little brother

Emily Dickinson after William Stafford’s “The Star in the Hills” drawing the line it’s the stuff inside we like to make MINE and claim an ownership though often and soon it turns to tarnish and rust with neglect, lazy in our giving to care.  it seems the dust comes to a pause on the etching (if there is etching) and the wire to keep everything in it in and (or?) everything in it out struts its stuff in the cold.  how true the graveyard gate’s still in its rust and still in its post of granite, a pillar set beside the church, another sort of cornerstone, and the iron squeaks when it needs to be opened to those folks visiting the bones of those they’ve known, (or the bones are waiting to be visited)—those clear lines once cut, the sod set neatly aside and labled in the mind of the gravedigger, to be placed just so, so as to be knitted back together when the fleshy and boney puzzel’s reclaimed, (look that word up, puzzel:

Conarium – the Gland That Was      The Seat of the Soul Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.                                     Elizabeth Bishop                                     The Imaginary Iceberg Maybe here's where Descartes should come in, feel himself thin and weary create his Cogito and stop, if really that’s the place to stop because is it? if it’s been thought it’s caught in a trundle of ‘it is’?  Ok, right, I know he suffers us (men really, not women, not dogs, because they don’t have souls, either of them, and I’d wager my own against the feather of Ma'at and say neither did he, nailing his Helena’s poodle to the wall to draw back its skin, to see, he said, if it had a soul within, as if the soul were some homunculus, little men (dogs?).  And what, pray, stopped him from making his own wife play a Sain

Wood Pile Quiet maybe your life was complete by the middle of November but it ended before August before July even or June when next winter's wood was dumped outside your bedroom window, while you slept your morphine sleep, amazed you woke up to shadows outside where the high pile, in a funk, reminded you of a house of cards come down in on itself, but pulled up by the coming together of your two hands, usually sedate in your lap, usually heavy as a helium shallow balloon a week after the party mid height at the foot of your bed. I'll ask you after you're dead to tell me again what you think is comfortable about this new kind of silence. Did you lift up the winter wood in mid-June, the wood you’d stacked last summer to make airy to bring its green up out of it by the sheer will of waiting and did all the little lice who’ve buggered rent free who’ve laid eggs after laying each other, who birth an

afterseizure: define: fermata: : a pause of unspecified length on a note or rest maybe it’s gummed in the hum and the only note's a flat jazz, something that holds close to stringing it along but loose enough before letting it be completely undone, to seize above the struts of that dam only the neurologist repairs when the weather’s fit or you're in for a routine chat, when you aren’t on another job  or trusting to get along on the winter dole: regular, counted...     "how've you been feeling, can you remember any afterfits? the brain scan comes in in a week or two"--and maybe he knows the next one's on call, it's somewhere in there where the paint has been taken straight down to the naked bracing and stringers, each length of flake a flint maybe and some of it to come away to lay in stasis for the duration of danger bridge out ahead detour  sign and traffic stalls on the bottom of y

temple, nh Practice Shots There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among things that change.  But it doesn’t change.                                                                                 The Way it Is                                                                                 William Stafford Later we’ll maybe say it was you went the long way around too, choosing (but who could, to your face, say that) the same way she did: the booze you take up and put down like a whore (your word for her though I don't know who you meant); the pills in your hand are tiny as your life has become.  It’s like trying to look through to the barn using the eye level bullet hole in the fence still some ways off, and not saying,  we all know you made it, or at least I do, I remember the day and the way you walked off with the .22 and a box of shells and split the air down her middle and every time she stitched herself back together you’d split her