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So you are here?  Straight from that moment still suspended?

I can’t stop wondering at it, can’t be silent enough.

Listen,

how quickly your heart is beating in me.

                                                     Wislawa Symborska

Convert

Is this?

                        this—this

                                    o

                                                            o

                                                                        God

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                the total end of him?

How.  I want to know how

I’m supposed to shape this

                                    this

                                    this

                                                stuffed

                                                calm

Maybe I should turn

Catholic—at least

they are not afraid to look

            at Mary

            at least they have the decency

            to know

                        God’s not

                        the only one sucked through

                        the sudden holes in their hands

                        and feet

                        as though

            it’s been waiting

            all along, and shit! it opens—

            pulls everything in and then OUT

            with it—thing? one! every ONE.

I don't know what I'm saying.

I only know 

I watch them go to mass

I watch some women unwrap

their thin lunch on Friday.  Their posture

their face…they’re no different than..

                                    But listen!  I want, I want (sorry)

a Saint Anne—give me a mother whose daughter lost a son

who can sit and stroke her and say

this

            this

                        listen

                                    this is his

 this

            and

                        this

                                                            with a cross

                                                                        with a drop

                                                           

                                                                                    of water

                                   

                                                                                                to hang on

                                                                                                                        to.

Ghost Pain

Ghost Pain

When Daddy came back from France

Mamma said he was a shadow

of himself, he shook, starting at one

a.m., like a geared up limb in a mid-

October wind, when there’s nothing left

of color but layers of brown, some

so rich they almost drip with it, liquid

brown, a thick leaded paint on the barn

door that Daddy, after shaking a first sip

of tea, would mix.  I’d watch him start

at the bottom and stroke up, thick

drips he’d catch when he lifted

his brush, stroke up from his feet

at the barn door and go up and up

until there were hips, until there were el-

bows, until the clavicle the neck the round

curve of a head and down the other side,

a hollow man, a door waiting to be

stepped through.  Days his shaking was so

he couldn’t eat.  He’d paint that shadow

on the barn door.  Days they lined up

like paper dolls, a whole family, out-

lined and then filled with soft strokes, his

flight of geese, almost soundless,

except a call out, a call out of his trench

lung but never returned.  Opening, opening

in a solid wood sky.  And when it wasn’t men

Daddy’d paint buoys.  And string a line

of them clear down the lane—a Noah’s tongue

he’d call it, hung there, beads of paint

rising up then sinking down into the wood

after he’d scraped old paint and cleaned the green

kelp and weeds, and the numbers, his

steady careful hand, best recognized

on the chop of water, he’d step back

and hand the brush off to his little grand-

son, more a pup than a boy: clean it best

you can don’t spill the thinner like you did

yesterday, stuff’s ready for a match, so don’t.

Ok Grampy….

And the buoys on their lathes…

and the hot sun of the end of June…

then into July

and the sag of line down to the grass…

and now Daddy paints a small shadow

on the barn door

and colors it in

a small brown shadow

and paints it again

holding the hand of someone taller,

Daddy’s height.  And the strokes

are slow.

The Last Jar--Before Cal Gets Home--and then, After

The Last Jar—Before Cal Gets Home—and then, After

the last jar of 1935

            carrots, put up last fall, sliced

            for a quick soup, are open on the long

            drain-board.  Their snap, the psssstPop!

            the sticking suck and the quick let go

                        (after she’d tapped the lid

                        to see it was fast)

            was the only noise the kitchen

            clock pulled into its tick.  She hummed

            but she was beside herself and clocks,

            and letting go of the last

            of something—well…

                        garlic and onion are obvious

                        and the hen,

                        she’s laid up quiet in the sink

                        or see—time’s good for tricks—

                        the carrot lid is marked

                        and she’s just pulled the onions

                        and they’re fresh as any weeping

                        she’ll ever do on the spot (but Cal’s

                        not home from the lake yet, so hold that)

                        except that morning, the limp wing

                        of her favorite old girl

                        it hurts me it hurts me

                        too big for the coon to lug off

                        but not to maim

                        and like this she picks her

                        up, and warm under her arm

                        there’s a heartbeat, a few hairy

                        caterpillars on the block—and no struggle

                                    it’s the mercy

                                    of the whole thing—once she knows…

                                    she just stops and lolls

                                    against the block…

                        a stray feather’s on her house-dress

                        the warm water’s getting warmer

                        the warm hen’s getting cooler

and the last jar of carrots

                        sliced for a quick soup, float now

                        in last summer’s brine,

                        globes, little orange globes,

                        in the musty, almost too musty water—

                                    it’s one thirty.  The hen’s white (purple

                                    bruise near the neck) skin is the same

                                    color as her hands.  Soon, in the boil-

                                    put in whole, her little globs of fat

                                    will waltz with a small turnip tip,

                                    a film of onion skin.  And salt.  Her one

                                    bird.  Her carrots.  And later,

throughout it all: her careful

                                    careful

                                    spoon to her husband’s lips

                                    But not yet.  Not yet. 

