Roadside Stand, Rt. 101

Roadside Stand, Rt. 101

for  Professor Gillian Osborn, my teacher

Partway through January the beekeeper was dead.

I’d drive by winter

day after winter day seeing

all his brief spaces cave in saying I wish I had

bought some of his honey.  Now

I never can.  All through February

and March I said this and too into April and May.

And the bees in the upper field I imagined them

dormant and chilled and seduced into dying

like their handler falling free after his shut off heart.  Someone

had taped the cold out and I said the moon has gone down on them

completely.  And well past May and early into June I saw all

the bee boxes were gone and the road that led to them had been

filling in with spring, and the road itself was being

remade by the hands of the land again

and the dismissal of man.  It’s deep into August

now.  The beekeeper’s Quonset hut

has been sold at a small roadside auction

and all his tools and deflated snowman for when he sold

Christmas trees and wreathes, maybe an occasional

fruitcake.  And too

his vegetable stand: his corn his squash his early then late

          beans and tomatoes.  All the berries that a simple New

          England town could yield and suffer up after being coaxed

and cajoled by all his bees.  Those occasional

          peaches for the slight of a lesser sun, a hardier, bitter bite.  Nobody

          resurrected it for him.  The field is now nearly completely

          white with Queen Anne’s Lace.  The road is still

filling in.  I watch it tilt itself toward and then finally into the woods and take  to redacting the signs that the seasons

or the children

or the deer may have sent down

          to the ground NO TRESPASSING—CAUTION, BEES—RAW

          HONEY.  and occasionally (because now I know

          he had a sense of humor) LETTUCE TURNIP AND PEA

Cellar

bodhisattva

Cellar

In the fullness of a season someone

had to go first into the other kingdom.

                                               

                                                                Philip Levine

                                                                Burned

Sisyphus lives in my cellar

and he is barefoot, a barefoot God

like Jesus on the cross

was a barefoot God.  Not often

but enough to know he’s there,

there’s shifting maybe in the chimney

maybe in the crates that have been

shiftless for almost twenty years.

I can’t even remember what all is

in them stuff all stuff.  Stuff

I’d wanted to save for one

reason or another.  And lately,

my way of stopping off

memory loss, my way of making

some burned end neuron

sizzle again is to open them, just a flap.

and the age of waiting is enough

to drive me back

just so.  It’s ridiculous

because now it’s taken on

the most of something too long

idle, some of it

has bottom rot and I’ll

consider it gone when I lift it

to my face, my eye and nose

and if it’s anything worth

saving say I meant it all along

just shift it from here

to there from one shelf

one box one shit filled one soaked

through oh  you know don’t you

Sisyphus, living there next to the door

of the chimney how sometimes

heat makes heavy things fall and tink

against the iron door, how rising

is the last edge any of us has

to the actual

letting go, letting it all go once

we’ve decided what goes

to the dump or

up in smoke.  It turns, some of it,

to creosote or cloud or rain

or stains, stains right there,

hold your hands out, see, move

them into the light, black at the heaviest

bit of grip, the meat at the end

of your thumb, smeared then

on the lip when the itch hakes hold

and the shovel is loaded – shoulders

a ship’s sail widening

to gain to the other side

(the spine is my midship)

of the room to pick up what all

whatever the fuck has to be

moved and given up

to rot, to clover, to ash

Old Fashioned

looking back: life mask
abraham lincoln
chesterwood, the berkshires

Old Fashioned

                if you make yourself the envelope

                whose flap of dry glue edge

                is spread opposite the pouch

                and in the pouch the letter

                                and you've invented the letter

                                and the nature of the letter

                                and the length…

                and it’s addressed and it’s stamped

                and the return is bold

                                and if you make yourself

                                the receiver whose tongue

                                is between her

                                lips and those lips are

                                pulled then between the one top

                                and the one bottom  jaw

                                but not before not before no

                                the wet warm meets

                                the dry glue and the glue is brief alive

                                in its intended work

                                and the tongue is sweet

and then it’s pressed

and it’s held

                                                and it’s sent

Last Unfinished Poem of the Year

Mending Wall
Set by Robert Frost
Derry, New Hampshire

Last Unfinished Poem of the Year

Under Some Tufts, the Substance of the Wall

…And the stone,

Reaching to touch  your hand, found you real

and warm, and lucent, like that earlier one.

And maybe a ghost, trying to hear your words,

Peered from the broken mullions

And was stilled.

                                                Wuthering Heights

                                                Ted Hughes

Maybe that’s what a stone wants of us after all, to

reach up to us like a mother or a lover and touch us

with as much love as it can muster, but because it is

stone it can only ever be a grievance or injury

or piece of wall, and gate-keepers all it suffers its gone-

solid silence .  Once, in the belly of the world, it was,

they were, liquid, inside it all, chuffed from molten

bone to molten bone and into the mouth and cheek

and laid bare there waiting against complacency.

