your shadows?  Those lovers

and sons, that mother, who would

find you flattened on your rock

bottom and empty

on the aft deck and not a breath

of wind left

in you but the vessel, still

sound?  Typical of you, right?  You brought it

at last to shore, not taking on

a drop of water, almost as new

as when it was lifted by the first tide

except, and no one could see this but

from below, the one

unrepairable hurt, struck

years ago by the looks, and stuffed

(how was it you kept

                afloat?) with all the cast-offs

of your living:  baby’s first

tooth, a gnawed dog

bone, a diploma, a wedding

ring, a commendation, your father's death
certificate, a photo or two.  And mostly, though gone

to ground glass and powder, so I’ll only say

on hearsay: fifth after fifth, your mortar,

ground down till it’s finally fine

and dry, and when the bung’s

pulled, light as pixie, it makes

everyone standing beneath it

sneeze, squeeze their eyes

tight against the glitter

and gleam, inevitably blinking in

some that will never now be shut out,

the eye a shape-made and cultivated oyster now

and the lid it, the shell and the grit,
the grit, just this instant settling in
with the salt, the mucous, finding harbour
under the tongue.