What Holds It's Own

pond.
stalk of grass.

What Holds Its Own

Whatever disquiet we sense in a room

we have brought there.

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,

pointing to hinge and plaster and wood—

You are matter, as they are.

See how perfectly it can be done.

Hold, one day more, what is asked.

                                                Jane Hirshfield

                                                A Room

Because they didn’t want to disturb

the living the parlor was set aside

to wake the dead.  I’ve read that

somewhere, how the term living room

came about because that’s all

that was allowed to happen there.

I don’t know for sure, and I don’t have

a parlor—though maybe that room—

in this house at least, would be

the den, and already the dead are

accumulating there: my grandmother

by way of her trunk, the one

she brought back east from Minnesota

after having been gone for twenty-

one years.  I can’t begin to guess

what was in it before my mother

put our old blankets, sheets—what wouldn’t

fit in her cedar chest, the one solid thing

she brought with her, that locked her

treasures when she moved them

from Salem.  My sister has that now, maybe

in her own living room.  I’ve never been

to her house but in other houses she’s lived

in I saw it, and the old rocking chair (another

piece from Salem), and maybe above it

my father’s 1960s Navy graduation photo

she won’t give back.  Maybe her house

is more a cemetery than mine, though

I’d argue it holds its own: a leather chair

a man I admired read to his granddaughter

in; a bookcase and the books inside; all

the books all around even, and still

living, the daughters and daughters of spider

plants and cacti, children’s children’s
children, new leaves, old root.  And too:

in a small wooden urn, a teaspoon maybe two,

of my friend’s ashes—what didn’t

get scattered, ten years now

at my elbow.  When I move back

home I have to find a suitable spot

somewhere, and in a brighter room—

maybe on that trunk next to the leather

chair.  What’s all in it: the kids’ stuffed toys,

a Brother typewriter, rocks I’d forgotten

about, coal maybe, and of course, those old

love letters, still holding their own,

closed up in their carefully cut open

envelopes, whispering the only

words they know to stave off the dark: Dearest,

I love you, I miss you, I’ll wait

for you, when are you coming back.

I put them under the pillows I’d meant

to decorate the couch with, where

we sat, lustful rush of arms

and legs and breath, hinging

and unhinging, coming up

for air after all that plunging, like any

lovers do I suppose, when they are

living and alive.

Ravish or Enrapture: Still, It's Toward Transport

Ravish or Enrapture: Still,
It's Toward Transport

Sometimes arriving late means coming in from behind,

spine first: the tight delight of a cuff perfect and tucked

tail, not a dart or pleat out of line and the review too good

to miss.  It’s like this: the whole rack gets along quite

well parenthetically; each collar and yoke a susurus, as though

they've been told to go the opening of a private show or

(this is provocative) during the moments the placket's 

laid down on the podium, shuffed and lined up

and tipped in favor of the audience, catty-

cornered and face down to only lamp in the hall.  Arm rising,
the whole congregation shuts up abrupt as snuffed kindling

in a mid of March wind.  Someone's spoken.  Soon, what

was quick to stiffen goes limp.  Soon too soon the heat goes

over the cliff cold and its only on the way down

you know you’ve arrived and you'll lose

your shirt entirely, and the parting

(while maybe not starting with fire, while maybe

hung on to with two hands at the base of the taper

and shaking so the liquid light spatters) isn’t glided

so much as (right?) guided spine first then held like 

two seamed gussets (thumbs are useful too, at first)

until swift as a swallow- switched- mid-

drift, lifted to go in past the front pocket taking

their time taking the squeeze the shimmy the jockey

on the back if in a waxed saddle of words there's slipping

the tongue tip alone but the only thing to go dry on the outside

while the root, the root, the root is pulled pulled

and there’s edges sweet and smooth there’s edges

thin and serrated, there’s edges of lips almost always

behind the light of the late arrivals and taking off

the jacket only reveals a straight spine

not the curve (at last) at the middle and suspended

at the hip

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