The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

To an Old Woman Standing in October Light

Better to just admit it, time has gotten away from you, and yet
here you are again, out in your yard at sunset, a golden light draping itself

across the white houses and mowed lawns,
the house-tall maple, green and rust in ordinary light,

has become a golden leaf-embossed globe, the brook runs molten,
the clouds themselves glow gold as the heaven you used to imagine.

Do you know that your own figure, as Midas-touched as a Klimt painting,
has become part of that landscape falling around you, 

almost indistinguishable from the whole of it —
as if eternity itself were being absorbed into your mortal body?

Or is it that your body, out of time, is merged into eternity?
You have been looking for a reason for your continued existence,

with faith so shaky it vibrates like a plucked wire.
Such moments of glory must be enough. As you search them out again, again,

your disappearing holds off for a while.  But see how, even in this present,
as you stand there, the past flies into the future,

the way, above you, the crows are winging home again, calling to each other,
vanishing above the trees into the night-gathering sky.

from Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Fragmenting

And the morning opens like a blue glory blossom on a vine.
The business conversations of the birds,
chitterings among the low bushes.

I want to be like the depths
beyond the petals where everything is burning.

The song I need to make it through today
falls on my head softly like the smallest pebbles

and keeps me from reaching out in sorrow.

Therefore I sing along and choose
among the many notes.

*

All night, dreams came to rest in quiet,
unfolding into a kind of truth.
They shaped who I am.

The night nurtured them with its stars
as I turned to the wall.

*

Later rain begins.

I feel the floor trembling
and the circle beneath my feet.

Inheritance and genealogy
on the curb talking

and the rain disappears into puddles.
I want to drift off to sleep

but I resist.
Then it floats me into its arms.

*

Reality shifts like a hundred
golden fish shimmering in a net,

fragments that cannot be put together.

I cannot take it in — bigger than the mind
can keep at once.

What can it mean? I mean everything.
The lake at twilight, the lightning,
all the machinery around me?

*

Once broken, things remain broken.
Words keep walking across the page
and a covey of doves scatters up.

I can never be close enough to the earth —
its vulnerable body, its almost silent heart,
so many souls riding on it.

*

Some days I am all habits and compulsions
and then comes the sweet relief.

*

What if there is no choice?
Who is listening then?

*

All is vision and sound:
roar of garbage compactors in the complex,

clatter of hours, the hammers of morning,
the women rising, the women sewing.

*

Who hears voices when no one is there?
Do you even hear me?

from Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

A Week After His Funeral

Without my hearing aids, the day seems so still,
light washes the windows all yellow
like the eye of my cat who snoozes on his wicker chair.

Yesterday a friend showed me her new poem:
seven hares running around a jar or an urn
the way they might have done in ancient Greece.

Only last week, Roger’s ashes sat on a bench
in the funeral home, in a stainless steel urn
and I thought he’s too large to be contained there.

By which I meant the largeness was his spirit.
The wake a great sadness.
Someone who seemed to be me

was standing outside myself
watching me comfort his daughter,
his two sons, moving around in a mist.

Now the clock that leans on the shelf above the table
is telling its silent numbers to the room. O two, three, four.
Drapes hang heavy with dust, I must launder them.

I just want to sleep and sleep more, then more.
What does this world mean anyway
so small in this endless universe?

On YouTube I listen to scientists,
the many who say there is no existence after.
Stephen Hawking says we are only computers.

Can I hope anyway? I’ve read and read again
the few letters I kept from the great many Roger sent me.
And stared at the photographs, trying to bring him back.

Seven hares running to what end, for what reason? 
Seven yellow pairs of eyes at the window.
Seven stabbing  shafts of midday light.

from Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Glosa, Four Months after Your Death

after Pablo Neruda

Nobody is missing from the garden. Nobody is here:
Only the green and black winter, the day
Waking from sleep like a ghost
a white phantom in cold garments.

Early November, leaves on the ground,
the migrating birds gone from the trees,
shrill jay in the maple, his unanswered call.
I am alone here among the littered fans
of the gingko, the hostas’ dried stalks,
alone as if waiting for you to appear
from wherever you have gone,
but there is only the silence, a gray atmosphere.
Nobody is missing from the garden. Nobody is here.

