little brother

Now Nostalgia A voice within my shadow wakened me, a glowing voice: I love the dark too much— That voice was always kind; it helped me now to rest, in its long shadow: “So much we loved the dark,” it said, “that all these years apart I have been here, like this, hidden in your shade.”                                                                 William Stafford                                                ...

News of You Your word arches over the roof all day.  I know it within my bowed head, where the other sky listens. You will bring me everything when the time comes.                                                                 “Sky”                                                                 William Stafford   I’m doing my...

Barometer Castle Hill--Crane Estate Kintsugi II For Pete Sheehan, my friend And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black chord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.                                                                 Jane Hirshfield                                                   ...

within, within, within Lubec, Maine On Clover “Isn’t it odd how much more one sees in a photograph than in real life?  —VIRGINIA WOOLF It’s not far off at all and maybe only a change in temperature and then only maybe a degree to see in the fog coming up over the hill a long roll of smoke—wet as it is we can only stand it still the way anything can be stood still and even that, the blur of the unsteady hand aiming the camera is translated in the liquid bath of the chemicals she’d mix when figuring: I saw a house on fire once and somewhere inside the flames themselves were born and borne by everything it and the wind wanted, and it was a lie to say it wasn’t the most awakened lover, how it rippled and let the tongue and finger linger on the brocade, on the chenille, how the smoke of it would offer (don’t be coy or too afraid) to take the children down easy before the fire arrived.  Maybe she thought that in ...

Dumb, the tip of my thumb is damaged enough to refuse to grasp anything but a gross fumble.  Even here, this pen a friend gifted to me nearly twenty years ago is tricky to grasp—it takes making an anchor, shank and bill, stick out beyond the gunwale and point up like a relic, blunt and rusted and left out in the open salt air.  It’s enough some- times to keep a balance and not stand up in the boat, although everyone knows it can’t be helped sometimes, especially if we’ve all everyone of us in it been let down into the sea after the first breach and we rub our hands raw on the anchor and let the wind bring us in closer than we’ve ever come to, and there she’ll be blowing wet air up and closing the hole on the top of her head like a third eye.  Time was I’d’ve liked to ride along beside and slip my fingers inside the coarse ribbons of blubber along that blowhole—to go in maybe up to my wrist whole hand open closed ope...

Among them New Bedford Whaling Museum With The Living What is fidelity?  To what does it hold?  The point of departure, or the turning road that is departure and absence and the halfway home?  What we are and what we were once are far estranged.                                                 Wendell Berry                                                 The Dance I: a small whale The juvenile female humpback came through to the cove almost unnoticed and maybe it had been ...

Doane's Falls Royalston, Mass The Last Time: Letting Go  “Those who act will suffer, suffer into truth”— What Aeschylus omitted: those who cannot act will suffer too.                                                 Jane Hirchfield                                                 Those Who Cannot Act I’m always going or wanting to go beyond the ropes the ones that hold the crowd back from doing the real heavy looking on or from being braver than they are given to believing about them...

Orphrey You change a life as eating an artichoke changes the taste of whatever is eaten after.                                                                 Jane Hirchfield                                                                 “To Judgement: An Assay” This is what you did to me with your hands and lips and Cheshire face: the way...

Door’s Left Open When You Lose the Combination: the Key to Memory   After Long Silence Politeness fades,… Distinctions matter.  whether a goat’s quiet face should be called noble or indifferent.  the difference between a right rigor and pride.                                                 Jane Hirshfield Forgive me if I repeat myself I think too much it is a small fault the vault door has been left to fend for itself and it is not safe to say anything that isn’t in there hasn’t already been shuffled through and given a value suffocating like it is with the others:                      ...