Only she who has breast-fed
knows how beautiful the ear is.
Only they who have been breast-fed
know the beauty of the clavicle.
Only to humans the Creator
has given the earlobe.
The humans, through clavicles
slightly resembling birds,
entwined in caresses fly
to the place at night where,
rocking the cradle of cradles,
the babe is wailing,
where on a pillow of air
the stars nestle like toys.
And some of them speak.
In the warming house, children lace their skates,
bending, choked, over their thick jackets.
A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy
it’ s hard to imagine why anyone would leave,
clumping across the frozen beach to the river.
December’ s always the same at Ware’ s Cove,
the first sheer ice, black, then white
and deep until the city sends trucks of men
with wooden barriers to put up the boys’
hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,
rain on the lake
room at the lodge
alone in a room
in the lazy light
loons on the lake
geese in the air
moose in the woods
aware awake
a cry dislodged
from the musty woods
the gamy musk
of the one aroused
the roaming moose
the rooms lit up
the woods awake
in the loony light
the moon dislodged
the lake aflame
the Muse amazed
amused aroused
I acknowledge my status as a stranger:
Inappropriate clothes, odd habits
Out of sync with wasp and wren.
I admit I don’t know how
To sit still or move without purpose.
I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.
Bustle and caw. Recall the green heat
rising from the new minted earth, granite
and basalt, proto-continents shuffling
and stacking the deck, first shadows flung
from the ultraviolet haze. A fern
uncurls from the swamp, the microscopic furnace
of replication warms the world, one
becoming two, two four: exponential blossom.
Lush with collision, the teacup balance
of x and y, cells like balloons
escaping into the sky — then the dumbstruck
hour, unmoored by a river,
In the barn demoted to garage,
the ax in a cherry stump can’ t be budged.
Daylight perforates siding despite
the battered armor of license plates —
corroded colors, same state: decay,
their dates the only history
of whoever tilled the soil
and left, as a welcome, the skull
of a possum nailed to the door, and the trail
of lime to the torn sack
in a corner where cobwebs festoon a scythe.
Rusted sharp, it sings
when he grips its splintery handle, swings,
and crowns topple from Queen Anne’ s lace.
"There's machinery in the butterfly;
There's a mainspring to the bee;
There's hydraulics to a daisy,
And contraptions to a tree." If we could see the birdie
That makes the chirping sound
With x-ray, scientific eyes,
We could see the wheels go round."
And I hope all men
Who think like this
Will soon lie
Underground.
Quick passage into
memory and behind
only blank spaces,
blue stain on pink
litmus or merely
known so closely
something falls away
receding from touch,
caught in the air
your fingers move,
agile water-fly
padding the surface
Chile, 1834
John-O was given a key to the apartment. The deal
was this: if Phil died suddenly, and John-O heard,
he would rush on over, enter the apartment, leave
unseen with Phil’ s brown suitcase, and secretly pitch it
into the mounded deeps of the city dump.
Simply, there were things that Phil didn’ t want
to hurt his family with. Do you have yours?