Only my own thoughts accompany me,
only the unresponsive sky, its silence of clouds
always drifting northward with the wind, and one
by one, disappearing as though year after year
was passing in procession, each loss making way
for the next and the next.
The hours are sullen and chill.
I gather the fabric of my coat to my body,
knowing I am not only alone, but alone will stay.
Only the green and black winter, the day

stretching out across the fallen garden,
the same garden that comes at night after night in dream,
as though the remnants of ruin were haunting me,
the Eden after the fall from grace,
all bramble and weed, so I understand
that what could be kept has been diminished,
that everything perfect already had been lost.
I hold onto life like a bitter promise that has some good in it
and walk here like a first woman as if waking, an innermost
waking from sleep like a ghost.

The year has turned gray and gold and is hung with webs.
Somehow I have become an old woman without meaning to.
These are the rickety days of little substance, the mind
gone blurry, the ears deafened,  the damaged eye,
even the taste of lemons dull on my tongue.
Nothing anymore, not even my emotions, is intense.
I have given up waiting for you to come to me
in whatever form you might take. I have given up watching.
All drabbed down, I am full of your absence:
a white phantom in cold garments.

from Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Memory

after a photograph by Yako Ma

I remember
the absolute silence of the cherry blossoms
over the small emerald river in the countryside,
the quiet countryside somewhere in Japan.
And the way the emerald water also held
the milky white reflection of the sky
and the dark shadows the cherry trees cast there
where a single rowboat was pulled up parallel to the bank
as I sat a long way off in another country,
another century, looking down on the scene.

I think it must be morning there, the air moist on my arms,
the small path that runs along the river, empty
but waiting for someone, a monk perhaps,
to arrive in his orange robe —
a monk deep in a meditation walk,
and he doesn’t know I am watching him
from my opposite and far edge of the world.
Yet here I am with all my senses open,
taking in his walk, the river, the rowboat,
and the cherry trees in blossom
such as I’ve never seen in my own life.
And wishing to go in that oarless rowboat
somewhere deeper into this quiet
that I can almost remember.
How gently flowing my mind feels now —
like the small river
or an unfolding cherry blossom.

from Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Reincarnate

I want to come back as that ordinary
garden snail, carting my brown-striped spiral shell
onto the mushroom which has sprouted
after overnight rain so I can stretch
my tentacles toward the slightly drooping
and pimpled raspberry, sweet and pulsing —
a thumb that bends on its stalk from the crown
of small leaves, weighed down by the almost
translucent shining drop of dew I have
been reaching and reaching toward my whole life.

from Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

How This Poet Thinks

I don’t think
like lawyers, quick in the mind,
rapid as a rat-a-tat-tat,
or academics, who pile logic up
like wood to get them through the winter.

I think the way someone listens
in a still place for the sound of quiet —
or the way my body sways
at the transition zone, back and forth
between field and woods — a witching stick —

or as though I were inhabiting the seasons
between winter and spring,
between summer and fall —
finding those in-between places
that need me to name them.

When I think, sometimes it is
like objects rushing through a tunnel,
and sometimes
it is like water in a well with dirt sides,
where the wetness is completely absorbed

and the ground rings with dampness,
becomes a changed thing.
Other times
it is the way sea fog rises off
the swelling green of the ocean
and covers everything but illuminates itself.

I think with my skin open like the frog
who takes in the rain by osmosis.
I delve into the groundhog holes
where no words follow.
Slow, so slow I think, and cannot hold
the thoughts except when they come down

hard on the paper where they are malleable,   
can be shifted, worked at like clay.
I think like this: with my brain stem,
and with the site of emotions
the way I imagine the fox thinks,
trapped in his present need

but moving freely — his eyes quick
toward the day’s desire —
and the way, beneath the surface
of the water, the swimmer’s legs hang down
above the tendrils of the jelly fish
which wave in the filtered light.

