aground/adrift

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

comes up like a title.  as if I’d set out

all along knowing what all

to call the thing starting at the top

was a reverse intention, the drill

of the auger boring back up.  so that maybe

we can come to say you and i

when it was all over for good between
us that the bit point isn’t at all what we needed

to worry about:  instead

it was the hand brace and how it gave

so readily to balance in any surface, whoever’s

palm it tucked, and turning the drill

on any skin and turning into it, curling

like a worm through and through

the dirt eating and leaving off

or through the dark while the cool

tongue calls to it from above.  it makes me

come to wonder what it would be like to live

in a house made with such a drill, and for that
matter, all the old-world man-
ual tools, built completely

by hand, to lay the first hand-planned plank
sawn just

by muscle, and to be able, once

our structure is erect, stand alone

inside of it without a stitch

of curtain over the glass, to be able

to be drawn to the glass in such an absolute

confidence that the only thing to need

me after you were gone
would be the sun and all her companions

i would take my time and step into
each square pane illuminating
and moving along

and be completely skin and eye, palms

and soles, though why those in particular i don’t

know.  but if it wasn’t for fear
you'd see me from the other side
and come back without asking i know

i’d step into that space and maybe take

up with the solidness of the frame, i’d lay down on

the shadow of the rail and stile the way

i’d always wanted to lay down on

the gunwale of the old lobster boat we took

for our own at the cove, the one that won’t

hold water anymore, the one that’s been

hauled up the bank these last twenty two years

the one we took outside the mouth

of the cove and let ourselves float off

into a broken (though who could know)

matrimony.  by the time we fucked it
up for good we were

strangers to each other, and you’d let me

sleep on that gunwale remember and i’d fallen

into the water and you almost didn’t reach
in to save me.  it was just like  you then to step off

first and leave me floating in the bottom, ne-

gotiating the water with one arm to row and one

arm to hold all the ghosts we’d befriended

while we were gone out.  you took everything

you could carry that was yours alone and I let you

and the rest, once I grounded the boat and hauled it

up to the dunes and left it open-mouthed like most

boats there, was broken in the bow (those

rocks at the cove-mouth going out, remember?)

remember that house up the road

where all those windows were open

to let me fly in like a bat and you'd glue me
down when you could by my waxy
webbed wings?  i think for the rest

of my days i may have to make my way to each

pane naked anytime of the day

a way to gauge the length of the black

i cast, and the gray, the negative fade,

without so much as a scream like when  you took

me the way you wanted while we were gone

out together, or even a whimper, or now,

on land and recovering the brace safe

away, the old bits sold, or cut off
from the sun, going cold.