Tell Me

 

Tell Me

 

It’s an awkward truth that I cannot help observing

and noticing things even in the most terrible moments.

                        Yiyun Li

                        Things in Nature Merely Grow

 

At what moment does the river give over

to the cold, and at what moment does it lift

its rhythm to the wind waving over it

& surrender, & in surrendering offer drops

 

of itself as sacrifice, & what drops volunteer

or what drops are drafted to the task of becoming

made invisible by light & by

that same light & after a certain encampment

 

fall again but different entirely, irrevocably

changed, or not at all, because how can it be, the same

water after all it’s literally been through and told to do.

At what moment, because rivers are memory,

 

does the body of it, remembering, say not now,

not this time, & pause to get hold of itself, to get

solid the way all bodies get solid from the very

start, a splitting but not a splitting, of its cell-f,

 

a selvedge edge now, at that moment, becoming ice

that rimes the banks with the seasons in its surface,

the banks and bottom a hollow consolation for August,

when the mud was caked & shattered & the rain,

 

when it finally fell, rose straight up again, the way

any inflated thing would do, bouncing on the hard

unyielding shell of the groundit sped to, on the pottery

shard, on the shell of the just hatched snapping turtle 

 

camouflaged…

How Illuminate, Uncovering You

 

How Illuminate, Uncovering You  

 

 All love abhors habit.

                    Christian Wiman

                    My Bright Abyss: 

                                    Meditation of a Modern Believer

 

How today’s sun rises on yesterday’s labor,

how the now dug out stump slumps on the lip

of the incision I made into the crab

grass sod.  & then there’s the one that wouldn’t

budge, rebellious-wedged.  How more & more it is

being made naked again

 

plunge shovel plnge shovel grunt shovel

 

how once there must have been a structure:

a house or barn, something.  How what I’m hauling

up is just the broke stone.  Oh but yesterday, how

a splinter, a sliver of window glass, somewhere near

that cemented dead elm.  Once

an elm

                        plunge shovel plunge shovel grunt shovel

 

always?  How Gerry dug into the buried bark, or tried

to.  How it was hard hard hard.  How it was hard as Egypitan

brickwork.  How the spade blade made a great thwang

and how later I’d remember I saw sparks speak. . .  

how the teeth were meeting iron. How one nail, stoppered

all these years

 

                        plunge hammer plunge shove grunt shovel

 

and met, well, tooth and nail.  How it was the fleetingist

of lights.  Tinder’s friction, tipped. How it resembled the lightning

bugs up near the gone-by mountain

laurel, those now spent flowers a still branch-gripped bouquet

in the slight alcove of the oak it was

cultivated in. 

 

                        plunge shovel plunge shovel grunt shovel

 

 

 

 

 

 

How I saw them in their linen-like winding sheet,

their rag & bone man hold, their fisted grip that will get them

through to near a year from now, the shoulders

of those oaks holding the snow,

their growth, seed & leaf, wind pillaged,

crow stole, and all those suns long ago shone,

 

                        plunge come up! plunge shovel grunt shovel

 

& that open hole, half an acre or so over

there, how it is exhumed again to its cellared parapets,

the light of day once more being squeezed

between pieces of granite that for the last hundred

fifty years, tally the elm rings, how they have hunkered

 

demolished long before I was born and worn,

dumped into its own cellar hole,  

 

shovel shovel shovel  of soil,

 

how with squirrel buried acorns championing

the purposely planted elm.  Mute. Rising blind into light.