little brother

Vintage In the quiet and the dark is what makes it, and don’t forget time, the most of it the way we leave everything bottled and tipped to our shoulders on the shelf (so the cork will slide come an opening time) and turn off the lights to wait for it to become aged.  Though tell me this has not gone and done and borne all the doing alone, begun in the sod it was sunk to off in the hills and along the coast while the sun comes and goes and the moon too.  Under such a future I wonder if we have to be afraid of the soft and clotted  unilluminated mud  we're shoved and  shouldered-into-: us-dark that is everything we crawl inside to take to being rooted up, plucked, peeled and crushed and sucked up to be soaked over something sweeter something on the hinge of bitter, with a tooth to it, made after years of waiting to rest in the cup of the right tongue, the bouquet rising up to that one nose t

A Stone Throw From the sky in the form of snow comes the great forgiveness. Rain gown soft, the flakes descend and rest, they nestle close, each one arrived, welcomed, and then at home.                                                                                                                                 November                                                                 William Stafford You make it through to the end of the first day of hunting season with nothing but a bent back and a burn deep in the pads of both your feet.  Maybe the lazy days before November didn’t tell you enough about how much walking out into the woods would cost you: the new rifle, the one you argued with your wife about while the car sat on blocks up to its shoulders, tireless. And the hole in the roof                 the scatter of rats                 she said                 squirrels you said either way taking up a house for

basement window Of a Mother’s Day Brief and Fleeting                                       …this is the way an old man walks who still stays vigorous and strong, firm, alert, holding on through the years for you— The kind of old man you could be,                 or could have been.                                                                 William Stafford                                                                 Crossing Our Campground When  you take it with you into your old age… When you cut and wrap and fold and tie to take it with you into your old age… the day takes on her own decay—and maybe it decays the way resin decays: the split in the skin of the old growth is filled with the retirement of other lives: seeds, tiny feathers, a slow going ant or beetle…and it is the quiet rise of this up to the lips of such ants, or random   needles or leaves and the one something that gets stuck in the thick stick of it

Rich Entel Cardboard Menagerie  Birthday It’s heavy to drag, this big sack of what you should have done.  And finally you can’t lift it anymore. …You never intended that it should come to this. William Stafford "It’s heavy to drag, this big sack..." Somewhere out in the world there’s a thirty three year old who took you up after you left, who was shocked like your cheek from the combustion of gunpowder breaching your skull and even your jaw, (the heavy pistol slid and you were awake the whole way only to slip first coma then no.)  And maybe it wasn’t like you’d planned it, maybe what you’d intended had nothing to do with her and maybe it was instead all the carefully folded clothes you carried from room to room when your sister ran the streets and your mother walked and walked and called down those Lynn alley drain pipes into the r

Of Earth Old mistakes come calling: no life happens just once.  Whatever snags even the edge of your days will abide. You are a turtle with all the years on your back. Your head sinks down into the mud. You must bear it.  You need a thick shell in all that rain.                                                                                                 William Stafford                                                                                                 Mein Kampf Clay, like peat, is best cut wet she says, and stacked up out into a faithful wind and sun, to draw all that aged water from it, to turn it day by day into a stone of itself, combustible maybe or form enough in its own shape to make a sister and a brother, a wall and then a room and then, if enough’s cut and molded a whole house for you to hide away in far from the rain or even the sun that dried you or when the sun withdraws altogether, log aft

An Imagined Atonement:       on Mother’s Day Who would want to happen just once? It’s too abrupt that way, and when you’re wrong it’s too late to go back—you’ve done it forever.                                                                 Ways to Live                                                                 William Stafford I wouldn’t want to be unforgiven, for instance if I missed the moment you were waiting for and had been hoping (though nobody would know                                 because part of the power you held everyone                                 accountable to was your silence                                 and later claiming                                 we should have known) I’m long enough (though too often not) looking into the dark eyepiece of my old camera to try and frame the thing I want to stop forever and while I don’t know anything about light or time, and  I don’t know what’s goin

Nature The hardest thing about watching the lioness take down the fawn is the resolve the doe has to submit to in the tall grass, how she has to watch it all from the out- of-reach she’s run to, and listening back: the exhausted soft bleat and the jaw closing over the throat in a warm gurgle.  It’s suffered, it is, it’s the mean way of the world I’m told early on and aren’t we glad we’re not running for our lives the way the gazelle needs to or the zebra, or on occasion the small giraffe against the practiced lioness or hyena.  Later I'd think: it’s wrong to pin something human on them but what else can it be called when, sated, the big cats lick the blood from their paws and purr and growl and take up letting themselves be mounted from behind in the lazy uncommitted way of some nights? The way they allow the lion to come into them and send the future up to almost caress     the fawn that’s been makin

