Opposable

Kingsbrae Gardens
St. Andrews, NB

Opposable

If the leaves.  If the singing fell upward.  If grief.

For a moment if singing and grief.

If the blue of the body fell upward, out of our hands.

If the morning held it like leaves.

                                                                If the Rise of the Fish

                                                                Jane Hirshfield

I have to ask if men fishing are jealous

of the osprey who from far away

can see to take the rainbow trout up

into the air in such swift independence

it’s possible the fish considers it's suddenly

wings, that on each side of her is new

body.  If men, looking up, mistake

the fins for feathers and pull their vests,

jealous: all that time tying flies, the sigh 

tightening the weight of the knot that will be  

tested against the feather, the way, while making

each tuft of fawn hair (don’t worry,

it was stuck to a barb of wire lining

the old property, he’d walked

the boundary last spring and it was

a wisp in his imagination, a certain

fly he was godding through under the lit

magnifying glass) he’ll think: the one

I’m going for is swimming right now

and really what’s the difference

between my fingers stroking this

string and her fins stroking her stones

that rub her belly erotic (are fish

erotic?) and time her surfacing to

the dark shift in shadows, old soul

she is, knowing the water, the silted milt,

the cool/warm exchange of rain or snow

these so many seasons we’ve been

knowing one another?  Does he think

that?  Tying flies?  And all the way to

the pond, his worn path, his patched hat

and vest, his tested line?  What can be

known of this or cared for in the eye

of the osprey, owning her own piece

of sky for the length of time it takes

to feel the shift in shadow beneath

her breast feathers (isn’t this knowing  

known before it’s seen, and isn’t it in

the bones, the ones that cage grace-

fully our aching failing hearts?) and aims

straight and faithful for the shadow,

that will, when it’s lifted, transmigrate: become,

muscle, become scale, become a reached for

creature the fisherman in his whole

lifetime imagine he alone lifted from the water's
grip in the form of a fly, and breathed on it

and watched it come, finally, briefly,

to life?

Eastport, ME

Bare With Me:

Bare With Me:

I

There is a place in the ocean where vast waves

ceaselessly rise.  Without fail, all fish which pass

this place become dragons.  For that reason, the place

is called the Dragon Gate.  The vast waves

there are no different from the waves anywhere

else and the water is ordinary salt water

as well.  Yet mysteriously, all fish crossing

here become dragons.  Their scales do not change,

their bodies do not change, and still

they become

dragons.

                                                Dogen

                                                Shobogenzo-Zuimonki

II

Freshly poured (though they start popping almost right

off) the coffee looks like a small pond of spiders’ eyes.

Different sizes, they keep close to the warm walled- off-

from- breezes sides of the mug.  I’ve given them

a fair start in the morning: while everything brews

an old favorite cup of mine sits in the sink with hot

water starting her off.  Because who wants, being cold,

a sudden rush of something near toward boiling,

if even a lifeless and faded to almost white through

the years through the lips and teeth and an occasional

(tricky, this, having been burned once and once more)

tongue.  Because how do you drink something hot

or have you ever noticed?  With caution?  With rush

right in?  Does your tongue hover over the rim, bottom

lip kissing the outside (we can call it that) because what else

is it the beginning of, other than a swallow, an acceptance

or rejection, and that comes after, much later sometimes,

if there’s something of a cooling down to do and that

lower lip’s the first to know if the approach first time coming,

should be called off, clumsy in the morning just

getting out of the dream and dark of all of night’s

suggestions (the window fan’s a wind itself, the wind’s

a rain, the rain’s a wave that makes and makes and makes

and never seems to bread, only increase or decrease depending

on the tide).  It’s how the dead come back to tempt us,

because it’s only awake that we know how lonely

we (we?) they are, and those dreams never bleed us

out and we come back among the alive unhurt, unscarred,

except maybe the clenched knot of the jaw, the break

in the lip, drawn, now dried, blood on the pillow 

so it does, it behooves us to come with caution to the hot

coffee we offer ourselves and let it settle, every eye

bubble in the light pulled up or back down into the drink,

the passage like a ride in a lake-boat on a calm day,

all those small wakes left behind while we sit and watch all

those lives float by, anchored as they are among

the pines and beeches, the evergreens, their needles

that sometimes bead in the heat in August and drop

the sticky pitch of their liquid selves onto whatever happens

to be beneath them, dropping as a bubble, falling

as a bubble, making it to the skin before it opens, so small

an explosion its almost unnoticed, its carried

all the way home, it’s kissed, if it’s allowed, and noticed,

but fleetingly, like a memory, like a barn

spider I watched climbing higher and higher into

the rafters, into and then out of the swiftly charging air,

temperature dropping, rising, dropping, rising, as I breathed

on it, out and then in, out, and then in.

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.