Last Unfinished Poem of the Year

Mending Wall
Set by Robert Frost
Derry, New Hampshire

Last Unfinished Poem of the Year

Under Some Tufts, the Substance of the Wall

…And the stone,

Reaching to touch  your hand, found you real

and warm, and lucent, like that earlier one.

And maybe a ghost, trying to hear your words,

Peered from the broken mullions

And was stilled.

                                                Wuthering Heights

                                                Ted Hughes

Maybe that’s what a stone wants of us after all, to

reach up to us like a mother or a lover and touch us

with as much love as it can muster, but because it is

stone it can only ever be a grievance or injury

or piece of wall, and gate-keepers all it suffers its gone-

solid silence .  Once, in the belly of the world, it was,

they were, liquid, inside it all, chuffed from molten

bone to molten bone and into the mouth and cheek

and laid bare there waiting against complacency.

In a dream they knew what they would be-

come: after the back-turning rejection of the hard

glittering lard, men would spend their entire

fortunes digging out to bruise and melt, to lighten

up the world to cough and die in when the smoke took

hold, as inevitably it will, to lift, the first Lazarus.  Listen:
how hot does it have to be to melt a rock, just any rock (ok,

yes, malleability varies by degrees, but…) see: some
never suffer themselves to come to liquid and they’ll go straight by

the way to ash…what had it, charged as it were to be,

and then, like all those other gods, gone off

to want, to eye blink agog at the first dawn of her,

waiting to be made into, what, a cloud?  Her you say?  Her?

Earth?  All of her now suffered under the palm

of someone’s hand?  Come to this: when Sylvia

set her hand down on the rock walls all three Bronte

women immortalized all that time ago high up the shires

in their York and Devon, there was a wind a bare bald
wind blown over the moors, and she was enough of a ghost

to know women like her would arrive to make the world

shake and tremble and rake the earth into veil

and velvet and scrape the glacial peak, reach to

the top of the heap, and have to rave and be brave enough

to never touch, cheek or teeth, even (and I’ve known

this, I’ve done this with stone against my own flesh

and bone) when against the heated meat, soft and sucked,

there’s some heat, some, if small enough itself,

to be (heaven is where we begin the believers tell me)

aren’t you with me in this, brought in out of the cold

and nursed back, blood wave after blood wave, to receiving

over our heads, under our feet, kin.  Simply kin.

High Point in Fog
West Quoddy Head

The Origin of the World

The Origin of the World

after Courbet’s L’origine du mond

You’ve never

done something so simple, so obvious,

                                                                Philip Levine

                                                                “What Works”

the beauty is that it is

supposed supposed! to be

burned.  imagine a lodge pole

pine cone so tight only fire

will try the edges will pry

with the opposites of ice

(and by now the hem end’s

down by now there’s fray

and chafing)

but a pry like I’ve

never seen -- a fire so alive

it is more

than eyes it is more

than tongue though

you’re right yes it starts

there as a curl a shy first

turn of the dervish before God

takes hold and blows

and blows and settles curl

deep into the canopy

to wake the future to make

the future drop

to the mesa’s table to the waist

to the skirts (they’re open!

don’t be scandalized!) we’ve

all seen L’Origine

du mond or at least heard

the news dresses

to be spread so the cracking

letting loose

can be done with a sigh only

the desperately pent up

could recognize come alive

fall into the dying

roots of the pine and like

the smile I mean really

like the smile of the parting

pond taking the rock after it

has gone through

with almost no hoorah

cutting the water

in a throaty cheeks drawn

breath drawn cshhug!

the ripples drenched in

cinders drenched red wet

Low Tide

sunrise

mulholland light

Low Tide

On Winslow Homer’s Fisher Girl, 1894

Watching her watching, doesn’t she seem to see more than the sea,

Casting off beneath the fog where all the underwater aliveness goes  

About on it's own living without needing her  –  doesn’t it really seem

Like this?  And too, what mother’s do, who bring in their daughters

And sons back from the rocks before the clouds really settle in

For good, before the rain that’s being forecast in the gray that's

Being leeched from tiny tide pools teeming with new minnows

And some, bless her, blood of the middle daughter’s thumb

Where the crab pinched and drew?  I could look at Winslow Homer’s

Fisher Girl for the rest of my life and want her to be my mother.

