You’ll Notice

Odd Fellows Hall
Nashua, New Hampshire

You’ll Notice

Blue was your kindly spirit—not a ghoul

But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful.

…

You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness.

But the jewel you lost was blue.

                                                                Ted Hughes

                                                                Red

I know the snow on the lip of the brick

on each I.O.O.F seven stories up

is clung to in every crack, is stacked

and will melt back to water

when the warm rain’s finally come.  How

tropical almost, 48+

degrees in the middle of January,

and one continuous persistent breeze

being fingered below by the leafless

street trees.  (in another poem i want to
say how street trees are different
from park trees and park trees are

different from yard trees and yard
trees are different from woods...)
Don’t you want to be above 

ground and beneath such rain,

head bare, chin up

to it all, open your mouth, the offering

so small but soft as that
almost spring

rain?  You're waiting for it,
I can tell.  I’m sending you out.  Go

coatless.  Last week’s blizzard,

(actually, it was only four days ago)

is almost melted off.  I can tell that
too, although it’s still dark.  The rain sounds

edgy, like last year’s

weasel teeth, struck to on all the attic wires,

squeezing and grating against everything
that's insulated above my head: soon the copper’s

in the raw, soon the hiss might not be

rain but the ecstatic beginnings

of a flame, a small glossa crawling out

on the beam where the house

is giving its ribs to be roof and hood
beneath the nearly new shingles.  Flick

a switch, if you're keen on seeing
magic that's vermin leaving nothing
but scat.  But ignore it.  Ignore the
funk.  Ignore the dust you'll cough

out of your lungs.  Stand still. Unless it’s slick,
which this brilliant wind and warm
make claims for, stand still.   

Just days ago it was nearly 15 below

zero.  Take it.  Take it I tell you, under
the sod, or onto the water still
reluctant to give in to February.  Soon ice will be
pushed up the bank and break open

the way skin does when it's too tight
and dry, too tired even to cry...but leaving
that hood, that lip of itself open
for a weasel, for an eagle, for a small

beak of a young goose to reach
into and pull a tuft of something,
who knows what all, into its mouth
hold it while it goes warm, hold it

like alphabets in brick holding snow,
holding their own Odd, century-old own.

Broke Open

Shooting to Kill

rail/porthole
sparkplug
lubec channel

Shooting to Kill

So to Speak:

Walker Evans

(found poem)

I do regard photography

as an extremely difficult act

I believe the achievement of a work

that is is evocative and mysterious

and at the same time

realistic is a great one and rare one

and perhaps sometimes

almost an accident.

It’s akin to hunting,

photography is, in the same way

you’re using a machine

you’re actually shooting something

and you’re shooting to kill

you get the picture you want

that’s a kill

that’s a bullseye

Weather Report

weather report

Nature is what We Know –

Yet have no Art to say –

So impotent Our Wisdom is

To Her Sincerity –

                                Emily Dickinson

I’ll get to thinking in the morning

and it’s just clatter, like a small screw going

loose but not too, and the machine is held

and holding on but just.  And I know if I’m going

to be any good, if good is a word I can call

the frictioned grease I am, I need to shut something

down, I need to drop something and turn

my back after I’ve given a little twist

to what’s coming undone, even knowing

it’s stripped even knowing nothing’s going

to last with it, that eventually it will come to

falling down and even salvage even grief

wouldn’t be worth the rest that comes from

abandoning it to its own.

What?  What say?  Plain then be plain for God’s

sake.  And I’ll say, I’ll say: the rain

is falling off the roof today except it’s not

rain it is instead it is what’s coming to soft

how the warm palm of the weather is resting

against it and bringing a calm bringing

a relief in some way bringing simply by it

being and falling drop drop falling like morning

thoughts so cold so long going froze

and now letting go letting to

the edge letting there’s little choice now

or none, go.

'O Taste and See': Votives:

'O Taste and See': Votives:: Votives: Those Candle Stubs Burned for Our 1 st Anniversary Now they're fat wax stubs three fingers high; an unsus...

Votives:

Votives:

Those Candle Stubs

Burned for Our 1^st Anniversary

Now they're fat wax stubs three fingers high; an unsustainable

                breath smothering the thin wicks weak as children’s snowmen  

                sticks in winter, little limbs splintered from the sugar
                maples, fingers broke off in the last wind's-up aha.

Or now, the gone fallow fatty suet-to-tallow-to-suet unsalvageable,

                especially to finches and jays, crumbs stuck in the bent  

    wire trap outside the door, made of the rent come-to-shore

    bare-from-the-storm lobster pot, combed, now cut,

now bent to this new will, and hanged.  I’ve given up, unsated,

                trying to dig it out of itself, the wick, that is, fixed

                between anniversary revivals to light it, forgetting the

                last teeny bead of flame sucking for substance, suffocated

now on oxygen.  The black tips keep lapsing, a miosis-of-the

                the light, like owls in the bright day, how I've seen the way

                they tuck their faces away in the trees

                beneath the paused, speed-preened wings  Not unknowingly,

now I go out holding both votives that have come under

                the fire of their own temper (I’ve held them long enough

                I suppose) exposing, unlit of course, their only scopes of knowing

                their way home when day turns her shoulder over, back-to,

then shudders when the wind picks up, and blames, understandably,

                the extinguishing (even if it happened twenty

                or so years ago) on the wind itself, not the maker, not
                the giver.  I’ve kept them though, like sinner's petitions given

now to minor saints, those griefs at a grave and flame's somehow, unbelievably,

                deliberating its way from match to fuel.  Enough wax.
                Enough wick.  And on a rock as small as this, they are two eyes.
                They are the size of liberty coins. Again, I try lighting them.