little brother

Late: A Songbird in November …all the imaginings, sweet god, the many arms the mind, the                 many mindedness of the spirit of descending upon itself, making                 a fullness that seeks entrance and when entrance is found                 unable-like water driven up from below-to resist the                 opening, and so it shoots out, a blossoming of sparrows gone                 mad, making a blessing. . .                                                                                 The Sparrow’s Gate                                                                                 Brigit Pegeen Kelly I’ve thought about it off and on through the years, how it may have been simply a new late spring song bird on her tail end of her first migration and was late getting the news and waking cold enough that morning for it to be quite a rough way to start the day.  And to meet  the end of it, flying like she was,  from west to east an

  a curse the darkness keeps But of course the darkness keeps It's appointment.  Each evening, An inscrutable presence, it has the final word Outside every door.                    Mary Oliver                    The Lamps he told me this story, genuinely confused, which makes it all the more unforgiveable: how on the far side of the garden on the edge of where he planted some years squash some years potatoes some years cucumbers two apple trees came into  their maturity and gave him  their fruit.  came the doe and her lambs year after.  occasional male or female bear and their kin.  listen, he had a wild circus right on his back doorstep.  and while the fruit  of the tree was small it was also abundant it was also sweet so  abundant so sweet he couldn't carry it all in, and what the others had finally satisfied themselves on what they had moved off through the season on, fell finally with the air of a woman well deserving  of all of her rest.  each tree fanned out their skirts

Firewall: Wag Dodge A poem is a gesture toward home. It makes dark demands I call my own.                                             Jericho Brown                                             Duplex he dug a deep enough gorge around himself and filled it with liquid pine sap and lit it,  perimeter  tip to tip on fire before before he lay his face in the puff of already given up ash.  His own men leapt over him and tried the mad dash up the steep grade and nearly none of them  made it.

  After Reading Jericho Brown's              Ganymede His father rides until Grief sounds as good as the gallop Of an animal born to carry those Who patrol and protect our inherited Kingdom.  When we look at myth This way, nobody bothers saying Rape.  I mean, don't you want God To want you?   If Heaven is where the poet points, toward the terrain on an as yet unlabeled map far off   and between  Promise and  Apology  tell me where, if I were  to  blindly lay  my dipped nib down  precisely there and begin, where it is you say I started?  Before or after being touched that way? tell me what is the true name of the city of my berth ?  Of your berth? Promise or  Apology?   Don't try to say it doesn't matter. I want to know if my forced impression, hands and knees, will be song or blood long before they become solid.

  Reading Gregory's Eurydice Wake:  it takes the snake big as a bracelet to make the mistake: to break open the crate and create the place: first intake sharp haste laid way to taste to make way for her own OH! KAY!

  Elegy or Ode?  If the firmament, knowing     the moon as only          the beloved can know,               with the float and flow                    of opening and holding open those sometimes overly-          fast sometimes overly slow               going molecules folding                    from heat from cold                         such rain, snow, the roam of the open, the close,     would it write elegy or ode          celebration or gentrified moan               that only holding and letting go                    can know like the rope      in the undertow          the lope toward gloaming                    and hope, her coal,                         glowing?            

@chesterwood summer studio daniel chester french stockbridge @ 1st Reading Max Ritvo: 1990-                                                                  2016 At life's close, you're like the child whose     parents step out for a drive---                    "The Big Loser"                        Max Ritvo Doing the math I'm sad it's what I wanted first off to know and how  but resisting that I'll start reading Boy Goes to War and The Big Loser and listen from the lip of the proscenium grateful I'm saying to myself at last I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought my wings were ghosts that the foam and soap on my shoulders after my father gave me a bath and the ends of the sudsy wash cloth slapped at my knees stoked the lonely hollows I couldn't  reach.  I have to take my hat off to you.  It's cashmere.  Red.  I have to wear it in this room filled with books and a dead fireplace and four 200+ year old windows, their mostly still inta