Tree, and Trunk, and Stump

Tree: 
Her Trunk, Her Stump

Stationed the way she is and taking on

time like it's tipped to the side, see how
the water slides by her, pulled by time
and tide in the wide eyed glide of the quiet

and pacifying night?  Eyes, see: they are: tree,

finally deleafed, having been seized
from the up-river come undone liquid frieze; 

see: the thick then thin cartography received 

beneath a once fizzy August heat, now a greeting

gummed on the trunk, limbs quit, and dead 

up the stump, like some lumberjack chopping 

to audition a Jesus tree, and in a meeting sees
the squeeze and releases the whole scene
swing by swing by swing, whetting the head
of the ax every ten connections.  It's his particular

routine.  And even though I’m the only one seeing

that ease, the tree’s definitely been a long-time
free of her roots and kin and maybe
months and maybe years ago.  She holds only
to the dried mud and rush (if the man who owns

the dam water rights is watching the jet
stream spots it).  Like she's stationed here
briefly, detritus freeze, and plugged, and has no 

needs, just this pause and pause through brutal
afternoons and early season frosts, all

that water washing her, letting her go.  Today,
with things being as they are, she's stuck
longer than she might have been, and her
calm and haunting top coming to be her copy
against the river water,  she is two gazes:

not Janus exactly, see the one face is not
solid at all but still it is caught, it is the same

as if it is severing itself on the water, taunting

a want from me to be both as secretive, as trans-
parent:  my daughter watches as I crawl

unceremoniously down the mud-gucked bank

to get in on the right edges for the perfect
angle.  I hold my camera above my head
as if I were going to cross the whole river
and slip slideways trying for the right

frame.  I’m as stuck at one point as the dead

tree eyeing me: I see some of what I need to keep me
standing and take it with me in my hand,
grab the grass without looking back.  I didn’t fall

this time, but when I’m home and the image

grows slow as a Polaroid, I see a sunk

thing, finally coming up, and it’s not

the tree or trunk or sawn-off gawk

of the heartwood.  I see an owl, don’t you? wide-

eyed?  And I’m prey too, I know I am, coming

undone, coming to an end that is always

ending, or beginning that is always beginning,
distant and reflective as this body of water,
insisting, insisting, my limited shifting: who?
who?  This way a saw-whet, this way a barred,

closer, come, a horned.  Though if I incorporate 

the limbs, and if, like you see deer, the rack 

is an aged buck.  Still, in the end, it's the sweep 

of wings, feather or bone, once
winter is on, seem tipped sideways in flight,

alight on the snow of its own self, holding,
holding.

Morning: Three Days Before Christmas

Morning: Three Days Before Christmas

The stars know everything,

So we try to read their minds.

As distant as they are,

We choose to whisper in their presence.

                                                Charles Simic

                                                Autumn Sky

But in our sky dear Charles three days

before Christmas morning there’s a thumb

nail moon just rising some above 

the pines or if you wish a curvaceous

hip and dimple grin slipping up from the river

and getting thinner (the moon not

the river) and here she seems shallow

or take away that h and the meaning

shifts some though it depends on the hue

of your mood.  But consider this: the glass

is that rippled and stumped glass that 

old homes have.  And so too my friend 

is the at-mosphere and too so is the film on

my lenses, smudged from tongues

of steam and grease from when we opened

doors receiving us as guests come in

from the cold come in from the brief

or long road narrow enough this time

of year that those oncoming either

yield or we do and because we both

want to be seen as courteous and in

good cheer we each of us pull toward

the bank and hear the tires ask what?

and keep their grip anyway and we take

nothing that doesn’t belong to us

as what is going to pass us by passes us

by and we nod our gratitude in exhaust

pipe condensation and hold our cough

and squeeze and a brief glimpse of that

little slip of the naked moon between

our teeth before she goes missing behind

the stovepipes and chimneys, their billowing

smoke holding out only for the moment

we make for it thinking we must be some-

thing like a genius to see the universe

so briefly before we get back to the mundane

and practicality of the where to put one’s foot 

carefully on the broad pond of ice the parking 

lot, waving off that moon and her sky coming

in and out of light.

An Eth(i)c of Cons(c)ent

 

 

An Eth(i)c of Cons(c)ent

after the trod and demolish 

watch the fog fall how it has

fallen seed creamy leaf

caught buoy/rock stiff knot

of a fist instead it's neck stretch

thin skin alms: esophagus 

the lips of this particular con-

juring of water to take me in-

stead make me! make me! 

naked awake in miniature 

areola knee and each teethed

with pleading before it all 

heats the rivet of another 

tongs and dolly and hot

cauldron of another dawn

(

(

From time to time the placid

shrugs its shoulders—

earthquakes, for instance.

                                Jane Hirshfield

                                Milk

Eyelash is an open or closed

parenthesis, depending on

its innocence.  Here it wants me

to consider all the space

it holds off for its own,

on the lower margin of a novel,

the cream pages breathing

in and out with my eye

on the story: I keep I see

I read about three people

on a beach.  It wants me,

small lash that it is, to consider

turning a page over more

slowly but I can’t forget

three paragraphs above it

was a dead ant, stuck on this

sentence:  “The baby slept on

in his arms.”  There’s a spot

of ant oil (what else would you

call it) between ‘his’ and

‘arms’ after I flick the black body

into the trash.  I’ve borrowed

the book, and I’m sure it’s past

due.  In the story a man is learning

how to swim.  He’s afraid

of the water and he’s just come up

for air.  It’s someone else, someone

who has a deep, treading water

grudge against him, who’s holding

his daughter in his arms.

