the sun will shine in your wake,
while safely offshore the hurricane
named for me will parallel you,
but diverging as subtly
as I do almost every day.
Truro: the Bay Side
Watching blunt men surf-cast sand worms,
you want to learn to catch the groundfish
we sauté and eat with gusto.
But flounder, halibut, and cod
avoid shallow bays. Rockfish, croakers,
bluegills, shad, bluefish. If you hook
a big one—a forty-pound bluefish—
it could drag you into the water
where you’d squeal in Technicolor
until I dragged you out again.
These long July days seem delicate
and blue-white as Delft pottery.
The sky revolves on a pivot
about a hundred miles overhead.
The surf-casters mutter to themselves
but rarely speak to each other
and never to us or the other sun
people scattered on the seamless beach.
Maybe at dusk when fish are biting
I’ll rent a casting rod and teach you
to fling bait far enough to tease
a cruising striper to strike. Maybe
you’ll catch one. But then you’ll cry
for the pain you’ve inflicted. You’ll free
the creature back to its netherworld,
and for the next few hours regret
that you ever invaded its space.
The Posthumous Look of a Diner
The posthumous look of a diner
on a hot Vermont afternoon
forces me to stop for lunch.
The parking lot saddens, one car
angled in the shade, the gravel
stippled and rutted and weedy
where a wooden picnic table
crumbles with decay. The metal
sheathing has dented. Concrete steps
trip me into gloom. The waitress
sags with adolescent splendor,
hunching to avert herself
from my potentially male gaze.
I order with downcast eyes
so she doesn’t have to blush.
Three ceiling fans rotate slowly,
and an air conditioner rattles
in its window perch, a chilly sigh
exuding like the breath of a tomb.
The other customers, a couple
in their eighties, leave a tip
shining on the table and depart.
Stevie Wonder on the radio
sings something from the Seventies.
The waitress proffers coffee. I nod
as politely as I dare, vacant stools
rebuking me for being here,
booths haunted by food-smells
many years old. The ski crowd
will pack this place winter weekends,
but the summer glare exposes
the delicate grease-film embalming
the fixtures, the ground-in filth
of the tile floor dutifully mopped
every evening, and the fatal
heart attacks ghosting from a grill
tended with care by a cook so lean
the waitress, if she weren’t so shy,
could strum his ribs like a harp.
Milkweed Days
Across the Fremont land the wisps
of milkweed flutter like strands
of exploded cobweb. I palm
a half-pod and crumple it
to feel the papery compression,
then feed the fragments to the breeze.
When I was six I pestered
Joanne Szluc with sticky tangles
of milkweed filaments. Armed
with the milk squeezed from the leaves,
I pawed the mess into her hair.
The cottony fibers were white
as Grandma’s earnest and faintly
senile gaze, so Joanne cried
that I’d made a hag of her.
We stared at each other a moment,
thrilled that she’d used the word “hag.”
The tattered milkweed stalks relaxed
as we ran off laughing; then later,
to punish, she pushed me face-down
into garden mulch, and I let her.
Huso Liszt
Fresco, The Forlorn Virgin, Dirbi Monastery, Kareli, Georgia
The history of Georgia is that of repeated invasions from the south, up between the Black and Caspian Seas. Few peoples in the world have an ancestry more dominated by rape. Contemplate the Forlorn Virgin of Dirbi, and its corrosion by violence. Remember that the monastery was a nunnery. Don’t forget that Stalin was born in Gori, just thirty miles away. The faux culture of a State based on the abstractions of Marxist ideology did not so much supplant a culture, as take root in a poverty of violence where the peaceful transmission of cultural wealth from family and society to child had been rendered impossible
–Keith Smith
i. Paleo-Violence in Plaster
We saw it first in Pernambuco
from the stoop of our rustic farmhouse
roofed with thigh-molded tiles.
Enormous toads emerge from the orchard
to the scent of orange blossoms, jasmine, chicken shit
as the sun pissed its blood and sank. A boy
appeared out of a darkening tunnel
up from the river through the trees.
He was the youngest son
of the caretakers we had unwittingly
dislodged by buying the farm the week
before from their landlord.
We were in danger, he said. You’ll need a gun, he said,
and pointed to a cold flurry of bullet holes,
a heavy-flake snow perpetually falling
in the plaster around the windows.
