Manners at the Wake

Manners at the Wake: Do Not to Gawk Straight at a Her.  Or Him.  Or Her.

           

Only when in her periphery.  Only when oars scud off the water

            of her face to cause some pause– Only when that water,

                        riding inside and beside, only until it's past them all, when

                                   the float is not possible anymore, or the wave, or the rough

                                                or sweet, the cut or the unmarked can reach

into her dear own throat, only then (but seen later) does that bubble, all along,

           all along rise to her surface and make sense: opaque as air with its flat water

                        seal, it is a glimpse, a lidded breath, a delicate, delicate hell, this 

                                    little bubble rising from her lung to throat to nose

to roost there maybe on the (w)hole world of her face, waiting.  And more, in the 

            suds of her mouth, what's later wiped away swift and simple by Mama, who’s next

                       to see, who's head was never so perched, never such a rock

                                    in her lap of air, not since baby, born still as clotted 

                                               milk, the pause, Jesus that rock that pause before

she sways and holds her wet flower of handkerchief to her mouth, breathes in

            and gags.

Service for Twelve: Writing Their Eulogy

Or this: 

Never having felt to the roots

of this hair, he scrapes and pulls and chafes

each follicle that falls…  he holds it in

the light of the dim moonmoat,

a jaw on the white

white page of the still to write

eulogy.  The paper’s a cavern yawn of a fox jaw

he’d seen once as a boy, and the nib’s

her black meat jowl on white teeth.  And soon,

because eulogies like these are nothing less
than going out blind in blizzards alone, 
and bunking down, he hallucinates
a bright wet red against the paper snow.

And when the weather clears: the sprung closed

trap he’d put his weight into a day, maybe two,

before, to set…

(and the still blaze of that precious coat,

and the two ungloved girls, their hands hidden 
but he imagines the pimply skin
anyway)

And this too, going into, going through:

It was the cold the stiff cold that scorched him—

Maybe he’d expected warm, maybe,

a broth or tea, but when all the hes or shes..., he didn’t stay

in the make-shift morgue to see
those dozen driftlogs in summerwinter water, crushed

under the thick cove, like ice thinning at his feet, his wits,

his diaphragm a ceaseless hiccup.

To lead to:

Until the thaw.  Until some mercy caressed his mouth

the way sprung springs sigh when pulled back

by practiced hands.  Only when they don’t,

all to once like thought, they are that very same caught log

pulled into and under the tide like all the rest—

But not like that. It was never like that—:

sermon words—eulogy words—

they were, at first, the fox’s wet

black nose sensing the air and coming up

to that moss covered bait-plate

and leaning in and sniffing and leaning in
and tilting her head while opening her mouth
to get at the meat at an angle

and snap!

That fast.  What’s sprung is sprung.
The marvelous gateway's a blur
now, a shade of Eurdice's winding
sheet dragging on the underground.  In his dream
she's petting the fox:

            Pure grace, she is a grin inside all that golden grass

            he wanted to see when he was nine, when her tail,

            swallowed by the hillside, was just that, not the snow,

            not the black-toothed goon closed on her nose.  No.

            Instead it’s her mouth, her tongue.  Her rooted teeth still
            needed, still necessary, still a row of teeth letting in,
            letting out, letting go, letting go, but no words, no hell 
            no, not a yip or a word.  Yet.

What Cal Sees in the Dream

If Cal Sees --
Listen,
It's in his Dreams 

if under the water they brushed past

each other 

if each finger or toe in the drift and lift

of hair or coat 

if there was untanned throat 

if they floated

until finally ..

if for minutes or hours the bottom

if the solid bottom

if solid bottom was their cot.  

And then if. 
If as is the way of small things, drift 

if lice and leaches 

if pebbles

if fish kiss and nip a lip 

if an open eyelid

if closed 

if stuff in their coat pants shirt cheek pockets

if any small corner swished the spit of the picnic

if the dates the lemon patties 

if all of what they ate before

if the boat...

listen: 
it’s how you know something’s 

full you know? when you're pouring it in the dark 
it’s when the pitch of that pour shifts 
it shifts, and
it's the tip of your thumb hovering

