(

(

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?