On Finding Old Photos

On Finding Old Photos

It’s possible, at first glance,

(and then

a longer tucking in,)

to fall in love with the pause,

and then with the soft as gosling

fade on their face, their lips,

how they ask

nothing in their looking out

but the staying of shade,

how years into simply looking 

they will not so much intention

as continue listening--

these photos, they put me

to wonder,  if I held

them  to my cheek and ear and lips

wouldn’t feel and hear

the breath let out and retrieved.

Some photos, long long

into the sepia curl of their age,

the old bones weighted down

and blown over by oblivious winds

and all these years of heave

and sod.  Listen: this is their brief arriving,

their quickening return.

The long retreat of sea

or creek and its coming away

is our own random debris of memory

scattered like the tended/neglected

glass or shell consequence lays

at our feet as we happen by, taken

up by our own lives.  And as it is

with unexpected treasures

aren’t we as quick to our lips 

or our ear, and because the edges

are rubbed off, because it’s smooth

inside, and quiet as low tide,

isn't the breathing hard at first,

and the mist of it caught

by all familiars, a shock quick to go

to a soft pause and then hello, and welcome home. 

We’ve waited such a long time

for you to arrive again.

Because There Were Boys Who Weren’t Allowed To Go: Chores:

Because There Were Boys Who Weren’t Allowed To Go:

Chores:

Hard on the land wears the strong sea

and empty grows every bed

                        John Berryman

                        Dream Songs – I

what is a saved life exactly?

a hoed row when more than too soon

pruned roots lie cut with weeds

each the color (after sun) of late peas, spread

wide on an attic floor

                        when days before

                        they’d opened a window

                        and swept the under-

                        side of the roof with rags,

                        a broom, their mouths

                        and noses gagged

                        for the bat shit

                                                spic

                                                &

                                                span

                        their mama said

                                                we got

                                                beans

                                                and peas

                                                corn

                                                seed

                                                I won’t have no bats

                                                or rats pissin’

                                                n’ shittin’

                                                all over

                                                you go up

                                                scrub buckets

                                                hot water

                       

                        until not one was spared

                        against the work
                        to stay home from the lake

                        and traps were laid

                        and all the cracks closed against those bats

                        their cheep and tweet

                                                shell and shuck,

                                                take them to the barn

                                                (you want bats

                                                but not near

                                                those peas

                                    and keep it clean, sweep

                                    it every night—

so it would be there, he was in

the attic,

the almost man

sweeping and one rat

gawking out the trap

he was about to throw out

the window to the trash

when he saw down the drive-

way the utter sag

and drag of the foot and face

of his friend
just dropped off at the end
of the lane, 

but being so far up the lane it’s a voice

without the voice – until it carries

up to him and by then

it’s as pitched and pinched

as a  swallow caught

in the claws of some hawk –

he hears it above the tree line

he thinks, that streak…

then the shriek.  

Painter at the Beach

Painter at the Beach

In paradise I poised my foot above the boat and said:
Who prayed for me?
                                        James Wright
                                        "Father"

What they once were has sunk and become other eyes or throats, but only after they're broken and stirred, a scum skimmed or made thin.  Once they've flocked and folded.  Once they're turpentine mewl, and later,  mute mixed blobs she tethers together stroke to stroke then over her bleached board and canvas: her whole wet cove of low fog or smoke. She opens sniffs each tube while folks she's known, 

those boys and girls, step up to her and glow so begnignantly.  They close the distance, smelling of balm, of salty pebbles, of shadow only these dead can muster.  Nothing but her brush and a hand and that scent, and then not only a hand, but all what else is landed and clutched: like those salt-marsh nesting birds who’re hidden, always hidden in sand and roses.  She paints those timid birds in winter, when 

they're gone, the plovers and sandpipers, flocks she follows all summer through the goose tongue greens, that bog the side pools, while tides come and go and stand.  She comes and watches, she waits while they peek and peck, she waits while they spook and swarm, she waits while they set and settle up the beach aways, always arriving in a hood in the rain. And she’s just eyes, and just fists in her ripped 

pockets.  And she’s been doing this for years: seeing them settle and rise, settle and rise, seeing them migrate before winter while the summer folks still unborn, a generation away maybe, are a smidge a bubble so far from forming, so far from being made, they might never ever, and the birds, the quick spooked birds pause before she touches (when the sun comes) the canvas with the brush, with the paint. 

