At the Red Light

At the Red Light:

                Drops of Water

                On the Driver’s Side Window

All steeples are upside down

in the drops of rain on the window

and they multiply and they are many

bending shapes: and see how they make

balloon animals!  Can’t you

see a man clowning around with the limp

rubber wiener and how

he’s practiced holding it

randily, the bounce of his rhythm... it makes me

wonder if when he was first getting used

to thinking he might like to take up

entertaining a crowd with make believe

he stood before a reflecting glass

to catch the sass of his real wish and he’d add

act after act, gesture this,

subtle that, the rubber blown

to near popping, blown and popping

too full of him: until he learned the burst

of the bang was one of the challenges

he could push back on to the crowd, he could

control their own breath and the throb

of their heart, how he could have them

riveted to the twists in his hands

and rubs and squeaks and tipoffs and come

to what it all will be: the legs the torso

the ears and viola! it’s a long

necked giraffe or maybe a green alligator.

Or a pucker with that tied-off end

of a flower…and yes, all this right?

from one and one and one drop of rain falling

on the window, the tilted spire

in its curve, how maybe the only other

time it leaned that way was when

it was being erected, the steeple-

jack's asked his opinion and consulted the crane

to take the strain of the pullies instead of the men

yelling all their Saturday afternoon

expletives.  To think it could all come down

spire first but finally up it falls

into the heaven it was erected

to point to, nailed to the roof, all

tower housing and a tired set

of bells that have their go in betrothing 

the ears and spirit...but only after the fall

carnival and ox pulls and tent

events and extra fees in the back

for all the men and boys wink wink nod nod.

And judgments need to rest (tell me I'm wrong)

in the paw of a small boy sleeping

next to his deminishing-even-as-he-breathes

blue twisted balloon that makes me want

to wake him before it goes

flat as a sermon on a rainy morning, 

a thousand spires hard, still rising,

while the men yet to repent their sins drive on

before the light turns green.

Other Than: What Are Brooms For?

“Shall I Make Sense Or Shall I Tell the Truth?  
I'm Not Sure I Can Do Both
With This”

Mercy’s at best approximate,

like the first weeks of blindness

before the other senses' stunned quartet have learned to translate

inside the skull’s black paradise

some recovery of touch, this odor of apples, sea wind,

hearth-fire, this prophecy

of rain or danger,

this autumn of spring dryness in the leaves.

               

                                                                Deborah Digges

                                                                Late Summer

Opening you, I am remembering I had been dreaming

about a woman.  She was gentle and she waited a while but I was still

afraid, a long wave of unfinished afraid, but in time a going out wave.

I think I dreamed of doctors because earlier in the day I’d made

some comment about seeing only those who’d treat me

above the neck: and specific: the dentist and the optometrist.

Nothing but teeth, and then nothing but what I can

see.  Nothing but what I can chew and read.  I don’t think I’m unique.

In the dream, I never sat down and I mostly

looked away, and the room was a subtle grey:
hair just washed/just dried
soft, you know the kind, or fine as a new baby’s hair if we’re lucky

enough to be able to think back to that.  Mostly though,
and only after course examination, after taking it all down

and into the skin, after lesions, lacerations, and life-saving
stitches, my head has stood up enough to what’s

been offered: and now I know I go out

with my clavicle and scapula broad as the prow

of a small boat, used new and not new used if that’s possible
and it is if you think about sex.  And it's safe to say
you liked it and wanted to and made it an intimate
part of your life until your life wasn't anymore and that
is what makes me ache because I wanted to get to
know you and now I only can with these few
books.

I don’t know why, but I made myself read you lived now in Mass-

achusetts, I made myself read that, even though

I know you’re dead.  I’m not right now remembering

the year but that will be on another book,

your last, published posthumously I remember. 

And it is.  The tense is changed.  You still lived

in Massachusetts, (I put the still in, because what else

are you now?) until your death in 2009.

I’m looking for hints and realize I always have,

that offer me a reason you chose to fall

from high enough in the air that it killed you.

In “Broom” I read you’re sweeping, of course you’re sweeping

and really there’s a lot of power in making things

clean.  You take lovers and husbands and you make sons
with one of them.

You fuck the lovers and fuck up husbands
and fuck-up the sons. And you say this later, describing some of it wild

enough to gum your hair while you sweep and sweep

them with your body and your mouth, hoping, I know,
that the whole motion will be about getting you

clean.  Maybe I reach for you every fall because of all

the trees that are starting to let go of one another and yet
one more year and I was drawn

since the beginning by your keeping
from house to house and room to room, especially on
moving, broom:

because I've been this kind of movement too,
and I remember wanting to be in your hands as your straw
monument, longing from all that's bottled on the first time I saw it all on the line.

You were alive then.  I was drawn by ending my time

with a Buddhist community and dumping myself
back on your shore.

I opened you (and maybe you’d find this poetic and then dismiss

it as sentimental) and there was my friend, and a thin

slip of his beard that I almost brushed away.  It’s him,

it’s what wasn’t swept up it’s what wasn’t ignored.  Did you ever

save anything of what you tried to sweep away?

