little brother

Mother to Son I: Annunciation: I had to look it up, the meaning of it, which, considering the quickening is really only three months maybe after he took me without me being there (ok i was there but i wasn't, i let myself out the door while he banged and banged) so we make it make sense by making it holy.  And hasn't it happened to you, even if you don’t admit it, trusting instinct for a second and then second guessing, holding the test to the keen illumination of scrutiny. And doesn’t that cheapen the authen- ticity? or at least the trust of it, how impeccable we want everything to be, especially the future, by virtue of it not happening yet, the sweat of inventing, the salt of it not even touching our lips let alone our teeth and tongue or the back of our throat, oh true holy uvula on course for vibrating, there’s no mistake, the same way, and it’s a shame to have to say this but take it as true as a vein in the

Allotment: the Mud Because he believes it will work my father shoots a crow and hangs her loose on a pole he’s driven into the edge of the garden and walks away while the made dumb bird flaps up- side down in the wind.  These are not the teeny cruelties he’d like for me to believe, he sees the need of being the champion of his scattered seed: corn, peas, even treated with the finger dying powder pink and white, serves the bastards right he’ll say when I ask is it poison what if the crows eat them.  I want to take him down and ask how long has he been in the world—long enough to open the earth every May or June, split her wide with his plow and hoe and bury into her without asking and cover it over like it was nothing nothing at all and grope in the closet for the box of shells when the birds arrive, flocks of them and half the labor is done and flown by the time he’s loaded, and one crow to show, g

Legs. . .Low Tide The Brine Shed Lubec, Maine Going Out Today we have to stand in the absolute rain and face whatever comes from God, or stop to smooth the earth over little things that went into the dirt, out of the world.                                                                                 ‘The Lyf So Short…’                                                                                 William Stafford When the tide’s in far enough the boat will float up from the rest-- the hull of it is taken in and the bow and the stern and every rib, in turn, every ding every bit of grain or fiber- glass, every rock of salt and Pennzoil slick bait blood and  outboard motor ooze, the jackets and flares stowed the hatch as tight as it is going to be.  Somehow there’s moon enough to see by, waning as it may, this time of the year, be.  Following his code of instincts it’s all loaded and he tips himself in and pulls the cho

I Speak for You: A Doe's Patois                                                          And I thought Of the tongue, of how it is a wound, a pool of blood, And how you should bind a wound.                                                                 Pale Rider                                                                 Brigit Pegeen Kelly We’d all seen it, though like most things we didn’t talk about it then and we don't now though we took it  the way all farm deaths are taken, accident or planned, legal or out of season, in a sorrow that seemed turned on a wood lathe, leg after leg for a table or chair or at least something functional to stand on.  The tongue of my father’s shot true through doe, the last one of the season, the last one he would ever shoot, well, it hung like any loose and now useless thing: through her teeth and I, well, I'll be honest and say it reminded me—purple and stiff thing it was—of the first

aground/adrift  At noon comes the lift—sunlight pries open a first section of the afternoon so that my shadow can begin a career.                                                                 William Stafford                                                                 “At noon comes the lift—” sometimes it’s enough the first line comes up like a title.  as if I’d set out all along knowing what all to call the thing starting at the top was a reverse intention, the drill of the auger boring back up.  so that maybe we can come to say you and i when it was all over for good between us that the bit point isn’t at all what we needed to worry about:  instead it was the hand brace and how it gave so readily to balance in any surface, whoever’s palm it tucked, and turning the drill on any skin and turning into it, curling like a worm through and through the dirt eating and leaving off or through the dark while the cool tongue cal

Disappeared When you left our house that night and went falling into that ocean, a message came: silence. I pictured you going, spangles and bubbles leaving your pockets in a wheel clockwise. Sometimes I look out of our door at night.                 When you send messages they come spinning                 back into sound with just leaves rustling. Come battering.  I listen, am the same, waiting.                                                                                 William Stafford                                                                                 Elegy Right there in the middle and toward the end if the dis- tance is added, the clear as knelling word works its way up to the surface and like anything quiet, unassuming, stationary in its waiting to be seen is the word ear.  Flank it on both ends and it becomes                 a fruit coming undone,                                 slipping out of its sk

e- strange- d                                                             …I don’t know why they should want to come back. I was reading about some men who had been buried under a mountain, I said to her, and one of them came back after two months, digging himself out.  It was in Switzerland, you remember?  Of course I remember.  The villagers tho’t it was a ghost coming down to complain.  They were frightened.                                                                 William Carlos Williams                                                                 The Horse Show They don’t want you when you return a long time away coming up late the lane they don’t even know you’re arriving and they’re shocked at the pane of glass in the door and they nearly close it in your face you can see the ache of it in their own the ache of the place they stayed on and remained while you got away while they felt betrayed all the whi

Sometimes Water Sometimes Ice --We owe the rain a pat on the back—bare foot it has walked with us with its silver passport all over the world.                                                 William Stafford                                                 Wovoka’s Witness Earlier it was impossible not to want to hold out my own hand too and make to shake the great bone and muscle and skin and bring it to my face the way I’ve seen the deeply penitent need to be after all those miles in the dust and mud and fall into the river with the rootless trees.  And it was impossible to not want to bend to my own knees, depleted of meaning while the tide claimed the great beach again and again and again, with regularly.  We've all come this way after all, you and me, and shit if we didn’t need a clean glass of whiskey and deep , and with it the extended, the revenant hand offered to us.  It’s the hand we’d spent the whol

Up At Aspet August Saint Gaudens Cornish, NH Coming Clean No one who does not live with constant pain can imagine the toll it takes.  The way it grinds you down.  The sheer damnable tedium of it.                                                                 Epitaph: A Novel                                                                 of the O. K. Corral                                                                                 Mary Doria Russell Somehow the pressure of the spin was enough to contain the ink in pen, left in the pocket, put in the washing machine unwittingly.  The barrel opens only to two pieces of clothing:: a face cloth now with one plot of purple, a dot that could be the pupil of some accusatory eye. And one smear, like a gunshot of a wound rubbed down the leg, a shock stuck through, though maybe it’s just play, stuff kids do after the movie is over and the hold their wooden guns up and call the shots.  A