Dream Rescues: After Pulling Her to Shore

Dream Rescues: After Pulling Her to Shore

Now all Junes are open water blue winter lakes.

A complicated grate of ice.   

The time when, in February, remember? you

had to take off your gloves to fuss

the auger after you tripped and it slipped  

into the just ladled hole?  I’d slushed it to a bucket-

fort any summer kid would crave to make,

and you'd lurched somehow, just dropped

and your hand and the drill fell in, fell

down that slushed-out closing slow hole.  You,

your great open sweep of coat fanning the ice,

were a broken-legged doe, and you went flat

to your chest and wet, wet.  My castle collapsed.

And after, with your elbows

and feet a flinging parapet and drawbridge.

You were up to your shoulder and you pitched,

you bit down on your lip and pulled.  Remember? 

But by then one, then two, ruby spatters

smacked the snow.  When the cold caught, 

struck you dull, you could not remember how to pull

horizontal, so, barehanded, I slipped in

beside you like a midwife might

to glide beside the breach and slide to

find that one grounded bone, and ease it

straight and guide you into the colder but dryer

wind.  And finally, our augur, free and freezing,

immune as Dad’s blue January anvil. (Oh Aaron!  I go

under that water to recover her every night.

Every night sleep is tight as ice, a closing

hole, and pulling is breaking you (her) loose.  Her hair

is your coat-tail-fan on the ice.  That splayed-leg-

stiff.  That slap at the first shock of water, rigid

lips and the same black crack down the middle

of your lip.  My only fault is I can't get back

to shore. Even if I make my breath water. I puff, I needed  

to, your name, easy, you are so close to me, on her cheek.)

Remember?  In the dream
she dies because I don't know her name.  

Holding you on the ice, once your fled blood starts back
to your wrist, persuaded to stay, 

it’s as easy as breathing, a tingle, like soda bubbles.  We  
laugh at the end.  And this part is dream true:

My own open coat.  My shirt lifted.  My own warm skin,
pimpled past shivering, soon that anvil cold blue.   When I put your wet

hands under my arms, and I close over them, and then down, 
your near dead fingers spark.  The water changes: 

The shiver.  The pimple. The teeth over the lips.

And for a moment those fingers and my ribs are the same skin
and bones.  For a minute we are warm.  Remember?

Even though we thought we were only sheath, 
only bone, we were, like a broken doe 

or a drowning girl, heaving in snow.  Slipping.  Getting 
up.  Coughing and pissing before we skid, 

at first, and then, like nothing, come free.  Solid as a auger.  
As a girl that girl come up from bottom, her matted scalp 

in my fist, limp and frigid.  But with grit: your fingers 
beneath my arms, the future use of them whispered, handed back to you, 

simple as a life coming out of the wet dark, grabbing blood
and breath, gulping it all down whole.

into Being

into Being

Until I hold you all
up.  Until the light is far enough. 

And away. I didn't know 

how smudged you'd be

how smeared with the force
of the swim the cool June.  And back

out but dead.  How dusted with crusts

of cheese, how feeding this feast

(but not in order)to the other

people at the table would seem

an absolute.  An ordinary fact
of life: sweet salt.  

Is it blight or providence 
to provide and prepare

the prophet her night 

through to morning? What is

it?  What does it mean to see 
from a dream a distance,

the length from the lens of cells, 
to those whose limbs can move
now only through plaster and lathes 

and then wake us up aching, dusty?  The girl 
who dreamed her brother dying
but didn't know it

was a dream of her brother
dying.  Is it hours after
the accident she notices?

Or is it the distance of summers
and the long suffocating
darks she charts?

Because only when it's all 
too far away is it a blur

she stops reaching for, 

a horn hassling the fog
on the shore, a picture paused
on the wall in the hall

or across the room at the funeral.
She can't see, even up close.
Or even, later, squeeze a memory 

from it.  There are too many.  

How is it we have any breath 
left at all? 