I look at it the way I try to look at the woman

in my dream, how I let the whole room go

soft, like an experienced deadlift athlete who imagines every muscle at the last

of it letting go the joint and going slack before they’re torn

to perform the most impossible, ludicrous task: 

thoughts

gate city church
nashua, nh

thoughts      thoughts      thoughts         thoughts        thoughts            thoughts              thoughts              thoughts              thoughts              thoughts              thoughts

t                 h                    o                             u                 g                      h             t             s             

Thoughts are drops of water falling

                on the driver’s side

                window: a pause at the red-light

                railroad crossing where say

                on a day like today

                the church steeple

                is upside down in the water

                whose shape makes me

                consider the pelvic girdle 

                —and because it all glides, 

                watch: that drop has a west-

                north-west wind pushing it

                in the belly. It could be

                a boxer bent over and all

                around her is her raining

                accumulation…see how certain

                windows of the church

                are stuck in their up-side down

                selves while they roll

                devotedly, and only just now

                to the edge, to fall off, maybe

                fall apart, maybe, or be

                held together

                on some other surface to be,

                maybe, expanded, maybe

                quivering for some time

alone before the sky

her heat and her shrouds

and her mensurable eunuch

call her back...my

how she’s different for

where she’s fallen, my

how she’s changed.

After Sitting With Wyeth

After Sitting With Wyeth

We can see the tragic forming

hurricane and victim;

and a man comes like a cat

to visit by the colorless forest,

his blue hands stuttering welcome.

Richard Hugo

Resulting from Magnetic

Interference

Going back I notice the old potential

lover has lost almost a whole row

of teeth.  Before I see him

smile I say he looks just

the same.  It’s far away and

he hasn’t made it all the way

in to shore yet.  Tying off

their caulked and patched

bow I wonder how he’ll get to

shore, and if he’ll be pleased

seeing his yesterdays walk

ahead of his children today, the way

water may, in winter, walk on its

own cold hands and feet, before

the wind, before it’s entirely

ice, and is blown like sleeves

like pants legs, strings of hood…

I wonder, when he plunges

into the bait barrel where salt
and eyes and bent bodies of fry

look out of the grime like he might

look out, the bait-shed window

with greased ease.  He’ll pass

a few laughs with the raunchy old

men who flash their shriveled

eyes and lift their lids with their

empty glasses off the counter,

the felled bar their grandfather’s

grandfather flattened, planed

day after day in the warm winter

barn, and made it so to see his own

face rise up in the varnish gleam.

I want to say you look the same

sitting there when you get in

off the boat, after mooring it

in the wind, and I saw you saw me

watching you.  And maybe it's your

deft and careful hands that are
the same.  And  I saw you taking

the years off me too, the way the old

take clothes off, first the fumble
with the belt, the button, the fly, and then

the rush in without waiting because

who’s getting younger?  Listen, 

the water’s a shock, especially
at my age, and going under means being

struck a moment, and then stuck,

until the coal paces her glow in the brazier

and sets the simmer, when the load shifts in

and settles and has enough Pray Jesus glow

to hold through: God

you look good how you been  

it's been a long time, you aint
changed one Goddam Bit.

At Bailey's Mistake

smokeshed
bailey's mistake
trescott, maine

At Bailey’s Mistake

Who can say which sadness when takes over,

becomes rudder?

Who can name for another what moors, what charts the date?

                                                                                Deborah Digges                               

                                                                                Nursing the Hamster

If you stand back far

enough, the second rung

on the ladder is a trick

of the posts.  Holding to

what they’ve held to they

are the last of a once

was fence, a stronghold

some long gone swinging

door may have rested on.

Moss lost in spots and shingle

grey, countless times a hand

hadto’ve laid on the round-

ed head of one, then maybe

the other, and took it all

in, whatever time of day

or tide, whatever thick-

of-fog or wisp, the way it

is with ghosts that may

float alone in the old debris

in the smokeshed that makes

this post-ladder’s second

rung.  See it?  Just so, the window

and doors are their own a

snow beaten salt beaten

sanctuary.  It’s maybe if you make

it work for you, a priory

soaked in its own smoke.

The millions of fish bodies

hung throat and gill staring

up to the rafters in the calm

way of such smoke, as though
to God.  And don’t you want to

imagine it still happens like that
in there at night, the straight-up

flight of pliable flesh rendering

itself out to a tight

and preservable delight?

Right?  It’s enduring now and old

in a way gravestones are old,

you know the ones the town’s

the most stoic of: a founder

maybe, a first white baby, a couple
of men gone down with their ship

not far from where this shed

will be built, will be worked

in for years, by whole generations

of families, will be walked away

from, but not entirely, because

there’s always looking back,

there’s always that moss covered

ladder that only our eyes

can climb safely, and the crowd

of goldenrod blossoms, and, out

of the frame, but there I assure

you, the rugosa lined road, opening

their mouths like taps horns, some

wide some gone to hip some shut

in their bud waiting for rain

to be rung from their sisters

drop, drop, don’t walk away

till you see it lined up: see:

drop, drop.  Stop.  Pause…it’s

optical.  It’s caught.   It’s soft

as the memory of a friend

walking ahead, not far, but just

enough in the fog to be almost

gone, almost, but not.  See? 

Yes, yes.  See.

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.