We saw it again, and again, even next door
in the boarded-up house where Jose de Deu’s
brother was murdered. We’d pried
the door open, and in barred shafts
of biblical light, a host of tree
frogs leached to the walls
and disappeared though the roof
as if they were the severed tongues
of the survivors
lunging for the cover of a time-
darkened mouth. And there in the plaster walls
fell the same heavy snow.
The silence that each violence had scarred
into the wills of the living there
was so palpable. This is poverty!
not an absence things,
but a drought,
a truth drought in floods of silence.
When the real drought came dust rose
like insurmountable drifts of snow.
ii. As She Was First Painted
Midway through her last eutherian trimester,
the flush of certainty drained from her faith.
No fire could unchill her from her doubt
which rose with every parent else against herself.
It had been at best an unamazing dream.
She could brave the market as well as anyone,
and once she’d passed a spot of bronze
to hear a teller weave the Greek and Roman stories,
and had shyly scoffed at all the shapes
the so-called gods would take
to relieve an earthly passion.
But now she came to question how trusting she,
and how unmiraculous he
had been—so unlike a raging swan, or shower
of golden light. To be sure, the angel
had been bright,
but only with an earthlike radiance,
as if the shadows in her room had all
conspired to be nowhere near his eyes and hands;
and she had seen a R
oman’s slave
with just as clean and shiny hair.
Worse, she had never once refused
to linger for the tales of shipwrecks
the soldiers like to tell, and their funny,
awkward rescues from despair;
and her people
had seen her talking to them there.
She had imagined her time laid up with the holy baggage
would be more graceful than this. She’d accepted
the vomiting; she hardly noticed
the bugs of lamb fat stuck to her chin
as she scraped the pot for more stew,
but even the colostrum that seeped through her
swollen nipples repulsed her now, and worse,
if the baby kicked at all, his kicks were as weak
as the spastic reflexes of any half-living thing.
iii. Dirbi Now
The snow, the snow, for eight
centuries, the snow,
by Monguls, Turks, Persians,
Khwarzem, Timur,
Dagestani, Turkestani,
Germans and Russians, over
and over, each war the same:
the men arrive, the women die,
or go.
Only the Dirbi Virgin remains
confined within the Dirbi walls,
a wedge of fresco
in deepening drifts of snow.
The flurries of spear, bullet, cannon
scars and holes
now render her forlornness
as beleaguerment by cold.
And the fossilizing swelling
above her lap, which once gave
hope to others in confinement,
conceals the reluctant slouch of
transformation, slouching
still, as with newer gods from
somewhere else, toward the same
old Bethlehem to be born.
The Death of a Whale
it isn’t the
harpoon kills
the whale, it’s
the line
from which they can’t
be rid.
their nostrils are a field
of nerves
vaginally sensitive
to feel the shed
of water, the snap
of air with every
rise, to time
each blow and breath
to fall between
caprices of
the breaking waves.
or do they begin their blow
underwater, and feel
its pressure at
the surface change?
whatever. in
their panic, and
in their pain,
and under the
inexplicable
horizontal
force of the ship,
there are breaths
they can’t arrange.
From Alaska: At a Conference on the Poetry of Place
On the closing of the last light bulb factory in the United States of A.
Let us have a conference and connect!
And admit to the robbery and murder our consumption funds.
If our tastes and dependencies here
arm tyrannies there
just as the love of pepper once
launched a quarter-million ships to slit
their way,
throat by throat, up the coasts of the orient,
what is the poetry of here, of place, and only here?
From my porch in rainforest, Alaska,
rainwater complicates over the clogged and rotted eave gutter
and pounds on the mossy concrete below.
There’s a simple pi pi pi pi of rainfall on the steps,
a bassline patters out on popcorn kelp in the tidal zone,
off salt-fluted hemlock leaning out to sea.
Only a mind could organize so much water,
and dum dum titty dum, suddenly
it’s Mozart. I’m in the 18th century.
And I’m drifting east, high over unnamed Deer Mountain, Blue Lake,
over the ridge to Harriet Hunt, unnamed Carroll Inlet,
Portage Cove, and the random fires of summer fishing camps,
Behm Canal, and the dark continent.
Lights cluster, mussel-like, to the shores
of the the black Atlantic: Boston, Philadelphia, New York.