Closing Days Sometimes I breathe and the stars go by in their serene beatitudes, never disturbing a weather-gray house by the sea where I have hidden my life.                                                                                 William Stafford                                                                                 Assuming Control Is it the same people who make the exhibit                 possible in it’s space, viewable I mean,                 who trace along the floor the path the light                 will take when the crowd arrives to eat it                 up all the way up the pant leg the knee                 the suit coat jacket tail the buttons (those                 buttons, something similar I’d seen in the quilts                 the women stitched to honor Nelson                 Mandela, not the same buttons and these                 are bronze they don’t open or close anything but our imagination and n

Mill No. 4 Greenville, NH Mill Girls: A Sense of Direction When they shook the box, and poured out its chances, you were appointed to be happy.  Even in a prison they would give you the good cell…                                                                                 William Stafford                                                                                 For a Daughter Gone Away Yesterday.  I should write about yesterday.  Because the sun could be seen coming up and I walked out into it and watched it rise over the old mill brick and continue as if nothing below ever happened ever enough to please it into being still. And it’s true, it never will be still, even in the picture of it up through the hole in the floor of the iron fire escape— the fancy grillwork on the face (south?) of the building where feet once, must’ve, at least in some drill, walked on and down and out the hell out of the booming, the looms, the move- men

Hair 19  And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head;  and she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him.                                                                 Judges Maybe the saddest sound of all isn’t sound or what we can’t hear being too far away from it in a chair and the music and the gossip is the ring around us we’ve stepped in mostly willingly mostly though would we for just us or would we just let it all come down around us the way drapes may when the wind pulls in her breath and carries on someplace else?  Like fingernails or skin it’s something we’ve grown and off it falls with a blade or a tooth or a scratch and floats (I know you’re thinking snow, though it’s not cold anymore and spring is here and the trees are turning green and come to think of it aren’t they quiet too in the middle of all that coming throu

For Pete Suddenly this moment is worth all the rest. Never has the sweetness arched so near and overwhelming.  They say a green flash comes if you’re lucky right at the end. Now you see it was always there.                                                                 William Stafford                                                                 Towards the End Today, what remains of you will wait on the shoulders of the stone vestibule tucked under the roof of a church you maybe never went to but intended, when the sun wasn’t right for running in when the rain made you more of a penitent than you’d ever known yourself to be and you made it, finally back in where you’d began as a boy, where voices, unfamiliar here, and song, familiar inside of you, and the clack of old women rising with their beads (does anyone ever pray the rosary anymore you may, remembering a grey-haired great aunt back home) against the pew in

Before Birth down the cupola stairs crane estate ipswich, mass Maybe there’re all laid out in front of us before we’re born: Choices, of how: we’ll learn to walk and whose hands we’ll clutch and what word we’ll say first and in what language.  Or the day we’ll taste our first flavor and say (even if we’ve only a few words in our treasure) sweet and good or bitter, not .  Maybe it’s a banquet of choices left out on buffet tables and the first course is served cold so we won’t rush the line and knock over the sauces, all those OH! tops we can pour over the already gold to guild it more or the already bad to make it takeable.  And all those spaces inbetween courses, the sighs of our impatience and the pitch of our entitlement or the way we’ll be given to wait in any line and the temper- ment of that waiting: by the time the night is over we have our whole life in front of us and

window bancroft's castle groton, mass On Virginity Your exact errors make a music that nobody hears.                                                                               You and Art                                                                 William Stafford Maybe when we actually come to the deciding side of the road its already been made up for us and all that groping in the dark dust all that grunting up hill toward the summit comes to nothing but what all along we knew but didn’t have sight eyes for.  But inside in those cave places we say we wait to rest and eat and find our way we are being made: famous or fool and getting out we don’t know the day of the month or the time of day or even what year it might be.  We got a body one man told me it’s all we got, a body and we walk it if we can or wheel it or sit it or someone does it for us a while, but what we are if we’re not water in a scorch- bucke

Old Timer The way he used to do is this: he’d get                 his old clam roll ready and his hoe                 and he’d read the tide times                 they’d published and he’d add                 an hour because that’s what                 you’re supposed to do and when                 he set out just as he’d planned                 his boots were patched so                 they didn’t bring on no more                 water.  And when he got there                 he was the first one and he parked                 to where he didn’t have to                 drive so far and he sat and watched                 the gulls and sometimes a crow                 (though given the talk he’d always                 known and grown up with about crows,                 and though he wasn’t a particular                 superstitious sort) he’d look for                 two and squint sometimes                 and let the blur bring on more