I think in tortoise-time,
dream-time, limbic time,
like a waterfall, a moth’s wing,
like snow — that soundless, that white.

from Necessary Light, Utah State University Press, 1999, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Lightning Spreads Out Across the Water

It was already too late
when the swimmers began
to wade through the heavy
water toward shore,
the cloud’s black greatcoat
flinging across the sun,
forked bolts blitzing
the blind ground,
splits and cracks
going their own easiest way,
and with them, the woman
in the purple tank suit,
the boy with the water-wings,
one body then another.
And this is nothing about God
but how Stone Pond turned
at the height of the day
to flashpoint and fire
stalking across the water,
climbing the beach
among the screams
and the odor of burned skin
until twelve of them
curled lifeless on sand
or floated on the tipped
white caps of the surface,
and twenty-two more
walked into the rest
of their lives
knowing what waits
in the clouds to claim them
is random —
that nothing can stop it,
that afterwards the pond
smooths to a stillness
that gives back,
as though nothing could move it,
the vacant imponderable sky.

from Necessary Light, Utah State University Press, 1999, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Watching Light in the Field

It may be part water, part animal —
the light — the long flowing whole
of it, river-like, almost feline,
shedding night, moving silent
and inscrutable into the early morning,
drifting into the low fields,
gathering fullness, attaching itself
to thistle and sweetgrass,
the towering border trees,
inheriting their green wealth —
blooming as if this
were the only rightful occupation,
rising beyond itself, stretching out
to inhabit the whole landscape.
I think of illuminations, erasures,
how light informs us, is enough
to guide us.  How too much
can cause blindness.  I think of memory —
what is lost to us, what we desire.
By noon, nothing is exact,
everything diffused in the glare.
What cannot be seen intensifies:
rivulet of sweat across the cheekbone,
earthworm odor of soil and growing.
The field sways with confusion
of bird call, mewlings,
soft indecipherable mumblings.
But in the late afternoon, each stalk
and blade stands out so sharp and clear
I begin to know my place among them.
By sunset as it leaves —
gold-dusting the meadow-rue and hoary alyssum,
hauling its bronze cloak across the fences,
vaulting the triple-circumference
of hills — I am no longer lonely.

from Necessary Light, Utah State University Press, 1999, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Roofmen

Over my head, the roofmen are banging shingles into place
and over them the sky shines with a light that is
almost past autumn, and bright as copper foil.

In the end, I will have something to show for their hard labor —
unflappable shingles, dry ceilings, one more measure of things
held safely in a world where safety is impossible.

In another state, a friend tries to keep on living
though his arteries are clogged,
though the operation left a ten-inch scar

and, near his intestines, an aneurysm blossoms
like a deformed flower. His knees and feet
burn with constant pain.

We go on. I don’t know how sometimes.
For a living, I listen eight hours a day to the voices
of the anxious and the sad. I watch their beautiful faces

for some sign that life is more than disaster —
it is always there, the spirit behind the suffering,
the small light that gathers the soul and holds it

beyond the sacrifices of the body. Necessary light.
I bend toward it and blow gently.
And those hammerers above me bend into the dailiness

of their labor, beneath concentric circles: a roof of sky,
beneath the roof of the universe,
beneath what vaults over it.

And don’t those journeymen
hold a piece of the answer — the way they go on
laying one gray speckled square after another,

nailing each down, firmly, securely.

from Necessary Light, Utah State University Press, 1999, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

First Night with Strangers

The bat veered erratically over us
on that first nervous night,
while we ate, the twelve of us, at long tables
in the three-sided shed behind the lodge
protected from the summer rain —
which was hammering straight down —
and the lightning.

A thing so dark, it seemed
snipped from the burlap of shadow
high in the rafters above our candlelight.
Something not real — a figment,
a frantic silhouette.
And all the while we
(who were not terribly disturbed)

continued to pass the good food,
continued to reach tentatively,
stranger to stranger.   Oh
we were jovial — we told jokes,
we laughed, we cracked open the closed
doors of ourselves to each other.

And, for all that society, I
might have missed it entirely —
so far above us it fluttered.
Seen/unseen. Seen/unseen.

from Duties of the Spirit, Tupelo Press, 2005, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

The Undeniable Pressure of Existence

I saw the fox running by the side of the road
past the turned away brick faces of the condominiums
past the Citco gas station with its line of cars and trucks
and he ran, limping, gaunt, matted dull-haired
past Jim’s Pizza, past the Wash-O-Mat,
past the Thai Garden, his sides heaving like bellows
and he kept running to where the interstate
crossed the state road and he reached it and ran on
under the underpass and beyond it past the perfect
rows of split-levels, their identical driveways,
their brookless and forestless yards,
and from my moving car, I watched him,
helpless to do anything to help him, certain he was beyond
any aid, any desire to save him, and he ran loping on,
far out of his element, sick, panting, starving,
his eyes fixed on some point ahead of him, some fierce
invisible voice, some possible salvation
in all this hopelessness, that only he could see.