The silence and utter darkness of ocean, then
the first lights of Europe,
scattered smoky fires of the agricultural poor,
now, Paris, Avignon, Vienna. From high windows
into the great parlors of the western world, we see Lords
in pink and robins-egg-blue powdered wigs
lean forward at the waist
before ladies gowned like giant jellyfish
and dance, gloriously lit
by oil extracted from harpooned,
drowned, and boiled humpbacked whales.
I look down at my clothes, my Patagonia fleece from Sri Lanka,
my Indonesian pants. Today, I ate
an orange from Chile, apples from New Zealand, Belgian cheese.
My American clam shovel leans against my wall.
Up and down Tongass Narrows, reflections
of crimelights, yellow incandescent windows of houses,
winks of video and tv
streak out through the rain and waver with the water.
It’s the eyes of tired Chinese parents drowning in the sea.
Pieter Breughel the Elder’s The Parable of the Blind
Listen! The blind are leading the blind.
Hear the wary linkage of six men, their breath
and fearful muttering, how their syllables
shorten and tonally ascend
with each stumble and jolt. Hear how their tentative
shuffle hisses music contrapuntal to the toads
that screech to populate the village ditch
where sewage makes wet kissing sounds
against the rustling reeds.
Their staves click between pebbles and grass
like thumbnails picking dirty teeth.
Their alms bowls jangle and thock against
their beaded rosaries and belts.
But where are those capricious landmarks
of the human voice, of the villagers who see? Somewhere,
a woman shouts insults into
the vast cavern of her drunk son’s ear. There must
be birds, too, twittering indifferently, high in the trees.
Now hear the slip of gravel, the grunt, and then,
the prodigious splash.
Now, hear the things you wouldn’t have heard:
The scrape of broomstraw as monks in the steepled church
sweep pheasant bones from between the pews,
and angels repeating whispers, mouth to ear,
over the great arc of paradise, to laugh
at each new garbled truth
emerging on the other side.
Hear aldermen belching, softly, ale gas,
counting money in their troubled sleep.
Be, for a moment, blind.
You lead. A hand rides your shoulder;
its grip tightens and slackens
as you pitch over ground swells. Leaning
forward, you choose your way carefully, always
balancing against stumbling over roots and divots,
your hand on guard for low-hanging branches.
Suddenly, you feel the first horror of air where ground
should be, and twisting your body mid-step,
as if you might scramble back across the trespassed air,
you fall backward into the water.
This is the parable of the blind:
No precipice exists from which men can fall forever,
except within the human heart, where fear dissolves
the underp
inning earth. What would it take,
in darkness and in panic, to shout out to the others
as you fall, “Stop! Fall back. The ditch is here. Hold still!”
It’s too late. The men tumble
cursing & thrashing on top of you. But let’s say you, unlike
your fellows, don’t keep falling after landing
in the ditch, but find your feet, the bottom, the surface
of the water, air. Can you now shout, “Fools!
Stand up! The ditch is only three feet deep! Stand up!”
Or do you stand up, wipe your mouth, and wade away,
and leave the rest to drown?
Clifford Hill
How natural you are
why are you wearing
that tangle of honeysuckle
around your neck
that torn blouse
of rose bush thorns
tight across your breasts
that brittle skirt
of oak bark breaking
against your thighs
everyone already knows
how natural you are
from the way you move
with baby sparrows
nesting in your hair
Ice storm in Boston Public Gardens
Trees have turned metal
Emblems
Of my own limbs
Bearing a weight
Of old love
Now wood and ice
Still there’s promise
Of spring thaw
Bark cracks
Crystal breaks
A sudden laugh
Through leaf
Branch trunk
The whole root of you
Domestic resolutions
It’s Saturday in the new year: I rise
at eight in domestic air to spread
lemon curd on toast and brew mint
tea in a clay pot; I carry a chaste tray
to the late bed you occupy in our
new resolve, egg and butter
beneath your creamy underwear
I’ll wash at nine. All week long
my list of resolutions grew: musk oil
for a man’s rub of leather in a woman’s
boots and beeswax for shine of oak
in your secret room: rise, old friend,
dance the winter sun: with a broom
of love I’ll sweep our closet clean.
Jasmine branch
the gold lights of Manhattan rise
and soon the jasmine branch plunges
once again in the childhood well
we crawled into for just five dollars
on a dare and there first smelled