Steady nets and shells, a good set of reliable floats.  She’s watching.

She’s letting go, sure, but she’s watching.  And she'll expect me

To come back to shore, she'll want me to.  And with a mother

Like her, I’d want to do just that.  After the storm passes.  After

The kelp beds settle, and the algae, and there’s a momentary calm.

Sorting Shells on Sanibel

leisure:
basking in mist in front of the Trescott smokeshed...

Sorting Shells on Sanibel

for Elizabeth L.

Once, sorting

shells on Sanibel Island, my friend

directed me to what she had kept: bushels and bushels

of lightning

whelks and rooster conchs, all

of what she'd plucked from the warm water

following the hurricanes.  She tasked me:  I was used

to the dried brine by then:

pickled- a poor man’s

escargot

the muscle of  

the salted dead.

And that one day I remember tipping

one basket over and as soon

as they spilled

over the sunhot, frayed blue tarp,

the roaches                 rushed             and rushed                  and rushed

they

rushed

rushed and rushed. 

As quick as that, lizards

flew! (I’m from Maine, and we just don’t see this!)

So! Yes,

And so invisible, watching me, waiting on

me, from the palmetto palms they feasted!

and seemed to swoop,

to swarm, to scoop them up.

And that was that.  My goodness,

all those suddenly gone lozenges,

those "hermit" roaches loosing

their second carapaces.  It was incredible. 

seeing

Seeing

This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.

How the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation.

                                                                Berk-Plage

                                                                Sylvia Plath

Have you ever forgot to blink?

For the stretched extensions

your eyes see out, all the while

drying quietly, while stem-

cell visor/wipers are
narrating lies under the lid,

while they swipe over the ball.

And all is falling

to dust.  The salt and parched

iris are changing to

crust underneath

the almost all-seeing.  So

it’s down to this: the little red

veins have been given

their resurrection: they

alone make the break

and take off across

the scrubbed sclera,

blunted by the iris, shy

of the deep hole

of the pupil, the body’s

first crevasse.  At least

I’ve heard it said that

light comes in and is

sucked down, is gulped,

thirsted for, so the blur

is the straight up choke

of it, the ‘go

slow companion, go

slow’ press of the hand

on the wrist, giving

ease, giving permission 

though for what

varies from eye to eye

throat hole to throat

hole, closing (though

let me tell you

it’s never enough,

the thirst itself is the verge)

and blinking

has become

a step made heavier

and heavier, made

delinquent, a risk, tearing

If the Wolf If the Gunman

If the Wolf  If the Gunman

He lay down.

His machinery adjusted itself

And his blood escaped, without loyalty.

                                                                Orf

                                                                Ted Hughes

Because reasons are sometimes given

first and not last, the judgement

comes when you step in late

when the dressing’s already stuck

to the cut, and the blood’s slowed

in agreement to everything, finally,

given to save this time a limb, or let,

finally, a tired, broken life.  I’ve seen

you go into a blind hysteric, convert

the alchemical calm of the room into

lead, so the sick have to give over

to you.  It needn’t have been blown so.

Like coming up on the remains

of the lamb he had to shoot, it

being too consumed with disease

to save.  It was the peaceful

thing to do.  The right thing to do.

But you, all you see is the downed

and the dead.  Did you come running

after the shot spread out its signature

pop, higher than deeper than

the lamb you were content until then

to snub?  How many months

did the poor thing bleed

while you skipped by, alive?  Never

once did you tend the mouth

or hoof, never once did you

listen to the cough and the closing

throat.  Who are you

I want to know, standing now over

this corpse and going into your own

flesh of milk?  I want to scoop the free

  

creature up and hold it away

from you so that its last dignities

aren’t stolen in your Christless

wailing.  I want it to take to its own

heaven, to carry its own soul

back into the fold and curl

into the hip of the ewe who

delivered it, who knew it before

you came along, before you

stepped into the rain intending

to save you say, save something

of yourself more, never ever

looking, I was there.  I know. 

And the weight of the gun

was like the weight of his gun.

On me.  In me.  Even after

I set it down between you

and me and the creature, bleeding

but free.