Thought

Sunrise: Fog: Bald Eagle
South Lubec, Maine

 Thought

If the gods bring you

a strange and frightening creature,

accept the gift

                                                                Each Moment a White Bull Steps

                                                                Shining into the World

                                                                Jane Hirshfield

But then, if we understood

or tired to or even wanted

to, the birds that

our thoughts are, how often

unlike a pile-driver, or should

be, how flight

is what they require

to live, to flit

from post to post, even

the top, capped to keep the gulls

from resting their bum,

or the crows, harassing

the nesting hawks, the eagles… still,

to see that fledgling sit

facing the sun all day

(and not far away those

crows, squawking their cacophony

of angsted delight), from far

he (she?) seemed to me

a spruce branch rooted,

posted guard,

while there’s herring

while there are humpbacks

while his (her?) mum

hovers over then clutches
her own: a birch

for her, not far but down

the road, and too a hooded gaze,
her brain taking it all,

everything in. 

And it is that eagles take it,

or hummingbirds, their long

proboscis almost seeming

to ravage 

the blossom if wasn't for
the blossom 

opening for it,
welcoming to make

more and more

nectar, not regretting

herself when she lost, slowly

if the weather’s good, all

desirability (but they’ll be
beetles wings later, right,
when she droops

too low on her stalk,
to caress her  

to anything limply needed). 

I haven’t gone

far, have I?  I thought

maybe to get, at least,

to the end

of the lane before the bird
fledged, I wanted

to be able to stand

beneath the tree, to be

standing beneath all that

waiting, all that serenity…

but the limb was abandoned,
forsaken

when I finally made it

and even a feather, after all  

that grooming, drifted too far

away to be enamored with
and cherished: the tall
cordgrass, toward the saltmarsh,

or and I just noticed,
I'd missed it all this time
sitting there,

the snowshoe hare—I thought:
how had it lived, hidden
in the rugosa

outwitting four
eagles, 

all these weeks?

In His Studio

Mount Ascutney,
Vermont

 
 In His Studio

Every quick feather asserts a just claim;

it bites like a saw into white pine.

I communicate right; . . .

well, Right has a long and intricate name.

And the saying of it is a lonely thing.

                                                                William Stafford

                                                                Lit Instructor

Even the dust of it seems too much

cleaned away to take a chance

imagining it as a space

where blocks of clay

and shaping tools

scraped away and made

in stage after stage

after stage the greatest

men and women in his mind

at the time.  They played

with his hair sometimes, the way

a river wind might

when he took to looking

toward Ascutney and Vermont or

tools thrown down in a plume

of dirt rising, the very one

I’m missing, walk down

to the Connecticut River

ti throw stone and stone

and stone into the sinew

of the water.  I wonder

if he liked looking

at the way it would open

itself to anything arriving,

the way it pulls it all eventually

down.  (the great winters had to

crack sometime, didn’t they?)

And maybe it was

that coming down to

the water was enough

to plumb the reach of the nostrils

of Shaw’s stallion’s flare, and lip

and severe wild fear

in his eyeballs and with Shaw

so passive (but don’t we

if we’ve known war, know nothing’s

passive, that maybe, if Saint-Gaudens

was today a neuro surgeon

he’d see the deep time

of the brain, how much like clay

the surface seems, until

the probe in where there’s some

natural curve and it yields and comes

to brilliance.  What we see is

what’s left behind and afterwards:

the studio propped with broke

(as though found in a local dig,

a Saint-Gaudens pit

for all his refusals) and drawings

we can’t get close to

and walking in and out

of his studio where some of it was

drawn and erected, where Diana

pulls back her stringless bow

(she’s notched the arrow though

goddess that she is, on nothing

but intention) where busts

of children and women and one

Jesus tucked up in a corner

are what we get when the dust

is enough out of all the window

and its clean.  Though somehow

for me it’s wishing I could see him

touch the stuff, to come away

from the face or the elbow

or the great stallion’s knee rising (and

to think it was mud that Jesus

made, with his own tongue working

enough spit that made the blind

man alive again in his eyes)

and say see, it’s moving, see it really is

moving.  A river of it, and

if I’m brave

enough to reach the river and follow

it too, all the way down,

a bass or a salmon or a trout,

having spawned earlier

in the spring, will be far enough

along to reach the salt of it all

dissolving, but, (lick your lips

because I do when I’m about

to see something remarkable)

thick with the work

of it, of everything now

being mud and grass and milt

and gills and, once seeing this all

and making it pause, a man still, moulding.

If You Are Light

If You Are Light, 

and if you were the beeswax too,
 and a newly blown glass mold is
an aegis to your wick.

and if you, before you were poured

 were viscous, facile as a clam tide
on the rare vehement ebb.

And if, when the wick was set

mid-way flaccid over the little lip

of the quick limpid pour,

you nipped the rim, and then a slight scald

or singe. when you're lit, then as all blood rises

under your skin it is within, first a sea-

  rugosa leaf bud slowly opening, remember,
it would be you who first drew near

to the wound, when you were fire,

after years of dormant and solid pause, 

and  you'v been called to go out as a melting thing,
 even as you step into the dark, ahead

of everybody else.   And you whisper

to the blemish: shhhh, sweat

heart—shhhh, remember me?

the tattoo artist

dooryard
from the stone barn
shaker village
hancock, mass

the tattoo artist

Answers are just echoes, they say.  But

a question travels before it comes back,

and that counts.