In a dream they knew what they would be-

come: after the back-turning rejection of the hard

glittering lard, men would spend their entire

fortunes digging out to bruise and melt, to lighten

up the world to cough and die in when the smoke took

hold, as inevitably it will, to lift, the first Lazarus.  Listen:
how hot does it have to be to melt a rock, just any rock (ok,

yes, malleability varies by degrees, but…) see: some
never suffer themselves to come to liquid and they’ll go straight by

the way to ash…what had it, charged as it were to be,

and then, like all those other gods, gone off

to want, to eye blink agog at the first dawn of her,

waiting to be made into, what, a cloud?  Her you say?  Her?

Earth?  All of her now suffered under the palm

of someone’s hand?  Come to this: when Sylvia

set her hand down on the rock walls all three Bronte

women immortalized all that time ago high up the shires

in their York and Devon, there was a wind a bare bald
wind blown over the moors, and she was enough of a ghost

to know women like her would arrive to make the world

shake and tremble and rake the earth into veil

and velvet and scrape the glacial peak, reach to

the top of the heap, and have to rave and be brave enough

to never touch, cheek or teeth, even (and I’ve known

this, I’ve done this with stone against my own flesh

and bone) when against the heated meat, soft and sucked,

there’s some heat, some, if small enough itself,

to be (heaven is where we begin the believers tell me)

aren’t you with me in this, brought in out of the cold

and nursed back, blood wave after blood wave, to receiving

over our heads, under our feet, kin.  Simply kin.

High Point in Fog
West Quoddy Head

The Origin of the World

The Origin of the World

after Courbet’s L’origine du mond

You’ve never

done something so simple, so obvious,

                                                                Philip Levine

                                                                “What Works”

the beauty is that it is

supposed supposed! to be

burned.  imagine a lodge pole

pine cone so tight only fire

will try the edges will pry

with the opposites of ice

(and by now the hem end’s

down by now there’s fray

and chafing)

but a pry like I’ve

never seen -- a fire so alive

it is more

than eyes it is more

than tongue though

you’re right yes it starts

there as a curl a shy first

turn of the dervish before God

takes hold and blows

and blows and settles curl

deep into the canopy

to wake the future to make

the future drop

to the mesa’s table to the waist

to the skirts (they’re open!

don’t be scandalized!) we’ve

all seen L’Origine

du mond or at least heard

the news dresses

to be spread so the cracking

letting loose

can be done with a sigh only

the desperately pent up

could recognize come alive

fall into the dying

roots of the pine and like

the smile I mean really

like the smile of the parting

pond taking the rock after it

has gone through

with almost no hoorah

cutting the water

in a throaty cheeks drawn

breath drawn cshhug!

the ripples drenched in

cinders drenched red wet

Low Tide

sunrise

mulholland light

Low Tide

On Winslow Homer’s Fisher Girl, 1894

Watching her watching, doesn’t she seem to see more than the sea,

Casting off beneath the fog where all the underwater aliveness goes  

About on it's own living without needing her  –  doesn’t it really seem

Like this?  And too, what mother’s do, who bring in their daughters

And sons back from the rocks before the clouds really settle in

For good, before the rain that’s being forecast in the gray that's

Being leeched from tiny tide pools teeming with new minnows

And some, bless her, blood of the middle daughter’s thumb

Where the crab pinched and drew?  I could look at Winslow Homer’s

Fisher Girl for the rest of my life and want her to be my mother.

Steady nets and shells, a good set of reliable floats.  She’s watching.

She’s letting go, sure, but she’s watching.  And she'll expect me

To come back to shore, she'll want me to.  And with a mother

Like her, I’d want to do just that.  After the storm passes.  After

The kelp beds settle, and the algae, and there’s a momentary calm.

Sorting Shells on Sanibel

leisure:
basking in mist in front of the Trescott smokeshed...

Sorting Shells on Sanibel

for Elizabeth L.

Once, sorting

shells on Sanibel Island, my friend

directed me to what she had kept: bushels and bushels

of lightning

whelks and rooster conchs, all

of what she'd plucked from the warm water

following the hurricanes.  She tasked me:  I was used

to the dried brine by then:

pickled- a poor man’s

escargot

the muscle of  

the salted dead.

And that one day I remember tipping

one basket over and as soon

as they spilled

over the sunhot, frayed blue tarp,

the roaches                 rushed             and rushed                  and rushed

they

rushed

rushed and rushed. 

As quick as that, lizards

flew! (I’m from Maine, and we just don’t see this!)

So! Yes,

And so invisible, watching me, waiting on

me, from the palmetto palms they feasted!

and seemed to swoop,

to swarm, to scoop them up.

And that was that.  My goodness,

all those suddenly gone lozenges,

those "hermit" roaches loosing

their second carapaces.  It was incredible.