little brother

Amateur Archeology                                                      I am not good with names.  But nameless you walked toward me And I knew you, a swelling in the heart, A silence in the heart, the wild wind-blown grass Burning—as the sun falls below the earth— brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow.                                                                   ...

  Eva's House, Left, South Lubec Eva, Lost     I   Tied tight to my feet, my running away shoes were laced hasty, one eye hole open and the tongue slipping to loll toward my ankle.  I’d watched Eva   come out of her house and wait for me, or at least I thought she was waiting for me, the way she stood and looked my way with the sun in her face, her hand   a visor.  Later I’d come to know her secrets, her losses, mainly her youngest daughter, still a new baby, shopped off to be raised by strangers while she was away having   electricity jumped into her brain.  She had the kindest face and the most vacant eyes.  Like she was able to split herself in two, a bilocating saint.  She was there and   she wasn’t there.  She talked with a heavy tongue.  I have cookies.  Would you like a cookie?  You look like you could use a good cookie.  And for a moment I forgot ...

  How You Care for the Dead Tells the World Everything  About Who You Really Are   Somewhere, perhaps among the living, a bell began pealing, insidious, solemn, obsessive, and there was no one left to tell the echo from the final stroke.                                            D.   Nurske                                            A Path in Grace   It seems like your greatest betrayal, the final abandonment   there’s no coming home from. All along you allowed her   to believe you’d be beside her in the e...

  A Shame                                When you are tired or terrified your voice slips back into its old first place and makes the sound your shades make there…                                              Seamus Heaney                                            The Loaning   What’s yellow of the last of summer’s mid-August is goldenrod, or the odd lily.   And I’d like to be the one ...

  Indian Pipe or Ghost Plant s. lee photo Blessings That was as much hope that the purest and saddest were prepared to allow for.                                                             Seamus Heaney                                                           An Aisling in the Burren   I won’t go to hell today, I need to leave Dante and his guide climbing   and ducking the demons that fly b...

  water/sky birdbath collage Stop, stop     Death’s dark door stands open day and night.   But to retrace your steps and get back to the upper air, that is the task, that is the undertaking.                                            Virgil                                            The Aeneid (II.172-177)     They’ll be no break in the clouds today.   Likely the night will hum,   a full-length flatbed on the highway going north to the papermill,   coming south from the papermill.   I l...

A Certain Cartography Leads Me These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yarn-goods.                                                                                                 Elizabeth Bishop                                           ...

  recovered 2nd class titanic The Art of Confession: At the Piscina:   After Saturday 4:00 Mass   "The Phantom Pain, they call it," "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.”                                                           John Boyne                                                                        ...

           Wrecker   And I – I made my own house be my gallows.                                                           Dante                                                           Inferno: XIII-142   Unless he closes his eyes to it, or draws the shade as low as it can possibly go, the turning light   of the wrecker, hues of yellowing wounds, will claim all...

  Keeper    “Film it in sepia”                              Seamus Heaney                              The Wood Road     Those morning moments, during sun- rise, when the pines and oaks go to copper, glow in the opening of the day, I know we could’ve grown up in the same places, Heaney and me, if only I’d’ve been born   earlier.   Or if there weren’t The Troubles we could’ve been raised in the same town on the same road.  Today, those ‘slow, children playing’ signs are rusted, overgrown.   The last time   I walked down the right side of that road I saw (though almost didn’t see) that pock- marked rect- angle, a...

Roofs  I wonder if in winter when birds perch on/in the empty branches of the maple canopy if there's a quickening in the heartwood of the tree (discrete to save heat) and if the tree would risk it so deep  into winter: the weight of a chickadee or a pigmy nuthatch taking a seed to pen and eat like tugging at a stuck purse zipper and then a kip as the men say in their war trenches after guard duty is wrapped for them and their stiff vision of the hills the empty trees and voided sky begins her perpetual revolution of light.  I've gone of track and I do that too easily: drift circle around to where I believe I started but it's all  gone to ghosts --even the trees are empty like they'd seen me stumbling up clumsy and they ache for the way something graceful can descend on them appreciate just for the sake of  appreciating and gladly take the weight. Today, in early April, the Easter lilies are arriving like green knives flying up through the dirt in their own inti...

