Just Enough

Harbour: Gloucester Fisherman

Just Enough

How far is it?

How far is it now?

                               

                                Sylvia Plath

                                Getting There

Salt.  Before I even attempt

to walk out on you I’ll lay you

out, spread you like a samurai or

lift you, a sumo, whose great fat

fingers let it sieve to

through their skies, who lift

it, thin crystal, into

the air to esteem the gods

before they set out to smash

be smashed, a flab of

flesh against a flab of flesh,

sex for a second,

hearts to hearts inside

those passionately padded

bones, behind the first audible

groans where all

is still all

is yet caught

on the rock

shelves of whatever all

gravity plunders, suffering

the crack to be prised

(but blessed all the same

melting loss into rock holy

brine, just enough, my friend,

just enough

to rise up and die.

Old Wooden Matches

Old Wooden Matches

Now you have to push it all –

Just as you loved to push the piled live hedge-boughs –

Into a gathering blaze

And as you loved to linger late into the twilight,

Coaxing the last knuckle embers,

Now you have to stay

Right on, into total darkness

                                                Now you have to push

                                                Ted Hughes

Fire hides inside the cap

of a match

stick, bides its time for

the glidestrike or

quickflitstrike

against the thin clapper

all boxes

of matches are packaged

with.  It must’ve been

on that shelf a hundred hundred

weeks, and I’ve lately
come to

the custom of Bics or Zippos, my thumb

                (numb still

                a year on shutting it in

                the car door – I’d wanted

                to see that weeping beech

                beneath the new snow . . .

thumb I run down

the teeny rigid wheel

to wake up the flint
and fuel

to pull the nigh dry wad

of cotton off to light the tongue . . .

We say: we’ve come all this way

holy ghosts.  Yesterday, in the rain

I made pictures of the face

of a saint and the lines

like trenches from his eyes, his cheeks,

a contrail streak on a bleak bleak day.

We say: ok ok the stone mason maybe

had great faith

or faith enough that even

a rough cut of a sinner could

walk up and watch the water

fall down marble

and cough his own intention out of

a lung going to smoke

in that very moment, having been lit,

a candle all his life.

There’s really little left, enough

perhaps that happening

to turn on his good hip

the sinner doesn’t tip and can still give

a nonchalant toss in the hardening water:

he makes it seem easy,

the slip into his pants pocket

for a row of wooden soldiers,

matches, on second inspection,
in zipped plastic,

and makes them lay precisely 

where the plinth meet the walking stick and toe

of the monument, all of them and each

(seeing beneath the lit lens on his workbench)

men he’s known, their names, and with the tip

of a hot pin, a profile 

of their face.

On Missing It, The Eclipse That Is, Bloody as it Was and Awfully Full

On Missing It, The Eclipse That Is, Bloody as it Was and Awfully Full

Say something warm.  Hello.  The world

was full of harm until this wind

placated grass and put the fish to rest.

                                                                High Grass Prairie 

                                                                Richard Hugo

Blood, you moved over us cooing, cooling

close and though we didn’t notice you we couldn’t

not know you were pouring out

over us head and toe and torso, and most of all

those moments you’d go colder into cold

owning your bold shadow, your own globe while we

closed over your face, slow, slow how

going for a blow by blow of only the cheekbone

and chin bone and bone above the brow, and too

the body and all our limbs we try to let off 

the hook on earth below, decreasing sleep, our only

practice at being dead, sleeping instead 

with the steady temperance, the congestive spin, 

and the going round after round before the bell, never 

a moment in the corner (ex-

cept for those in your brief completed umbra

when others look full on or full off) we who believe 

we’ve seen it all or at least enough to bow off 

and back away like everyone in the presence of the queen

whose gaze never strays (though tell me how

would we know) from the tops

of our head to the tips of our feet, stained

ever stained in the blood and black of the rare event

and honestly no amount of bleach,

plunged like tea steeping, is necessary or even 

needed.  Right?  We can keep our wounding?  Tell me, even though

I missed the actual seeing, I’m still (no need, please,

true?) eased, my sleeve wicking up your bleeding.

The Bee Keeper

The Bee Keeper

So intimate in there, . . .

                                                a listening post

Open to the light, to the limen world

Of soul on its lonely path. . .

Shining in silence, the fretful part of me

So steadied by their cogged and bolted stillness

I felt like one come out of an upper room

To fret no more and walk abroad confirmed.

                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                On His Work in the English Tongue

Maybe winter is the best time for beekeepers

to sleep eternally.  Their charges are naïve and quiet,
alive but just, stuck to the jellied honey they’d played

almost their entire lives out to make.  Over the cold

bee-box lid the brick sticks mute, the bulge

of deepening freezes and raucous thaws

coming up in ripples of warped wood and chips,

great lengths some, maybe of green,

maybe of red, to tell them apart at her going blind

distance.  They’ll wait, those bees in their boxes,

at the edge of the field as it cuts off and goes

into the woods, trees and bees intimate

with, I can just see it, each other, the buzz of stopping

off, coughing almost on a cache of pollen

after some sudden summer wind or rain blows

through.  And the leaves or the spruce needles keep

them the way a fairy godmother keeps her children:

under the bones of her wanded finger and thumb, or even

that angel in the painting I watched while I grew

up under my mother's buzzing dark, that drawing of a brother

and sister walking across a broken bridge

while the water foams and spits and hurls a few

feet under below them.  Somehow we all make it,

at least part of the way.  We suit up or don’t

for disaster or even just cautious care and walk

to the humming hive to lift the lid to see

all the Queen’s daughters suffer and fuss

and strut their lives in the golden ooze. 

Come spring I bet they’ll swarm, they’ll have to,

their keeper being dead and gone.  And the six

young deer who yesterday broke the ice

atop the grass these few mornings after he passed

will too be gone, lambing some, running some, and

among it all, the bulbous glob of bees,

dripping like a wet, just cut tulip procured

in the rain to save it, save it

wilting without so much as a by-your-leave

or please, please, before they scrum, caution: 

we’ve waited, we have and say, can you ever 

tell us when the master will come

she in her white gauze and smoke?