it's inside the rim when what’s wet/what's warm hits 
it's the hover

it's when you stop pouring when you move the thumb

                        or first finger away and sway away from

                        the bloat and float away from the blanket

it's when they're covered at last covered 
it's while I sit

it's against this pine bed 
it's when I see through the legs of the preacher

and he's so kind 
and he blocks some of my view 
and the boy and boy and boy

and boy and girl brought out pumped clean 
and those small fish
and leaches

and pine needles squeeze 
out between the open gate of teeth

Saying Grace

Saying Grace

As though to mock and haunt me, late

that summer the corn and the peas, like pails of pearl

essence, pails and pails, glowed.  In their mothered

shellac, (their gilled breath choked then bruised to liquid

ooze) I remember the way you’d run your knife, blade back-

ward, scaling the foot long body of the fish.  See

the sheen?  How it’s a phantom at your feet?    But these

corn and peas, are seeds,

shucked and shelled and steaming, these and new

potatoes, (but the beet greens and chards, they’re as good

as come and gone long before the boat…) still

how now their roots and tubers should bulge

in my mouth, how they should find their way

into this blessing, before

meat if we have any.  But all the boiled or stewed begins

to go cold as the press of my head into the split

knuckles and lips, and the butter melts

soft then goes spongy on the knuckles of peas, and they gleam

and then, like those fish, go opaque in the eye,

in the gill, gone in their ecstasy of grip,

in their flap and fillet for air.  My suitable prayer:  it’s nothing

but frayed padding under the kneeler hooked to the pew.  

I’ll never bend there again. Not now since the lake. 

Not now since that water.  Not now since

he’s beneath it all but up the road.  Grace is that

cataracts of fog, pearl liquid… grace is pearl blob burnt

into resin the factory crucible.  It bakes against itself

and then, when it’s scraped, like full plates gone cold,

can only fall into the open dark, fall fall into God’s

broad and gobbing throat of dark.

When the Beginning Was Become Void

When the Beginning Was Become Void

But

Before: Creation:

One:    And light         for day against night

Two:    And a firmament         against the waters

            And the waters twist into a ball             and against this a spin to make land dry land

Three:  And grass and seed and trees: fruit trees          against themselves but within themselves

Four:    And lights                    against the sky a wide eye sky never closing only turning

            And a quiet eye always sometimes open sometimes not

            And stars         those too                     against the hem of heaven

Five:    And birds  And fish  And whales         in these and against the wind and water they multiply

Six:      And the cattle creep                in and against the dust            

            And all the beasts creep          in and against the trees

            And the seeds inside the seeds inside the seeds inside the secrecy within/against

            And least of these                                me                               between beasts and trees

                                                            on my knees bending knees

                                                            sweeping clean the earth

                                                            for my Sweet Pea my son

            And we creep  we eat weeds   we sweep the sky with our baleen mane, our breached jaw

&

Then

After:   New Creation:                                    

Six:      And we creep in the filth and screech like wingless bats against alleys and moonlight

Five:    tight light under the roof of night against all day gone day gone forever day

Four:    gone out day forever out like the stars too and no way to know our way

Three:  to the gate, after all the sod is pulled away, after all the mud and clay are laid square

            after he’s laid prostrate and I fling my fist-ball of earth in

            reverse reverse to the sun

Two:    only to rub my face raw with His now curse of it that me firmament against me water

One:    that night again again without light

Cold

Cold

though it’s only  August

and blueberries to rake

all damn day.

August although this December

cold's a winter cow’s milk cold

bucket on the drain-

board or spilled

(yesterday, I couldn’t help

it)

glow on the snow cold, it’s snow

it’s August snow the sway

and glow the low light

globed against a blow

a single blow of wind,

that boat blown over

he’s in the bow

alone

And in the all the space 

between,

in the thin space between 

the house

and the barn,

if it’s a hundred

yards it’s miles I can’t

seem to get to him, swim

fast enough to get to him

in one breath

or every one I’ve taken

since.  It’s cold

it’s been cold. 

Can’t wear enough.

Or days

like these get up stay up 

long enough I only want to

be still enough

like he could, is,

is

under his white wood hood

wood, wood it’s wood, wood and the Guernsey

bawling with blister

pain until her late baby

is turned into her stall long

after he needs to or should

to butt

her bag and then between

his teeth her teat, her relief

and my feet burnt

as frostbite from getting to the cold

barn the thick shit stall,

from laying the way he

lays this long August

and will well into Fall

into all the months

to come

to drift like blown snow

without much

notice

to breathe water

to breathe water

And behold, there came a great wind

from the wilderness, and smote the four

corners of the house, and it fell

upon the young…and they are dead

and only I am escaped alone to tell thee

                                    The Book of Job

                                    1:19

by then it must have seemed the great god she believed in was dead too, that the big blue skirt of the sky was lifted in a swift wind and every single light put out when the rain arrived, even when they try to revive the fire with new fire breathing: a puff a pinch a lung-full a gallon a gallon but every spark was shuttered out and the snubs of tallow and their charred limp wicks curled like cripples were swept into the muck their house had become

sweet jesus seven twos and sometimes ones and the last in tow: that boat who once was was staging for her great frame a body now all wobble all wax all melt as if from some sheltered woodlot a man kept cutting down trees kept sawing them all halfwise quarterwise split then split again down down her brown brown molasses heart and sent them into a liquid-pitch flame, and she was bubble rising, like paint in the heat and breaking open and steam, all that steam, the only only breathing

nothing, nothing

Nothing, nothing

but the shimmer in the chum, of light.

