little brother

Mother to Son I: Annunciation: I had to look it up, the meaning of it, which, considering the quickening is really only three months maybe after he took me without me being there (ok i was there but i wasn't, i let myself out the door while he banged and banged) so we make it make sense by making it holy.  And hasn't it happened to you, even if you don’t admit it, trusting instinct for a second and then second guessing, holding the test to the keen illumination of scrutiny. And doesn’t that cheapen the authen- ticity? or at least the trust of it, how impeccable we want everything to be, especially the future, by virtue of it not happening yet, the sweat of inventing, the salt of it not even touching our lips let alone our teeth and tongue or the back of our throat, oh true holy uvula on course for vibrating, there’s no mistake, the same way, and it’s a shame to have to say this but take it as true as a vein in th...

Allotment: the Mud Because he believes it will work my father shoots a crow and hangs her loose on a pole he’s driven into the edge of the garden and walks away while the made dumb bird flaps up- side down in the wind.  These are not the teeny cruelties he’d like for me to believe, he sees the need of being the champion of his scattered seed: corn, peas, even treated with the finger dying powder pink and white, serves the bastards right he’ll say when I ask is it poison what if the crows eat them.  I want to take him down and ask how long has he been in the world—long enough to open the earth every May or June, split her wide with his plow and hoe and bury into her without asking and cover it over like it was nothing nothing at all and grope in the closet for the box of shells when the birds arrive, flocks of them and half the labor is done and flown by the time he’s loaded, and one crow t...

Legs. . .Low Tide The Brine Shed Lubec, Maine Going Out Today we have to stand in the absolute rain and face whatever comes from God, or stop to smooth the earth over little things that went into the dirt, out of the world.                                                                                 ‘The Lyf So Short…’                                           ...

I Speak for You: A Doe's Patois                                                          And I thought Of the tongue, of how it is a wound, a pool of blood, And how you should bind a wound.                                                                 Pale Rider                      ...

aground/adrift  At noon comes the lift—sunlight pries open a first section of the afternoon so that my shadow can begin a career.                                                                 William Stafford                                                                 “At noon comes the lift—” sometimes it’s enough the first line c...

Disappeared When you left our house that night and went falling into that ocean, a message came: silence. I pictured you going, spangles and bubbles leaving your pockets in a wheel clockwise. Sometimes I look out of our door at night.                 When you send messages they come spinning                 back into sound with just leaves rustling. Come battering.  I listen, am the same, waiting.                                                                     ...

e- strange- d                                                             …I don’t know why they should want to come back. I was reading about some men who had been buried under a mountain, I said to her, and one of them came back after two months, digging himself out.  It was in Switzerland, you remember?  Of course I remember.  The villagers tho’t it was a ghost coming down to complain.  They were frightened.                                        ...

Sometimes Water Sometimes Ice --We owe the rain a pat on the back—bare foot it has walked with us with its silver passport all over the world.                                                 William Stafford                                                 Wovoka’s Witness Earlier it was impossible not to want to hold out my own hand too and make to shake the great bone and muscle and skin and bring it to my face the way I’ve seen the deeply penitent need to be after all those m...

Up At Aspet August Saint Gaudens Cornish, NH Coming Clean No one who does not live with constant pain can imagine the toll it takes.  The way it grinds you down.  The sheer damnable tedium of it.                                                                 Epitaph: A Novel                                                               ...