little brother

Point of View Third Shift: Nine Years Old redemption he'd given me to believe was empty and returnable and in some states redeemable marked in two  obvious places on the can: body: face the top flat etch and to save space  abbreviated: ME- VT-CT-MA- NY-OR- IA 5c MI 10c CA CRV Going postal and going alone, my brother's  all spokes and stop motion the morning after some road party and he combs the ditches that shrugged up the drive by's wrist/ flick with the stub- end flint-stricken glow of the un- ceremonously blown. Open your throat.  Go down the pipe audaciously, grip your own bliss. It will surface  in sweat on your lip it will  You will look  after it's all been blown comb those  broken shoals and moan you will moan and groan in your own abandonment and show up early at opening and hold the most you will ever be known to locate naked- eyed and try to return the three glass empties miraculously  unbroken: Allen's  fifth of coffee brandy finished and rinsed your mo

Small Portends:                                             It seems as if This might be what forever is, the presence of time Overriding the body of time, the fullness of time Not a moment but a being, watchful and unguarded, Unguarded and gravely watched in this garden—                                                                                                                                 Brigit Pegeen Kelly                                                                                 Brightness From the North Three days on a moth knocks on the wire mesh of the window screen – she floats up into the night only to drift down again come in from her dark to this small square of two a.m. light and, for June an unseasonable chill. I’m glad you don’t know the owl who hoots a short ways off in the south east some mornings.  Would she, if you lit somehow close to her beak, see you in the dark against the trunk, the wrin

  Kintsukuroi i know you don't want to hear it this way but i'm telling you it's the same day after day and we take it we make it after we take it and maybe that's the only way: to get up out of it, split down our intimate middle and wait for the monk with the gold solder to come and makes us scar beautiful

Artist for my teacher, Mrs. Couchman For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe— should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.                                                                 William Stafford                                                                 A Ritual to Read to Each Other I remember I said (and I’m still saying) I’m not afraid of the dark necessarily but instead the clumsy thumbs that knead without knowing what it is they hold in their closed over hands: domed, cold, not at all knowing the solitary soul they've clutched has no other desire but to be flown of them, to be relieved of the meat under the thumb, the muscle that clutches them by the throat where all the breath that comes and goes stops to pause, where once a flutter has come, what can easily be summed up for a breeze bring

Pipe Dream “Honest love will come near fire,” I cried, “and counts all partway friendship a despair.”                                                                 William Stafford                                                                 A Bridge Begins in the Trees Maybe the first puncture is word,  and is aimed true through the thumping muscle above and behind the cage of bone and it settles as dark murmur, becomes a sunk echo no one could pin down or explain and the listeners only take notes so that the next time they ready your chart they’ll repeat your history back to you and ask if there’s been any change in your health.  They avoid the scars where you shot yourself day after day with the liquid smoke, and you say, laughing one day, if this were the Wild West you’d be taking your ease in an opium den,  and no wonder no one wants you  sober they don’t want to see you  peering out from the shadow of your main stop and star

At the Bedside of the Batterer   And now I would make of her something Better than she could make of herself—though the wolf Is only remembered in her prime, and not as she must Have been years later, after all that would pass had passed.                                                                                                                 Brigit Pegeen Kelly                                                                 The Wolf It’s not that I don’t forgive her—I do—I even take it past the bedrail she’d be confined to, and the straps she pulled at when the coma medication began to wear off and the nurse came in right on time humming some song I used to know the words to.  There you go , I want her to say while she pushed the liquid into the line.  Get your sleep, you’ve certainly earned it.   Really I wanted her to stay, past her thirty second bed check, but she had other patients up the wazoo I bet.  I could hear some of them call

anticipating light at the time of dark we are all all about to look down at the blossoms that will break the laws of winter, hunched in their bulb and skin. and making it through to spring. we are all about to look down and into our own throats at bulb burying time, and our battening, the obligatory pull toward the house and delicate hedge the hay and visqueen, wrapped and roped and nailed against the drafts of winter : the original windows that still let in light enough to watch snow being blown up old apple ladder we'd made into a trellis yes for the wild honeysuckle to have the time of her life yes we're all about to look down because beneath there's nothing, see! nothing but sky, clean, new-bride sky.

