little brother

  Following Along on listening to James  Schuyler read "The  Bluet" it's my mistake to make "dour" read "doubt" especially when the poet's gone from spring into deep October in just a couple of lines with his image with his memory of a bluet.  In between all this, I want  to say Dickinson wrote about bluets.  I want to   say when she was looking  at autumn come on sometimes slow sometimes running so hot she took to hiding in the folds of all the cool things she could find outside of the kitchen, blue   was the only thing that fooled her.  She'd want maybe the absolute devotion of blue as a bluet snugged up against everything in her  house who was coming down with something seizing or consumptive or  like a first flush of a grasped throat, a baby of an illness, a baby being made but far off, far, far off beyond October beyond the rest of the dour months (because dour is slow as doubt is slow) that want something blue but won't ask for it, wi

Shag and these regions now have little to say for themselves except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upwards freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing in brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets.                                                            Elizabeth Bishop                                                            "Cape Breton" The way my father would shape the word in his throat and bring it up gargling you could tell hew didn't like the bird: shag .  And his whole lower jaw would sag and he'd say they all oughta be shot.  They were noting at all to look at, especially dripping on rusted front railings on bridges we'd need to cross to get to the next town. The water brought up feathers against the grain, their breasts mostly and they'd curl and shake and be the cliché snake against the coming of the night.  They extended their wings for moments and moments to dry (they are not water- proof, these birds) Maybe he hated the wa

  Throughout the Morning, Early, Early Throughout the morning early, early and as the coffee has no choices or solutions in it all, cooling how it goes to almost unsippable to gulpable in the December room nearly all to once - how the tip of the fuzzy tongue burned impatient for the delay is numb to the water forced through almost powder beans (depending on your temerity) (your need) with the start of the coldest water brought up to the hottest of both you can muster heat the last is almost obligartory a clean-your-plate-before-you- leave morality because someone somewhere is thirsty.  Keep it at least briefly, on a first sip meeting.  Don't be bored or force the kiss.  Imagine that all night you have been stoking the coals and roasting the opening beans and broken them and sifted them between the mesh and strain and forced them but only sweetly only ever sweetly into being

  About the Dog Yesterday and some of the day before the paths he'd blown after the snow were shrinking and their walls were shrinking and our shared memory of the dog we kept brief and needing us both was now gone and was now shrinking.  Something near warming was blowing over it a caress of breath perhaps a coaxing before the long winter days began to settle in and we were again alone with each other.  The birds, jonquils, and chickadees, and, like the dawn on the morning after the dog went to a new family a couple of mourning doves like it had to be some sad cliché (actually I looked at the one in the seed box for so long I thought it must be dead and someone some thing had set it there in the night so somehow out me to being a fraud, but I saw its pink eye blink and realized because it was 10 below zero it was puffed against the cold) would get lost on the floor of the newly blown snow.  How one last time around we went, the dog and me, through the labyrinth and found our way b

  after christmas I've come to wonder just now if every time you had to shoot the dog you walked farther and farther out of yourself, our on that old wood's road and came back with nothing to report?  If that small transgression we never knew anything about had finally taken to bloom.  though now I'm remembering it almost  always happened in winter, all those years at home we'd come to having a dog that would live year after year distant from (though visible, if only by steam rising through one end of the heap) the house and never once invited in, even when the wind would slip up in the shingles outside my bed- room and lift a moan out  of the old storm windows, a moan and a howl of some animal being touched in some god- awful way it would never ask for but could never refuse.  Would you choose which from the slew you kept rifle you'd lift from the velvet notches of the gunrack I'd made in shop, the one that took on two rifles and the underneath single drawer yo

  new nativity                 why couldn't we have seen this old Nativity while we were at it? --the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame, colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw, and, lulled within, a family with pets, --and looked and looked our infant sight away.                                                  Elizabeth Bishop                                                  2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance I haven't gone a fraction of it on foot or not since I first set out, empty dish and innocent onto the barrens beyond the chained up dog.  He offered me the riddle I couldn't possibly solve and so demanded my face as payment.  I think the bowl was plastic and blue. I think I didn't ask to go outside and besides my mother was  distracted.  The family fractures were already set again and I was beginning to learn how to tie my own shoes (though when that finally came upon me is another story.)  But that walk al

sickbed our bed  shrinks from the soot and hapless odors holds us close                                   Elizabeth Bishop                                   Varick Street this absence is anticipated  the way waiting out her dying  seems the least discrete: pee breaks, creaking number three stairs and in between frictions of released (even after being so sneaky) cedar floor suites (the one that seems to be breathed like a swisher sweet) on our way to relieve ourselves which really means making room for more ease sudden gone the toilet takes on because why not we're going so don't waste a trip the whisper quirt of disinfectant the one healthy breath the one noise that will come back afterwards the gesture of holding the nose over  the mostly wiped away sick how some smells immobolize and then go on into the future the way sounds do when you're through i want to go with you but first i want to press my full weight on every board and stair rub i want to flush the toilet every t

saints: visitation s.lee   *Adoro Te Devote sight, touch, and taste in thee are each deceived; the ear alone most safely believed                                                                 Thomas Aquinas                                                                   Adoro Te Devote Maybe to alienate the deepest aches the chant is held holy as the Lourdes water cupped and dropped with a pipette into the cave of the ear.  My father said water seeks its own source, and aided by the pressure of all the hands and feet, the decades of passing the dent of weight in the same places-- blonder now if  it's pine enough and somehow stronger but not, only come to rely on the entire rack the house is stacked on.  I'd want today a way to place the strangest with the mundane or not so much the mundane as what is and what has been always taken: taken for granted (excuse the cliche) taken for trash, taken for nothing but a song.  I'll cash in and come to hum from my own obbligato: ho

  What Waits and Waits and Waits, Ammonite Like, Behind the Ribcage  "If what we see could forget us half as easily,"          I want to tell you, "as it does itself -- but for life we'll not be rid          of the leaves fossils."                                                       Elizabeth Bishop                                                       Quai d'Orleans As if after all these years, (forty six this past summer, the teeth, held cement still with their once-in-a-blue-moon shift (and this, unpredictable, ripples unbidden the carpet under my hairline, and though no one walks there anymore I feel myself   tripping up there from time to time) the zipper's coming undone almost all at once. How  some begin at the bottom, you know the struggle, and the worst of it is trying to bring the zipper down the split path that's gone in two untidy directions.  And there's unspeakable need for hurrying,  to pull up to start again to pull down, the fa