don't blame me

don’t blame me —

But I did.  I rushed. I did. I screamed I ran I rushed

through the crowd until I clutched

my dry blessedly dry boy told to stay away

from boats he loves boats he loves the way they float

and how he can sit without sinking yes I ran

I did and he was warm and dry and crying and alive

            except his knuckles

            in his mouth

            each bone I saw later

            ringed a red halo

            his teeth made

            out of which he’d whispered

            a boy’s name I couldn’t tell

            who a boy he said some boy

            he pushed me

            he pushed me

            out of the way saying

                                    it’s my turn it’s my                                         turn it’s my turn

Seals

Seals

People here used to believe

that drowned souls lived in the seals.

At spring tides they might change shape.

They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer

in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,

his shoulder to the jamb, his song

a rowboat far out in the evening.

 

                                    Seamus Heaney

There’s enough Irish here that to look at a seal now

would pull a bit of an ache to the teeth, that instead

of whistling there’d be a small groan, a burn begun

in the stomach, a bottom place no one ever knows

they stand on until that knock on the door, the politest ‘Ma’am’

you ever heard, as though a bung has been pulled

and all the color is leached, grey as a baby

seal beneath the water, popping up between breakers,

whiskers thick with—oh I don’t know—just thick.  The twitch

in the nose.  It’s as though they’re always crying,

eyes a puddle of shoe black, tar black, molasses black

a fall into a never surface again black.  And though it seems

they laugh and bark and snorkel and curl and twist, an excited

big boned puppy—soon, don’t you want

to say soon, the laugh is a whisper, is a thin whistle, is,

because you believe some of it or need to, a hum

 

of a hymn, a little too surly for church, but just enough fun

for seals.  Babies play, doing the world without

requirement.  This old notion mystique of girls in seal

skin, of guardians of the drowned, is, standing on this break

water, believable.  The closer they get, the braver we both

are in the water, it’s more real every moment, the tide

coming up like lips, starting at the feet, receding, coming

back, each time, depending on the moon-clock, depending on

skin slick with salt and oil, depending on staying.  This solid

spine of rip-rap, bolted to the floor of our sea, shifts while we

watch seals and ignore the prominent chain of Danger: Keep

Out we walk past.  Because we think we've conquered 

water, we're finally stronger, sure footed, keen.  We are.  Don't

we believe it, have to, when the baby cries and pulls away 

from comfort and takes that first step, swaying but keeping it because they saw

the bob and dip of their kin and want to run to them, be them.

June 23, 1936

June 23, 1936

What do we really know about how we relate to our memories?

They are so personal, so undefinable.  Where am I more real: in my

memory or in yours?  Where am I more alive?

                                                            Elie Wiesel

Lubec Public Schools

Report of

For Term Beginning        1935-1936

School                                                         Grade

          First Term                                                   Second Term

Half Days Absent

Times Tardy

Times Dismissed

Deportment

Reading

Spelling

Writing

Language

Arithmetic

History                                    

Geography

Physiology

Declamation

Music

I Can’t

ICan’t

i  can’t.

ICAN’T!

get past deportment:

manners

actions

conduct

demeanor

this dry white square

this dry pen nib

this dry open ink bottle

this wind blowing

those scraps of loose

pencil-shaving-pencil lint across the floor

—(it’s not

March but wouldn’t a warm fire be nice…)

my tea’s cold.

my sandwich crust’s gone

hard…the little

field mouse

on two hind legs in the corner

wipes her nervous face

steps

stands

and wipes her nervous

face…

my the vacant vacant school 

room

i’m teacher

I’m teacher

head in hands

a Lot’s wife

an Orpheus

going salt

going stone

going

mad

curling curling

the thin paper

beside this small stack

of these still

blank

always blank

rank cards—

a thimble and a thumb a decade of sunday communion

a thimble and thumb a decade of Sunday communion

How perilous is it to choose

not to love the life we’re shown?

                                    Seamus Heaney

                                    from “Badgers”

There are those, oh aren’t there those, who, in the coming

decade would say you got a taste of it yourself by Jesus

            (under their breath, between sips of Jim Beam)

and two! would you look at that, a daughter and her...

            (but shhhh…)

It’s those folks who let you go in first, hold the door, walk you  

straight to the pew near the front

and hand you a wafer and slim thimble of juice who don’t see

            (how can’t they) the habitual twitch has come since

since before your girl, and her gone baby are buried—though not

            with her, and after the tray’s taken

don't those settle back to the minister’s melody of judge

not lest ye… and those whose bread goes cold to watch Clara          

            (saint she is) touch the cup and bring them 

back to you had it coming you had it coming you have to know

            Christ God  what it’s like life doesn’t just

go on it doesn’t here Cal let me get the door for you, how are

you today, awful sorry to hear about your girl, had she taken

sick?