On Drawing Water When the water, drawn awfully small                 through the calcified tubes                 is nothing but rough and                 unreluctant from the town                 well, a handdug a century or more ago reservoir up the road, a fallback                 of run-off knocks on the copper                 pipes in the ceiling                 of the basement, I’m not long                 considering all the other knots and elbows under the tar                 and where the rest of the town                 is pulling it all up from the pond:                 Robbie, who if you watch him                 walk away he seems headless in his curvature, a modest Quasimodo,                 listening to the whistle                 of the morning two-bag strong                 tea he steeps for his elderly                 mum, still sleeping… the desk cop on duty, nodding off                 all this sluggish dawn, scan

  Speaking of the Dead I wanted what anyone With an ear wants-- To be touched and Touched by a presence That has no hands.                              I Know What I Love                              Jericho Brown Maybe it's like this: we confuse speaking ill of the dead with speaking honest                                                                      ly of the dead like some slate's sprayed clean and we're the deity who's rubbed, wrist to furied elbow, all the hand entire the life they lead                                                                      on our body and mind like they were some master cartographer and we blank as a sea after the great rain's finished and finally giving in                                                                      to itself.  I'm thinking I don't mean no disrespect but I'm telling you straight through to Sunday I won't tell you a lie so you can all of a sudden be comfortable                    

Coffee: saving a trip, I make up my mind to haul a basket of folded clothes on my left hip.  Because its wicker, the basket (and sometimes by the slip and virtue of it, my hip) it’s slick enough to need that particular hinge mothers grow defacto with children who sit there while the world is being made by the women who bore them.  Broken on one end, the braiding in this basket is coming loose, but who am I to consider anything else but letting it fall apart naturally, so for nearly fifteen years I’ve lifted sh- ifted snipped twisted   thrifty, trip after tip, up these two flights of stairs.  Today is no different and more: that second cup of coffee who also needs careful managing: it means the difference between convenience and a heat deep burn.  And even though my son and daughter are too big to carry on my one hip to bounce and soothe and achieve maybe it’s     the memory, the dragon I st

Shapes in the Kitchen  Linoleum I think maybe before the linoleum is left to cool in the making if it, the liquid swim is pooling lavenders…and they’ll eventually turn to ropes and chains of thicks and thins: blacks and greys, strains of what breaks away: what can be felt with the fingers of a woman kicked blind in her own mind, how it all came to her being naked on this floor after the simple opening of a door to God Knows who…the first bruise to come through is right below the throat where, shaped strangely like a boat I notice, when I’m told I should know she’d been beaten the night before and won’t you come home to her hospital bed the eight hours it will take you may save her to think someone at least cares and so: below the throat, yes, where, shaped strangely like a boat, it’s anchored longer than the rest because the clavicle below it is broken.  And then there is the neck, how like a purple turban or curtain, and the sp

Ton-glen: Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.             Use what seems like poison as medicine.                                                                                 Pema Chodron That winter I’d only seen her from the road, and because I was never able to stop and walk up to her, to touch the trunk of her underneath, the lungs of her canopy, to, palm on skin, lift something of her up from the root, something long mulched, something to revere, something to heal that bored hostility of boys and girls who had swashbuckled their childhood into any branch they could climb, ravish, hide, stamp on the pounded log-cabin dirt floor.  She's clean, beneath the sky, plain in her aproned placard and fauld, high above my head. I need just a moment, please, a banyan moment you know, like the Buddha beneath his own. She'll stand for it, suffer it all along and all the way through, like the others, who,

Thanksgiving Too late you learned to care that clean places make people want to need you, want to need to be sitting easy within little distraction: ants in the kitchen on the stove where the pilot light is plugged and hissing some as the jets sputter and tick and the knob stays at a perpetual leeward lean.   The last thing it lit was her cigarette and the gas wafted and could’ve killed everyone in the house but you opened the windows to get clean air in.   I want to come home and make it right for you, to fight your quiet despair with as simple a bottle as Windex and a box of your favorite wine, maybe a six pack of Narragansett.   These days   you spend too much time rubbing your permanently damaged hand, the spot where the lost last finger once, when it was first taken off completely, unthreaded itself like a sighing corset that's always been  too tight, lungs, stomach,  squished into the hourglass women were taught was be