  after the dogs There are days I'm naïve enough to say it began with dogs when they one after  another were stolen into the woods and given over to holes and stones and their own blood cooling.  It's foolish enough of me I know and mostly those days come on when it's cold and I'm trying to rub enough heat into my cheeks that would  long lost kin embrace  my chattering  teeth.  It's then I remember the limp chains, the scatter of loose fur  I'd pulled out when I came home from school the day before how it was caught in the tall dead grass and the only thing left of him or her aside from the scat- ter of shit and bare hard earth was tipped water bowl gone dry.

 in back: heart if looking at it from behind, the least dynamic almost certain and cloak and dagger hidden in plain view  and more  because i'm holding it still working out to you the palms of my hand bones become like the prostrate rib-splints of floor boards or like staging where imagine the artist is flat  on her back and one knee drawn (as if  it will accept any head to rest on it) and holding out her suffering fist and gobs and dobs of pig- ment meant for the fat ass of the baby angel but intend the blending in the tipped  palette with the viscous hues of blue  (the shade that makes veins that makes  (it's in error of course you know) some people believe that human blood is blue but see how it sneaks out through the cleavage between my thumb and forefinger knuckle (or  is it the right from your view, and then  really whos?) the circumflex artery  the vessel (i'll call it that even though  its medically maybe not) supplies ...

the early outlook of snow  of course we can't watch it go entirely, the whole foot and a half of snow--measured as it were by work rather than yardstick or pole.  snow goes in the dark too, you know, so that by morning days after the storm, days after the men with shovels dug and dug the requisite three feet for your ciborium shaped urn and later the same shovel propped like a guard fallen, scoop side up, and a measure of reflection if I were to lean over it and give over a little of the passing winter sky withering by or maybe not withering but instead un- knotting, like a tie at a man's throat, a man not used to ties, who, after  the long event,  gratefully tugged, undoes it and walks off into the still something- about- to- happen,  the auger of waiting, or not so much waiting as yet waiting to arrive, but that's days still,  days (and the shovel's leaning now against the house, having been returned) and days off.

  Before This/ Day Closes 3 January  continued-- Last winter, nearing its end, I bought a pair of ice grips and let them settle in for an entire spring summer, autumn, and now back again into another winter.  Had I remembered them in time I would have torn their labels musty from their wait (weight?) and strapped them to my boot heals my shaky confidence and down the slightest of hills to the mailbox.  The ice thickens and melts at the mercy of the weight air. Or the silence of it, I can't decide.  Still, had I found the grips, had I found the envelope, had I  found the stamps, this little bit would not be anything but ether, but waiting. I never could skate.  The idea of standing on blades makes me, like from a great high looking out, need to bear up my insides with my own two hands.  It's not heights we are afraid of.  It's falling  from them.  Even if the fall is short.  Only the vulnerable go to their knees.  Before th...

January 2, 2021: Peterborough And again a few inches of snow.  The earth is as firm as ram's horn, ram's skull.  It puts up with what falls on it with a retiring saint's patience.  What other choice?  All of what  winter is has begun now and those November  and December dress rehearsals are called off and the stage is set in place for months to come.  Still,  the shifting props.  Still the blunt circumference of the thuggish days-long falling rains who's only course is shifting  without choice to ice that thickens and clings, then settles   broken to the edges to eventually meld the middle of ponds.  Limbs dislodge.  Fall.  Are brought when some thaw is up to the dam and stuck there until more  flood lifts it up and over the white and yellow  water, water that ages, makes its cold case stick like slabs of fat left curing left unrendered perhaps   in a smokehouse, or maybe not unrendered but gi...

scar  maybe the enemy in the end  is fatigue is how all this time we are a library in our bodies and in our minds and our call numbers are smudged just there on their spines or after a while the shortest or longest (though I don't know if I'm holding the right call-card) things begin  to be misshelved or loaned or never returned or otherwise  lost completely.  time was when i could walk into some carefully curated collection and select the exact memory with instinct maybe especially by touch or smell or somehow by the slope of the floor bearing the heaviest weight of traffic so that (only figuratively) a rolled marble would stop bold against the one lone knot of the otherwise clear pine. and so.  you come to know at the end of the road the close  of the book you hold open  closes all those old stories and they  go to smoke or go to ghosts.  the pathos after losing hope. don't you when no one is looking touch your fingers to your cheek an...

  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 b...