There are loaded guns

and there is hesitated blood

everywhere.  But only hesitated.

Like when the book shut down

hard enough to take

the ant’s life but not hard enough

to squish it.  It was still so perfect 

I thought it was alive

when I turned the page.  But it

had merely been stuck waiting. 

Like the eyelash of some previous

reader: opening is an aside.  I

almost want to pluck one

of my own

and place it some distance from her

possible new companion, going

on to give its curve to catch

the rest of the thought, to consider

the next move.  But the story

isn’t read yet.  It’s written—

and some of it’s gone by me

in boats and stolen cars and bullet

holes.  And a drowned mother

who is still

alive in this bit, and crouched

“Japanese-style” which means

submissive? or spring-loaded?

Could mean she’s weak? Or

could mean she’s dangerous?  And more,

much more than the man

with the gun on his knee and the baby

in his arms gives her credit

for.  I’m here to tell you it pays

to read the parenthesis, even if

they are open, like cummings and his
experiment: (a

                     le
                     af
                     fa

                     ll

                     s). 

They are keys, secrets, like a ciphered-wink

between two people, given

quickly, but measured, while everyone
else looks somewhere else: to book

to pages to what's left to take
in to spine, to the entire binding…

while the father in the water

while the wife, while the baby

while the criminal with the gun

                                                                   )

Confidentiality: of Dignity

pause

Confidentiality: on Dignity

We shed our shapes slowly like moving water,

which ends up as it will so utterly far from home.

                                                                Jim Harrison

First maybe our thoughts are about recovering

a little dignity, stripped as it is and in pieces

on the floor, thin as mica and glinting and we

see it only if the light’s been left on.  Brittle,

it has no give when we pinch it, it isn’t stretching

the way we need it to, and the most of it stuck

to our blood, blood we’ll wash off, blood of the first

time for some and blood of the umpteenth time

for the rest of us.  I’m here to tell you that

the first step toward water will be a painting

in our brain and we’ll see the color of a blue

bruise pushing through the skin of our small

arch, as if we’d stepped on the business end

of the three-pronged extension chord just pulled out

of the socket and left lazily waiting for any at all
connection, the distance short, the hand in another

world.  And all around us is the unrecoverable: the lace

drapes, the stem ends of the late geraniums,

the way the hall, just past the cracked open

door pulls the dark out with it but does not,

cannot, replace it with a light that hasn't risen.

Fleetingly Revealed

outside the legion:
american flag

Fleetingly Revealed

And we, spectators always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses.
We re-arrange it, and collapse ourselves.

                                                     Rilke
                                                     Duino Elegies 

Two, like they were the only

and owned if not the proverbial whole

world at least the spaces

they crouched in cupping the end of whatever it was

to get it to fire to let them draw

in the hot of it while their bags soaked

up the puddles of slush.  They were so close

to the road.  A woman in a pushed back red knit cap

and her dreads cascading down her open

puffy coat, her spiny throat and collar bone.  

It was probably, if even, upwards to thirty

degrees.  And a man, his back

to me, covering her hands

with his, her knees his knees brought up

to her cheeks in an intimacy I’d see

only later, right now in fact, her whole life

story brought to an almost halt just feet

from the three in the afternoon street these

two people reflected back to me

like they were each of these things: muddy
puddle and breaking sky and all the wind in it and fire

most of all fire, though if it were the sun

or the lighter I’m not sure

I’d be able at all to tell and if I could even

explain the difference.

Behind them, behind us all, there are trains,

rusting relics of another age.  And churches. 

Some old duffer’s huffing up the stairs

in his basement conversion.  What was once

a mill.  What once rose up hand-laid brick, now 

withered, her summer seeds still in the mortar.

And some judge is bringing down

his gavel in his last case of the day, and maybe

whoever they are will get out and look up or down

and see something they’ve never seen

before, all of them, or maybe they’ll crouch

on the edge of a busy street and try to get lit

like they were the only ones in the world

in this whole wide rising falling down world.

On Second Chances

beneath, a leaf
old mill door
greenville, nh

On Second Chances

You’re shivering, O my memory.

You went out early without a coat.

                                                                Charles Simic

                                                                The Immortal

I’m beginning to like you and because I didn’t

at first and that was long ago when I cut you

off I thought I’m older now I can give you

a second chance I mean it’s not like we know

each other it’s not

like you would have liked me even if we did but at first I was

reading you because you were the only one

there and I was unpacking everything I’d thought
I'd have you in the bag

to save and somehow I must’ve begun to relate to
the skinny spine selection I got
from a friend or a for a bargain

and I’ve looked at over the years

though like all second chances (and hear I want

to interrupt myself by saying baby if I’d let you

touch my neck with your finger and maybe move you
to open your mouth if I felt

the wet pressure of your teeth

beneath the place where it throbs the most when

I’m thrilled (which isn’t to say, don’t mistake

me, unafraid) I may be

a completely different woman today Jesus

where were you

when I needed you where was I god

damn it when I needed you? And what’s left

to be said of second second chances other than

some people bow their heads to them

like they’re lions come stalking in the tall grass
and some people

take them by the genitals like they’re

the future and begin pumping

the life out of them.