                                                William Stafford

                                                The Research Team in the Mountains

I wonder that I wrote the same

way years ago but now it sounds

brand new like I’d never heard or

considered it but funny it’s familiar

enough that’s exactly what I do

I wonder and what’s the difference

between wonder and suspicion but

one has innocence and the other

accusation?  They both of them see us

in the mirror in the clear pond

they watch us and wait and take

us on or back away both

the only thing they could do

in that moment.  So it was yesterday

I saw the woman who marked

me for the entire rest of my life

and she drove by and I watched

her take traffic in remarkable

patience, like rising blood

coming up from the just under

the some two layers of skin so she

could lay down my mark the one I’d

asked her for the one I’d taken

out of my imagination and said

this and she said ok and she

sprayed me clean and she made me

painful enough she made me want

to stay and stay and stay the way

a flagellant may want to while

outside someone somewhere

was filling in a grave, or orioles

were at a flowering bush and coming

away with beetles or flying up

to the screen to make a moth stop

dead, or waiting (because I came

back later too, with other needs to be

marked) the ink, the soap, I think of all

what else they plunder while over

and over the mark is made permanent

and nearly forever: A phoenix.  A dragon.

A Buddhist mantra.  I’m watching her

cover for me when I have to leave

the room when I am sick of being

brave and waiting.  But when she

goes over the wrist bone with her

needle, and it’s close enough to

where you touched the place I’d made

myself come out of myself and you

brought it to your lips and kissed it

I watched the birds in your yard

come to  you in the way any animal

came to your favorite saint who made

any feather, any scale, wounded

or whole and free, easy enough

at ease.  Their wonder was

their only question and they put it

down like ink that only came good

when they left, blessed maybe

or maybe not, healed maybe or

maybe not, but brave at least

and staying that way, past the shame

they came in with, their leaving

now their delicate silica.

98% full waxing gibbous

98% full waxing gibbous

flanked by you, even

though I suffocate some

I find that key-

hole of light and air rescue

me and you slide inside

it.  And I am struck:

the wind is a buffet of

the Baltic, it is caught crystaled

with salt and wing

tips, it sticks to my cheek

where before you’ve laid

your mouth and there it stakes

its claim it penetrates,

a cave only you now

a moon could penetrate

first, a lone bird

then two.  And OH

their plumage

lifted, see? Thrilling

their pale breast

their stroked reckless

unblemished skin 

Inside Parenthesis

Inside Parenthesis

To me, only your hips are parenthesis

and your ribs.  Too your cheeks.

It’s a between

that’s brief: a mouth, teeth…nipples

but oh your unplumbable depth… if you put in

at my waterline and in the musk

of dusk’s fog, after all the walkers

after all who’d floated

their ease their milky thin ink

their own lips shut

will you let yourself

(in the boat you are sealed in

rib to rib) float over me

as an albatross

whose confounding weight

means nothing  in the

air she’s pinned in as she is:

feather and web and wind-

pipe of raucous hoarded calls

vibrated loose after the long

settling they come to now undone

on the rough rock once she is

beneath you or you beneath

her, it makes no difference

parenthesis.  You are elastic

and fiercely angelic

you are shafts of close-your-eyes-

light you are never groped for blind

but only know

only dip in then dive:

some salt, a fleeting wince

and the wet wide sky deep,

alive

Before You: Brief Eclipse

Before You: Brief Eclipse

You don’t have to do a bloody thing

though it's all about you.

Only you have to move.  You do.

You have to turn.  You turn the same way

you’ve always turned, or at least since

your captivity: a carousel for your

master's dominion.   And clouds,

undular mane, are both reins and preferred 

choice of horse, whatever shade the wind spits:

of course a beryl male and his mare, though

who’s in front of whom is always

this gamble, is always his cocked

tail and the unplumbed frontispiece of sky —
not exotic along the wild flat grass-

land planes, where dust moats of lust

on the run are hoof and teeth and necks red

with acquiescence after fury.  Does it

matter who chooses what back

to slide down onto, to wait

for the music the push the stiff

grip on the pole?  And those beams  

under the canopy, buckling (though no one

notices) under their unnumbered temple

years weight?  It’s a real leap here

but remember Samson leaning against

the pillar, after his hair grew back, after

they’d taken his eyes, after they’d put him out

to stud?  He’d be the prize on this carousel.

After the all night party, blind and tied

he’d lean and breathe and no one 

believed he’d come back into his own.  While

the thousand thousand thousand spit and mock

his cock and long ball sack (to provoke

their wives no doubt, who rode him, more

for the climb and slide, climb and slide)

(and the small consequence of sons) all along

those gawkers, a stroke

of luck they’re all here, look up at the broad

pavilion, how it must’ve seemed

as close as a moon could get, so close

it might, if the strings were plucked

in the right order and time, fall.  The building up
to blue, the quick vein pulse and grit.  And then.
And then all that ahhhhh ease

of letting go.  All his weight against

the pillar, the slow shade going over

their faces the way clouds do all the night

and day, and will go all the way all the time

through, the ceiling—obviously too heavy

on its own, and every one of those clumsy drunks

looking up in awe, the blood still  

pulsing off, the gourds and millet, the bladders

of wine caught, but not before they’ve gone

from tongue to tongue, each grape, each seed

safe in the stomach, in the womb of the wives

who stayed home, away from the soon to be,

but not yet, not yet, dead.