little brother

A Reckoning life broke ten whipstocks Over my back, broke faith, stole hope, Before I denounced the covenant of courage.                                                                 Robinson Jeffers                                                                 Suicide’s Stone Maybe lately, two years before you turn eighty, the way y...

chair: looking back into her room the olsen house cushing, maine shards – in answer to the question: what is the effect of this fragmentation After William Carols Williamses “[Rapid Transit]” do it I dare you break the mirror you choose the size you choose the amount of light its been designed to ricochet to play and persuade the eye there’s more always more light where that came from to make it finally back to you and now at that you’ve thrown it and all the angles are randomly scattered save the frame (yes, save the frame you’ll need each piece to fit back) but in this exercise let it slip                                 when it’s still                 whole gently, as if you’ve suffered ...

Planning a Summer Without You It doesn’t matter now only that the way I walk makes the side of my feet dry – dry enough to crack – dry enough to almost bleed and in between need creams – need cool sheets need out-of-the-sheets bleeding.   Even before I decided I wasn’t coming my old shoes waited, (they’ve been in tides, canyons) their gaping mouths open as the dead.   They’d waited all winter, craved the old crack jerked seaweed makes when it is crunched under such aimless walks as I’d take every morning looking for God knows what all, solace probably, and not.   More I bet at Lazarus and some talk I make up between he and Jesus, a quiet argument of need and whose then would be the deepest.   Feet with the thinnest skin between the rock and the sand the boat’s wood the kitchen  synagogue latrine you name it all the lift and fall – who is my Lazarus?   Yours?   Who do you try to raise from ...

felled: autumn wind west south-west If this wind were home and the tide was high or on her way in she’d be all arms and legs,  like the surrendering of evergreens that have spent their summer, dignified, giving in to the last of the mud tucked under and in the crotch of each of their roots.  All their lives have been a setback, being a seed in rock, and to think this is the only way they’ve been able to thrive.  Hasn't time and his more penetrating demands worn them down and though of course they weathered it, they did,  and their needles held up and through six or eight decades of such howling, hasn't that inevitable calm, been on the way, and then gust: it’s enough now: a slight fifteen miles an hour out of the west south-west will be enough coax to it.  All of autumn will be taken down and right now too, and the surrender, from the trunk up through of this one in particular, who I...

Emily Dickinson after William Stafford’s “The Star in the Hills” drawing the line it’s the stuff inside we like to make MINE and claim an ownership though often and soon it turns to tarnish and rust with neglect, lazy in our giving to care.  it seems the dust comes to a pause on the etching (if there is etching) and the wire to keep everything in it in and (or?) everything in it out struts its stuff in the cold.  how true the graveyard gate’s still in its rust and still in its post of granite, a pillar set beside the church, another sort of cornerstone, and the iron squeaks when it needs to be opened to those folks visiting the bones of those they’ve known, (or the bones are waiting to be visited)—those clear lines once cut, the sod set neatly aside and labled in the mind of the gravedigger, to be placed just so, so as to be knitted back together when the fleshy and boney puzzel’s reclaimed, (look that word up,...

Conarium – the Gland That Was      The Seat of the Soul Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.                                     Elizabeth Bishop                                     The Imaginary Iceberg Maybe here's where Descartes should come in, feel himself thin and weary create his Cogito and stop, if really that’s the place to stop because is it? if it’s been thought it’s caught in a trundle of ‘it is’?  Ok, right, I know he suffers us (men really, not women, not dogs, because they don’t have souls, either of them, and I’d wager my own against the feather of Ma'at and say neither did he, nailing his Helena’s poodle to the wall to...

Wood Pile Quiet maybe your life was complete by the middle of November but it ended before August before July even or June when next winter's wood was dumped outside your bedroom window, while you slept your morphine sleep, amazed you woke up to shadows outside where the high pile, in a funk, reminded you of a house of cards come down in on itself, but pulled up by the coming together of your two hands, usually sedate in your lap, usually heavy as a helium shallow balloon a week after the party mid height at the foot of your bed. I'll ask you after you're dead to tell me again what you think is comfortable about this new kind of silence. Did you lift up the winter wood in mid-June, the wood you’d stacked last summer to make airy to bring its green up out of it by the sheer will of waiting and did all the little lice who’ve buggered rent free who’ve laid eggs after laying each other, who birth an...