o

o

NO.  No no no no.  I tell you no no no

it’s not him no no he can’t no it’s not no it’s

not possible no I saw him just now I saw him no no

no get out get out get out GET OUT out no look look he’s outside

no look you passed him when …he…no I told him

no boats no boats you bastard I told him oh

it’s not no god it’s not not Merrill, baby

no not him

Last Words

Last Words

The way the mouth might hold jagged gags,

word-stones of broken teeth sucked against the gum

and always bloody always sharp. 

The way, when the news arrives, the tongue has to find

something else to do.  It’s a caught and blunted,

stripped bud bear, bolted short chained to the post and

                        the way the claws are hauled

                        out one by one then cauterized

                        by hot drops of ore

The way such ore is poured into

her unscrupulous crucible, but makes a graceful wisp

of a crack that years ahead of now will be black, still black

on a lavender background…

all day

all day the lake-           ore is smelting:                                                no good news

                                                                                    about your boy

                                                                                    aboard a boat

                                                                                    first one in maybe

                                                                                    and beneath a tarp

                                                                                    with another boy

The way a tongue and gums begin to put on

weight almost without

knowing, as though the only thing

in the room is news

                                                                        gorged to swelling, greedy to telling

                                                                        but listen!

                                                                       

                        it’s quiet, it’s like

                                                this muscle has got so big

                                                                        it’s suffocating everyone.

Like the way, in most Novembers,

the biggest buck would, hung from your tallest

pine, and astride its hide a sign of your boy’s

                                                                        first shot (because the boy

                                                                        squeezed his eyes

                                                                        before he squeezed the trigger…)

Mother.  Don’t remember way your words

were shot as he slammed the door

behind him, buckshot spraying the back of his head

“Get out of here!                     anddon’t                      youever                        comeback!

Don’t imagine the way they were stuck in his skull,

their usual berth, and, though the undertaker

pulled each small rock the sweep and drag rash

imbedded,

the way every foul word you ever spoke

fell into the bucket at the funeral home

was his sifted skull, the cracked bow,

the way each tinked in the tin

of it, the bloody tin tink tink on the bottom

of the tin, in your teeth.

And you grind and grind and grind.  Swallow

and grind.

Letter Home:

Letter Home:

WWII: Somewhere

in the Pacific Ocean                       

It’s different, it is,to see it snow at sea: the soft

(or sometimes not) long drift (or sometimes not)

of flake and flake and flake, and the way

it accumulates on the deck, the way it’s absolutely

swallowed by the salt-rimmed lips of each low

then high slope wave: wholly gone.  There.  And then. 

How, now, seeing the white pocked sky and the inch high

almost ash on the coats of the crew, they in black boiled wool

coats rising and disappearing in the wind and snow

in their slow clearing of the deck so that they’re in

and out of the frame: visible                                        absent

visible              absent                          visible

they seem a lighthouse beam, whose straight out from shore

is an eye cutting the snow, a closure opening, close, open, a code

of what shore you’re about to run aground against…but oh

if my brother could be here he loved snow he just dug and hunkered

and tunneled and flung it into…just for this part.  Not the war.

No.  Not the war.

And the ship pitches and shifts and the snow, what drifts...it’s my

turn at the deck.  It's odd, the white that falls into the drink, is gone

all gone, as gone as all the boys that day eight boys.

But how spooky when the eye ,when the sky when it all everything (after

they died) was snow-falling calm.

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.