little brother

Vintage In the quiet and the dark is what makes it, and don’t forget time, the most of it the way we leave everything bottled and tipped to our shoulders on the shelf (so the cork will slide come an opening time) and turn off the lights to wait for it to become aged.  Though tell me this has not gone and done and borne all the doing alone, begun in the sod it was sunk to off in the hills and along the coast while the sun comes and goes and the moon too.  Under such a future I wonder if we have to be afraid of the soft and clotted  unilluminated mud  we're shoved and  shouldered-into-: us-dark that is everything we crawl inside to take to being rooted up, plucked, peeled and crushed and sucked up to be soaked over something sweeter something on the hinge of bitter, with a tooth to it, made after years of waiting to rest in the cup of the right tongue, the bouquet rising up ...

A Stone Throw From the sky in the form of snow comes the great forgiveness. Rain gown soft, the flakes descend and rest, they nestle close, each one arrived, welcomed, and then at home.                                                                                                                                 November     ...

basement window Of a Mother’s Day Brief and Fleeting                                       …this is the way an old man walks who still stays vigorous and strong, firm, alert, holding on through the years for you— The kind of old man you could be,                 or could have been.                                                                 William Stafford                    ...

Rich Entel Cardboard Menagerie  Birthday It’s heavy to drag, this big sack of what you should have done.  And finally you can’t lift it anymore. …You never intended that it should come to this. William Stafford "It’s heavy to drag, this big sack..." Somewhere out in the world there’s a thirty three year old who took you up after you left, who was shocked like your cheek from the combustion of gunpowder breaching your skull and even your jaw, (the heavy pistol slid and you were awake the whole way only to slip first coma then no.)  And maybe it wasn’t like you’d planned it, maybe what you’d intended had nothing to do with her and maybe it was instead all the carefully folded clothes you carried from room to room when your sister ran the streets and your mother walked and walked and called down those Lynn alley drain pi...

Of Earth Old mistakes come calling: no life happens just once.  Whatever snags even the edge of your days will abide. You are a turtle with all the years on your back. Your head sinks down into the mud. You must bear it.  You need a thick shell in all that rain.                                                                                                 William Stafford                   ...

An Imagined Atonement:       on Mother’s Day Who would want to happen just once? It’s too abrupt that way, and when you’re wrong it’s too late to go back—you’ve done it forever.                                                                 Ways to Live                                                                 William St...

Nature The hardest thing about watching the lioness take down the fawn is the resolve the doe has to submit to in the tall grass, how she has to watch it all from the out- of-reach she’s run to, and listening back: the exhausted soft bleat and the jaw closing over the throat in a warm gurgle.  It’s suffered, it is, it’s the mean way of the world I’m told early on and aren’t we glad we’re not running for our lives the way the gazelle needs to or the zebra, or on occasion the small giraffe against the practiced lioness or hyena.  Later I'd think: it’s wrong to pin something human on them but what else can it be called when, sated, the big cats lick the blood from their paws and purr and growl and take up letting themselves be mounted from behind in the lazy uncommitted way of some nights? The way they allow the lion to come into them and send the future up to almost caress     the fawn th...

Closing Days Sometimes I breathe and the stars go by in their serene beatitudes, never disturbing a weather-gray house by the sea where I have hidden my life.                                                                                 William Stafford                                                       ...

Mill No. 4 Greenville, NH Mill Girls: A Sense of Direction When they shook the box, and poured out its chances, you were appointed to be happy.  Even in a prison they would give you the good cell…                                                                                 William Stafford                                                ...

Hair 19  And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head;  and she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him.                                                                 Judges Maybe the saddest sound of all isn’t sound or what we can’t hear being too far away from it in a chair and the music and the gossip is the ring around us we’ve stepped in mostly willingly mostly though would we for just us or would we just let it all come down around us the way drapes may when the wind pulls in her breath and carries on someplace else?  Li...

For Pete Suddenly this moment is worth all the rest. Never has the sweetness arched so near and overwhelming.  They say a green flash comes if you’re lucky right at the end. Now you see it was always there.                                                                 William Stafford                                                             ...

Before Birth down the cupola stairs crane estate ipswich, mass Maybe there’re all laid out in front of us before we’re born: Choices, of how: we’ll learn to walk and whose hands we’ll clutch and what word we’ll say first and in what language.  Or the day we’ll taste our first flavor and say (even if we’ve only a few words in our treasure) sweet and good or bitter, not .  Maybe it’s a banquet of choices left out on buffet tables and the first course is served cold so we won’t rush the line and knock over the sauces, all those OH! tops we can pour over the already gold to guild it more or the already bad to make it takeable.  And all those spaces inbetween courses, the sighs of our impatience and the pitch of our entitlement or the way we’ll be given to wait in any line and the temper- ment of that waiting: by the time the night is over we have our whole life in front...

window bancroft's castle groton, mass On Virginity Your exact errors make a music that nobody hears.                                                                               You and Art                                                                 William Stafford Maybe when we actually come to the deci...

Old Timer The way he used to do is this: he’d get                 his old clam roll ready and his hoe                 and he’d read the tide times                 they’d published and he’d add                 an hour because that’s what                 you’re supposed to do and when                 he set out just as he’d planned                 his boots were patched so             ...