winter chickens

meeting
tree fence and three
shaker village
canterbury, nh

winter chickens

where a tale begins

and where it ends

matters.  Who tells

the story and why. . .

that makes

a difference.

                                Epitaph

                                Mary Doria Russell

In January the

one rooster is late

to begin

the day, late

to wait at the door

and make his comb

flop and shake

over his face

and the cold

going out over

his whole brood

ruffed up

along the old stall

walls, unmoving,

almost unmovable

hens.  Once there was

a cow and her son

and they both stood

walled off, balling,

each on the wean.

Now a dry, froze over

mound of chicken

shit and summer

saw-dust and the old

trough where

my father pours

steaming laying mash

he’s stirred with

an old lath broke off from

the wall in the second shed,

where the plaster’s

cracked and crumbling

anyway, where if I look at it

at the right angle

it resembles that set

of broken off teeth

in the head of the same

calf, a skull I found last

summer up on the old

woods road.  The lath

makes up for the lack

of some other stick

and he makes do: it

comes in just to the top

of the five gallon bucket

and he draws from

the bottom what’s dry into
the middle.  After his deep walk  

out in the new snow,

his open coat I won’t

be a minute

when she asks

accusing him of the cold

but the chickens don’t

know, and with the arrival
of the mash

they stretch

and flap their wings

their rooster cops

his walk between boot-

prints and snow, following

them.  But only

to the threshold.  To

where the dirt ends.

To where the snow (it

was shoveled just

enough to get the swinging-

out door open)

begins.  The old barn 
holds to its own.  Opens

to anything, closes to
anything.  Wind.  Rooster.

Hen.  Mother and son.
Leading them in.  Leading

them out.  One at a time,
or two, depending on

the threshold, the man,
the bucket of steaming

mash, the winter falling
early yet in the season

early yet in the cold,
and what bawls will bawl

softly, like a hinge on a door
closing against the snow.

The Triggering:

storm:
out the barn door
hancock shaker village

The Triggering: 

While Waiting for Richard's Making Certain It Goes On

I Open Deborah's Rough Music.

Some things won’t translate backwards.

Some things can’t be undone,

though it takes  years to learn this, years

Such were the serial exhaustions of my beliefs…

                                                                Deborah Digges

                                                Rune for the Parable of Despair

Before you arrived I was well into someone else.  I tried

to be patient waiting but she was so…

her black spine freckled with the claim

of her given name, slipped thin between the rest,

but a reckoning, a vigor to be sure, and so

I opened her and her honest to goodness lust

sprung up from every curve every line every dot

hung above the ‘i’.  After it was finished I went back

for more, and so I know going on like this

I’ll be weeks and weaks away because I need some

of what she’s willingly put down in silk, in thick

unblemished perfection.  I’ve been with her before

and often, though she’s never about remembering. 

When she fell from the grandstand I carried her

around inside of me and she’d say this: wind

in the bells.  That’s it.  And sometimes I was the wind,

but mostly she was.  She knew what she was

doing and because I’d never not ever once been on my knees

looking up except to the dirk to the hilt of a Jesus red,

red heart, the only one ringed with the zisiphus spina, the one

I’d watch the sun set through every Saturday afternoon

mass.  I took my turn.  I waited.  I made plans to be

a nun in a far away place.  I wanted the veil

and the cloister more than the tip

of a finger on my lips.  Imagine my anguish opening

for her for the first time and she letting me be

in complete control: the clothes she wore

that day were pine green and black.  There was

a brooch of cream where her nipple might be,

but only on the right side facing me.  The left was velvet

and it was a glimpse of light that outdid me, unhinged

my lips.  I wanted to, I really did, I wanted

to wait for you.  But your silence.  Not knowing

if you were really coming, if you might even be

dead, was the clutch of my despair.  She read that in me.

She took my hand.  She guided me with it.  I’m sorry,

but she was there.  She said she'd been waiting.  And I couldn’t

refuse.

"my day"
where Eleanor's fingers
tips and thumbs
and whole fists
touched, came down,
made her marks

Snake Oil

beached fog: dory bow
 at low tide

Snake Oil— 

There’ll be a day we’ll need to come clean

with the small lies we’ve told ourselves

all this time, all our lives.  Like trimming the dead

nail that’s coming up from the thumb I shut

in the car door last March.  While something

under the nailbed is making brand

new nail, while it cut through like a tooth beneath

the bruise and immobilized blood, the old and broken

tenor to maintain a hold, like a widow

coming away from two stones and waiting

to make her own, you may say what’s she

in all this whispering about lies and their perennial

opposites, because it seems to take

as long, getting to the truth, how the nail gives way

from the bottom when it cleared the thumb tip

and begins to fray and snag

every stray string or loose something or other

and is pulled up and what’s beneath it still

attached perverts its own compromising

bruise.  It’s the shade of cooling

calves fat if you care to know, the veal

remember? we sometimes eat and leave

scraps here and there on the plate

and we’re done and good and full.  Milky.

