never an extra boat either.
I heard things once, blurring out of sleep
or some other elsewhere to
none of us the same. The same what?
After. As in, between and among now
for a long time.
The Breathing
Think back with a shovel, bend,
do that.
Who’s breathing through these tubes now?
So this is how you
plant trees in Scotland all afternoon.
We take instruction. The translucence
of it. Each plastic cylinder the exact shade of
a stem tall and suddenly wide, slipped
over sapling after sapling
sunk into earth, tied, staked against wind.
The mallet comes down.
January. A wee walk, we’re told,
to get here. Fields this old,
the lives that lived. To ask anything
is to lose the question —
Hills plus sheep plus cold. Air like wet gauze
but sun, a bright accident.
Still: who’s breathing through these tubes now.
I see plain enough, upright
nether-vents, their cool green
so many rows made
in the making. Barely trees at all
hidden, each incandescence.
It’s the shovel, abrupt.
It’s the fierce
stopped, to fierce again
the suck, the lift up
to go deep
a stunned thing.
It must draw them, the dead.
Both the violence and the ceasing must
remind them.
Because haven’t they come
to lie here, their half-light just visible under
old stalks and grass. Dusk, with its
new dead and old dead…
And true, isn’t it — that
we’ve pleasured them. True that our
hammering in breath
is another breath.
Not that I love you, the mouths they had
through oak, willow now, birch
will say —
a
They wore out the a
in the letterpress case only after
a few thousand hits under the inked rollers,
pulling the crank, turning
the giant wheel.
Must have been 1820. Thereabouts.
Wanderer, glory-run of letters: thereabouts.
Hunger took its due from
the belly of the a.
So? All kept reading it
as a — those who could read — and anyway,
a bite out of that apple proves
our kind mortal. Rare good paper
into page until most everything about the a
was shot. Practically prayer, humility,
a great foreboding not just
bare-bones frugal.
Simple aaaa from that a —
first letter loved, to hear it ache and fill
even at half-breath.
Look, it’s standard. No one but
a divine being or two makes perfect copy.
Real case in point: my now-and-again body so
poorly echoed off my mother, my father
out of a broken skull simmering
in a bog, BC probably, long before AD
pretended anything in order. Earlier, our whole
dark hole of a planet copied
unto itself via earthquake, flood, star shard,
raging molten ball in the middle, some
big bang’s idea
of a flawed, proper start.
For a while there, the tiny a
wounded. What it does.
Doing, to herald
every human sentence.
Aubade with Grass, Some Trees
Water on the ground and whatever will stay put
but I can’t see that well. Or far.
What for, the deer out there. Not now. Not
with the rain. But two of them yesterday.
Even here, the sound of cars and their distance.
No song is complete without
some straying into the minor key but
what does such happiness mean. And who said
why first. And to whom, looking sideways
at what. Grass. Some trees. The furious shrill
of the legendary largest woodpecker
you almost never spot. I don’t listen. I’m like
before I was. A stone. Or fish.
If a fish, how do I know the life in the pond
any different than the life in me. Mindlessness
is sweet. Oh this in-spite-of in the morning.
Because they forget. In captivity, round and round
the fishbowl radiant, willing.
In June
I can’t help but
think about the dead. Everywhere
their flowers burn bright.
Roses lift the trellis, lie
about their thorns. Then the feather-like
lavender I can sweep
with my hand — that scent
wakes anyone. Oldest question,
oldest answer: so the dead
go where? A shrug,
a blank look. Or the stories
we’ve heard and heard,
nodded