I mean think:

how still the children had to go
to die all those years ago, 
to pull off their glee as though

it were a disease, pull off that 
caul of thought, that pause of 
awe at being truly dead.

It’s so honest it's firefly brief, or a parasite

that bangs against brain
and come away concussed,

falls to the ground, and vomits.  

Like the mothers and fathers receiving
this news after the swirl of it set and jelled:

when they breathe some 
of the hot-tongue facts, words spontaneously

pause, levitate in the algae and be-

come now their other son
or daughter.  Imagine it, how news
like this becomes another

child, the only one left 
to hug around the neck, and no matter
how stiff it can't be choked

dead again.  It levitates above the bed
now and rubs the back
of their neck right at the point

where life jabs.  It makes them drop
everything and lie dumb

and openmouthed.  Breathe.

Breathe over that flat lake, late with the bob

of loons.  The men are long home 
from throwing their ropes. 

But it’s their throwing that’s unwipeable.
That undisputed God-pause 
of the hook hanging like nothing.

Thoughts without air.

As though they've been caught in a fabric
only dead things can see.  And, when ripped,
and words pour out, it's the beginning

of something altogether new
in their world.  It started
this way, the cauterizing of God's

chaos: His bladder
of the universe, torn open
on the whole community.

And stars come together because
of it to burn words shut.  They work for years doing
it.  They're still working on it: news

of boys and girls and aunts and sisters
dripping through.  And all the mothers who see 
but don’t say.  They can’t wipe their face

enough to wash all away.  Even
if they rubbed for a million
minutes, even though the blood

doesn't move, the cheeks sag
with the hold of it.  See?  Can you?
It's in the water.  It always has been.  

Grave Digger in the Rain Imagines Ireland

Grave Digger in the Rain Imagines Ireland

Clay is the word and clay is the flesh...
                                  Patrick Kavanagh

It’s his mud.

Where it pimples

and puckers. 

He can’t see  

the spade. And every drop

of viscous spit

is gone and it’s nothing

but wet tack, sod, 

a whole round globe

of a summer's dry heave/wet

peat, slung

in the sun, bricked,

each precious inch

sinking to be sucked 

dry by the hot throat

of the sky whose esoph-

agus is broader,

wider than

the turf spade and all her

intentions.  And each

slice he now pulls

up, this pyramid

of dirt tumbles back

into his precisely gridded

grave.   They are so close.
Like trundles
in a fever hospital.

The morning was tar 

dark. The morning was rain,

was sludge, was the bottom

of his sanity.  He’d wanted

it dry.  Dry as summer

coal.  Dry as white cedar

bark.  He wanted

a drink.  But even if

there were he wouldn’t…

wouldn’t.  Not here. 

Not this dig.  Or the six

before.  Or the six

yet to come.  The itch.

The pucker.  The mud

and soon, though whose to know: 

the sun.

He plunges the spade.  

Lifts the dirt.  Sings

or rather gurgles.  He can't

sing.  But he tries.  Here,

before the crowds arrive,

and in the rain,

he tries.

At the End: Stations of the Cross

At the End, 13th.  At the beginning: 14th 

Stations of the Cross:  

Her tears ran down her cheeks//Because she had none

to comfort her

Thirteenth station: -the body of Jesus is laid in the arms of his mother

                                      Reader: We adore you oh Christ and we bless you

                                      Mother: Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

                       

Because I want  

his absence beatified I want it

to prove miracles.  I want his limbs

his limbs! to sprint, I want his hands

his hands! to hold my hand.  I! want! Him! Alive!

Not not be.  Not this wet dredge.  Not this,

this ... I want. I want...

Do you have something other than this

my gut on my tongue?  I want

Goddamn I want him back, alive to me back I want him instead, 

           

instead! of Jesus God Mary

instead of sin I want

noise his noise I want scabs

his scabs, sweat his sweat I want

it all on my lips I want

not these stiff white beads I want

his knuckles under my thumb, his sitting on my lap (he wasn't too big
for that) I want               GOD

before they float away with him float away with him I want him.

Fourteenth: - Jesus is laid in the tomb

                                                Reader: We Adore you O Christ and we bless you:
                                                People: Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.