We’re both of us lost to the crawling

we do to justify what we go through

to consume. . .oh but isn’t that just

bullshit horseshit dogshit.  But it’s true

I did jamb my thumb in the car

door, in the falling snow in the winter.

I wanted to get a picture of the way

everything seemed gentle and patient

around the weeping beech, and I’d waited

all season, and the sun was just

right and the snow was just right

and a car drove by and I was too close

and doesn’t everyone freeze

when they think they’re going to be

run over?  All those does and lambs?

All those coons?  Because look: it’s falling

snow.  It’s as stunning as it going to

get, aside from being outright

struck.  And here it is mid-June and still

I’m looking at this injury all this time

and cutting away the dead that the new

pushes up because its always done it

that way.  What else can I say, the thumb’s

doing well under the circumstances.  Her

layered lapping laths of keratin stick

out more because of the blood maybe. 

Because I’m having to trim what’s lifting

up from the middle, near that little moon,

lunula it’s called, and the nail started just

beneath what’s risen, or if it didn’t,

I’m picking it up there anyway, and it won’t

ever clear the thumb tip now, it will be

interrupted and cut off just as it’s been getting

going and making a small fuss, ready to

expose the pink nail bed beneath, to reveal

it all, whatever it is hidden under the months

of bad blood, coming clean however it can.

Inventing Measure

blur
below me
stones...

Inventing Measure

Genius, perhaps, is making anything

worth the world’s stealing.

                                                Jane Hirshfield

Reading her Four-Postered

Beds of Mycenae, (and let me

read it through again and

again) she makes me

see not just the need of invention

but what was invented to measure

all the not- made- by- man things:

the moon say, that wasn’t always

but when it was and when it was

able didn’t stop being the moon simply

because a length and a spot

of time had been added, had been

stuck to comfort other objects

or animals that come into season

and pass out of season, not because

attention had been called, listen, didn’t

the doe, didn’t the opossum, the

armadillo, the artic fox already

know MOON and her tricky shifts?

Don’t they from their dens

of snow and ice and hollow tree,

drawn up in their tails or elegant

legs, having found a hollow

to wait the time out in, unmeasured

uncomprehending the hands, the sweep

of them across the face or

the way I’d seen the time flip

by on the little digital cards

on my grandmother’s bedside table.  Some-

times I’d watch, sometimes I’d turn

my back to them, but only so

I could listen in the easy quiet to each

little pad fall, a Rolodex of numbers on

a wheel, how they’d seem to sigh.  Contented.

But that too is an invention, isn’t it, a

satisfaction?  If we’ve given ourselves

enough credit, or too much, on

where we’ve been, where we are,

or where we’re going, the MOON remains,

always: at our feet, our knees,

our hips, our belly, our lung, our

clavicle, our lips and eyes, round

then as they are, and lidded, closing

opening, falling to come back around,

like clockwork, depending…

Early Apples

bog
west quoddy

Early Apples

Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,

then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

                                                            Wislawa Symborska

                                                            “Under One Small Star”

And don’t, please, look away when I look

                                    away

when I am distracted by my own

longing

to gather all your windfall, all your early

strays

into my apron, into my pockets, into my

mouth

and bite down into your skin, between the soft

fontanelle,

where ants and drunken wasps have made early

cider

of the long spring and wind of summer.  All that

time

your stem, all that time broadening broad,

bulge

in the shadow of the cragged branch’s

peak

a summit achieved only in a freak high

breeze

when you are lifted up and your clasp, finally,

is undone.

And the fall to the ground wasn’t the pain

Why

you’d begun to grow at all, why you said

yes

for this not at all please don’t believe

random

hand brushing away the grass

the dead

bees.

The fatigue of your release is sweet.

Me,

cupping the split seam of you into my life-

line’s

shadow, the round firm unblemished

you

round , rosy, you’ve come for this: the tongue.  My

tongue.

It’s why you ripen and ripen.  It’s why you rush up

and fall
and split apart to show me your stars.

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