Cleaning

Cleaning

I have learned…

                                --how the real Bible is

written, downward through the pages,

carved, hacked, and molded, like the faces

of saints ...

                                                                How the Real Bible is Written

                                                                William Stafford

But for the rain I would have begun

to pull the dead and broken

clematis up out of the ground, them

and their thin sisters with their stringy
hooks of hair that especially

crept and stuck through like vines do,
the fence and the ladder

we’d laid by so they could, yes,
(don't we all secretly aspire to too)

climb skyward.  The skinny vascular
and lymphatic vine tooth root
is a wider stretch than I’d had time for,

and while I dug the other day I may
have laid down more seed
but for something that pulled me

away--I could’ve gone into the cellar

and found our one pair of scissors, rusty
from the kids leaving them out
in the rain 

and made my way back through that thin

dead creepy weed.  It was more
than I bargained for: I’d have to

lay them by the pile

of maplewood, last year’s dead
limbs too, what had dropped off
one by one, storm after storm.

Come a day soon it will have to do

to use the year old clematis to light

the bottom of a pit I still have

to shovel out, and the dirt will be cool
and smooth, like the inside of a cup
furnaced a week

or two ago, or a thousand years ago,

on a shelf in a shed, or in a dim

museum.  It is night when I dream myself

alight.  I dream it.  I see everything that

will be cleaned.  I see the knuckles and knots,

I see the little bit of green

that wouldn’t for the life of me

let go of the broken, close to the ground

trellis.  So it goes too.  And I suppose

that bit of wood, a pried out tooth

the new shoots will cover it up
like a bottom lip.

The new is already on its way through

despite all the cleanup I have still

to do.  It’s cool like the rain going

away.  It’s cool like the rim of those

old ceremonial cups holding

nothing but shape and shadow

and the pattern of sugar cane
or a Zen name 

under their glaze.  I wonder if they

just beg (don’t you?) to be lifted

up.  Cleared of every chip and miss,

lifted up to, before it goes away
entirely, with the rain.