It punches through the water, a torch

beam that pinches, it ill-

umes and widens all the eyes shut up

against the sway of hair, an Irish moss

on a high, but going out, after a storm tide.

He takes the faces in.  Like an audience,

these faces, mouths and open wide,

propeller raw heads, they float through legs

and dresses pulled hemside up.

Like umbrellas.  In this liquid wind,

and viscous float that he’s poised, that he’s stage

curtain quiet, string trembling in a change

scene queue: in his palm, as though he’d never

rehearsed at all, when to pull I mean,

when, on cue, to draw

the right string and open it all up

to the awe

of the audience, fssst, fssssst—he pulls

down

            down

                        too hard

but too hard and in in in the reverse!

And the curtain, what he’s supposed

to open, is as closed

as it’s getting and now he’s panic, he drops

his hold and it’s lost in all those velvet

folds of dying.  And though he gropes in this soft

heavy air, he reasons how to fall

into it all,

the fabric wrap.

He opens and closes his hand

on the empty, he knows the string’s

gone.  But he pulls one last moment.

at nothing

nothing nothing

at water

and hair and faces and a drifting

dead boy nudging him away

from it all…

unheimlich—unhoming

unheimlich—unhoming

Oh my love I am afraid.

The sound has stopped in the day

And these images reel over

And over…

                                    Seamus Heaney

                                    “Wedding Day”

                                 

Later she’d liken herself to the Unhomed, that race

of Sea-Faring Giants who lost their skill

to navigate their way,

and maybe it began when the spike

of lightning seemed rammed

straight through the wood-       

stove and into her, blown telephone

off the wall, lifted beds

up from the floor, the dogs’ wiry hair

singed in the tingling

effervescent air.  It seemed

a genuine exorcism as quick

as she went stiff and took that nail

straight on and lay

flat as the blown off mattress,

not smoke so much as steam,

hot fog, as though the dome

of her skull were washed and a vault

of a sepulcher

or a ceiling she’d seen

in CCD books were scorched there:

            fat bare babies twined in girdles

            of a blue so blue she doubts it’s ever seen

            completely, not even in skies wiped dry

            by an ablution like this.

            Or later she’ll see it’s a squid’s

            creep into his own ink and squim, a frenzied

            epilepsy, a slurry of thirst and revolt

            of mouth on mouth, of that seizure

            gone on long long long

            enough to bung the lung and tongue against it all.

What changes after lightning,

after the sky’s kiln insists

it’s a furnace in her, is the way

saints and Cathedrals buzz

and sputter between the shoals

of coal piles alight from inside

like that Moses tree free from char,

with all her God

inside of it.  She sees that tree,

pristine when her bare feet

insist, and the light’s tingling like blood

gone to sleep

then waking up again

in a house that, in the ripple of blast

trauma, rocks blind in the thin moat of light.

It’s all aura

all over her

palsied body.

Or when, listen, she lay beneath the dahlias

and the sun was good

to her, a quickening, a queen-kin

a dapple – that Hopkins line

she’d run to her brush to paint

against the bleach-white board:

the couple-caul that the petals were,

the brinded underbelly

of the leaf, the stipple.  By heart

it’s her priest’s favorite.  And

she’d paint the trout, the cow,

the finch, until her urge is sugar

juice boiled near to burn, all that water called

up the copper curl, cauterizing,

her father once said, when they lived

in South Carolina, a man’s soul-

hole.  When his horses sweet heads fell

in an Ypres sleep beneath the deep mud streets

he’d asked every angel he could name

what and why and it all came down

to silence. 

All that was before.  Before even

her Lubec

Daniel, though there’d be times

when she’d want the lightning more

than the water.  At night, you know?

When the whole house was

cold and sober.  When she’d press

her thumbs abductor muscles into her eye

sockets and make those rainbows

break, memorializing the slide under

the water and how first it was all that burning,

and then all that pulled her out

of it.  Was it when she let go

or when he let go?

She never could tell.  Akimbo with all those knees

and elbows, that long long hair

all that going black and then

when it absolutely couldn’t happen

it did:

the lightning, the sepulcher,

the moment she was surface,

was pulled out of it all, almost.

And then there were times,

most times,

when it was all the same, the way

she went under for real

those two times.  She felt it

in her own knees and feet.  She felt it

in her cheeks and the roots

of her teeth.  She smelled it coming

even, because instinct

had taught her this by now:

she flared her nose

her mouth, every opening

and went down

into it.  And each time

was the same yet slightly

singular.  There was nothing before

that lightning or all that water…

there was no before or beyond those

two things.  It was as if

they never ever were, as if she were

born a struck girl and then

when shoved at the shoulder,

woken up, she was never baby

born.  She was all along lost.