little brother

Amateur Archeology                                                      I am not good with names.  But nameless you walked toward me And I knew you, a swelling in the heart, A silence in the heart, the wild wind-blown grass Burning—as the sun falls below the earth— brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow.                                                                                 Elegy                                                                                 Brigit Pegeen Kelly When we didn’t know any better and would go about bare-foot, or when we were just trying to run away from her we’d take to the edge of the woods and pick through the bushes and play in the old family dump.  Digging with a sharp broken rake the short handle eventually scraping my hand raw, I’d draw the red teeth over the gelatinous  (but only after rain) dirt and expose the lives of all my relatives who lived here, who shared their water and coffee

  Eva's House, Left, South Lubec Eva, Lost     I   Tied tight to my feet, my running away shoes were laced hasty, one eye hole open and the tongue slipping to loll toward my ankle.  I’d watched Eva   come out of her house and wait for me, or at least I thought she was waiting for me, the way she stood and looked my way with the sun in her face, her hand   a visor.  Later I’d come to know her secrets, her losses, mainly her youngest daughter, still a new baby, shopped off to be raised by strangers while she was away having   electricity jumped into her brain.  She had the kindest face and the most vacant eyes.  Like she was able to split herself in two, a bilocating saint.  She was there and   she wasn’t there.  She talked with a heavy tongue.  I have cookies.  Would you like a cookie?  You look like you could use a good cookie.  And for a moment I forgot I was   running away and walked to her, into her house, her re- markably quiet

  How You Care for the Dead Tells the World Everything  About Who You Really Are   Somewhere, perhaps among the living, a bell began pealing, insidious, solemn, obsessive, and there was no one left to tell the echo from the final stroke.                                            D.   Nurske                                            A Path in Grace   It seems like your greatest betrayal, the final abandonment   there’s no coming home from. All along you allowed her   to believe you’d be beside her in the end and the stone even   says so.   Going on fourteen years now, her being dead   has to seem, still to this day, like a freedom four decades   in the making.   Your name has been filling with small bits   of seasonal detritus, random as the wind.   Garden dirt.   Birch leaves.   Blueberry blossoms dried on the bushes when   the bees are too few.   The face of it is washed out some by   the wet weather, or a pol

  A Shame                                When you are tired or terrified your voice slips back into its old first place and makes the sound your shades make there…                                              Seamus Heaney                                            The Loaning   What’s yellow of the last of summer’s mid-August is goldenrod, or the odd lily.   And I’d like to be the one   to see it in a rose.   But mostly it’s the goldenrod and I think didn’t the field beside the lane   leading to the neighbor’s old house boast of so much it was its own sea almost, it was electric with   tiny stinging things—they seemed content to be left there beneath the blossoms and tolerated   my soft walk past on the path that was rising thick and invisible all those summer months, and my   brief years of being and needing – feet to grass – each other had, like the time it all, (everything, really, had),   blurred the way a cataracting  eye blur

  Indian Pipe or Ghost Plant s. lee photo Blessings That was as much hope that the purest and saddest were prepared to allow for.                                                             Seamus Heaney                                                           An Aisling in the Burren   I won’t go to hell today, I need to leave Dante and his guide climbing   and ducking the demons that fly beside the trenches of the thieves and fires   that light them to ash and then once ash make them people   again and then again burn into ash again and again and as many agains   as eternity can spin.   I think he’ll forgive me for lingering, won’t he, my slow   blind climb a grope through the air of  a throne stone – what was that quote?      we're all, every one of us, on a collision  course for into every stone we've thrown?   Today, I won’t chance ten miles through woods and edges of small ponds   of both standing and dam-manipulated

  water/sky birdbath collage Stop, stop     Death’s dark door stands open day and night.   But to retrace your steps and get back to the upper air, that is the task, that is the undertaking.                                            Virgil                                            The Aeneid (II.172-177)     They’ll be no break in the clouds today.   Likely the night will hum,   a full-length flatbed on the highway going north to the papermill,   coming south from the papermill.   I like the round chimney   I can just glimpse in the opening between the trees, higher   than the pines and cedars. What do men and women do in there.   I mean,   I know, but then, do I?   The last time I really thought about the mill   was years ago, trying to imagine my father falling from the icy catwalk   erected above the belts and saws and bark strippers, the weight of the world   pushing into him invisible, the he

A Certain Cartography Leads Me These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yarn-goods.                                                                                                 Elizabeth Bishop                                                                                                 The Map Once or twice maybe though certainly never more than half a dozen times I’ve been out of sight of dry land.  I floated out slow and when the motor was cut we drifted near the buoy we’d hook to pull up and wrap and wrap it round the line hauler and watch while the water was squeezed through to drop, like the water is often dropped, back down onto itself, first maybe striking the gunwales, the scratched fiberglass.  One day it was aqua so far from shore I’m not sure how I missed the trail we made in foam and oil and while I’ve never been any good at mixing colors on a palate to get the effect Edg

  recovered 2nd class titanic The Art of Confession: At the Piscina:   After Saturday 4:00 Mass   "The Phantom Pain, they call it," "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.”                                                           John Boyne                                                                                   The Heart’s Invisible Furies   “Did you know that bread was the first eraser?”   We’d been cleaning the water and wine cruets.   The lips   of them, entirely crusted, crystal clinking in the sink.   Somehow   they’d been shoved in the back of the sacristy cabinet.   They lacked   for nothing but a bit of care.   But back there?   Pushed   in a hurry?   Like someone was coming in and the spill of it   was taken up by the linens stacked to attract it.   Clandestine.   Not a scratch on them that I saw in this light.   And the small cross   topped stoppers, tall as my

           Wrecker   And I – I made my own house be my gallows.                                                           Dante                                                           Inferno: XIII-142   Unless he closes his eyes to it, or draws the shade as low as it can possibly go, the turning light   of the wrecker, hues of yellowing wounds, will claim all the territory of his periphery.  Or maybe, because   the windshield, with its framed cascade of cracks above the steering wheel tells the wrecker   driver someone survived but barely, (it’s his line, hundreds of times in his lifetime, driving to accident   sites) and the other car, crushed under the tires of all that was oncoming, tells the story from the other side:   at least one body didn’t survive.  Three cut seatbelts flap in the wind, frayed ends like aged prayer flags.  That driver’s   side, the whole roof is in the seat, or soon to be, briefly, and the lady

  Keeper    “Film it in sepia”                              Seamus Heaney                              The Wood Road     Those morning moments, during sun- rise, when the pines and oaks go to copper, glow in the opening of the day, I know we could’ve grown up in the same places, Heaney and me, if only I’d’ve been born   earlier.   Or if there weren’t The Troubles we could’ve been raised in the same town on the same road.  Today, those ‘slow, children playing’ signs are rusted, overgrown.   The last time   I walked down the right side of that road I saw (though almost didn’t see) that pock- marked rect- angle, all the yellow almost sun, and the stamped, like Braille, relief of the words that any alert driver would know were announced after   the drive by.   The sign-post was over- grown with all the ditch flowers summer could spew: iris and her thick tongues, wild day-lilies and the start of cat- o-nine tails c