from Duties of the Spirit, Tupelo Press, 2005, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Pistachios

Take a simple thing like pistachios.
Think of them in their smooth brown cases
or cracked open to white meat shiny as a tooth.
Or think of them in ice cream, the green of mint
or spring or something more succulent,
an unnamable ecstasy.
Get into the nuttiness of them,
the unadorned goodness, then let the mind go
wherever it goes from there, to Romeo in the garden,
to the full brown nipples of Juliet. Let love
come into it
as the raison d’etre for all Being,
and because
someone’s always starting a war, let war come into it,
though you wish it wouldn’t.   
Missiles over a ragged country;
worn-out people not turning back
to watch their homes on fire.
And from there go
to guns in the streets of our own country
and murders in the parks where no one is safe,
to feeble attempts — pistols
that can be fired only by their owners —
as if that would be enough to stop the killing.
Oh, but Romeo
in the garden, in blue, and the moon over.
Oh but Juliet on the balcony. 
Oh but the strong vine
that can hold a man climbing.
And pistachio ice cream,
a green you could die for.
And pistachios themselves,
the simple nourishment,
the hard welcome apple,
the fallen fruit.

from Duties of the Spirit, Tupelo Press, 2005, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

The Composer Says This Is How We Should Live Our Lives

He lifts his violin and gives us the fox
in Ireland running with wild abandon
along the cliff-edge above the wild Irish Sea

and I am back in Connemara where even
the pasture stones have names and the green
slopes are plentiful with stones and the sea-wind

where there are no trees to stop it rollicks
across the commonage and the sea is a wild rolling
and the composer’s brown hair is whipping around

his young intense face as his arm jigs and swings
the bow across the strings and his body is swaying
and his shoulders are leaping and the music is leaping

and the fox is running with such joy along that cliff 
red fox brilliant green pasture cerulean sky 
and the wind and the white-capped

plum-blue ocean and a man’s foot measuring time
in the sun that is beyond brilliant and the fox is leaping
forward along the cliff-edge.

from Duties of the Spirit, Tupelo Press, 2005, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Wherever you are going

you will want to take with you the mud-rich scent
breaking through March frost, and lemons

sliced on a blue plate, their pinwheels of light
you will want to take strawberries you have stolen

from the farmer’s night fields, and the sleepy child
you lifted from under the willow where she’d been playing

you will want to take the one-eyed horse that was never yours
and the obstinate cat that was, and the turtle with the cracked shell

you found crossing the hard road and could not save.
you will want, especially, to bring with you the shifting

blue/black/grays of the lake shining beneath coins of silver
and all that lives deeper there beneath the mysteries of water

you will try to take a prayer you might have otherwise
left behind in case you need it — and a memory of the love

you have been calling back — but you will soon forget

when you go, you will leave the Giants cap you wore
to dinner behind for the others, you will leave dust

coating the books you meant to read, the books themselves 
weighing down the shelves. it will be necessary to leave

the suitcases and tote bag in the overcrowded closet
and your two rooms for someone who wants them

more than you ever did. leave your tickets, and your Master Charge
with its sad balance — you won’t be coming back regardless

of what you’ve always been told. therefore take nothing
take less than nothing and even less than that. remove your shoes

place your pulse on the table, release breath. leave behind the scars  
on your finger, your thigh, the long one over your heart

from Then, Something, Tupelo Press, 2009, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Prepositions Toward a Definition of God

Beneath of course the sky,
in the sky itself,
over there among the beach plum hedges,

over the rain and the beyond and
beyond the beyond of,

under the suitcases of the heart,
from the back burners of the universe.

Here inside at the table, there outside the circus,
within the halls of absence,
across the hanging gardens of the wind,

between the marshland sedges, around the edges
of tall buildings going up
and short buildings coming down.

Of energy and intelligence,
of energy — and if not intelligence then what?

Ahead of the storm and the river, behind the storm and the river.
Prior to the beginning of dust, unto the end of fire.

Above the wheelbarrows and the chickens.
Underneath the fast heart of the sparrow,
on top of the slow heart of the ocean —

against the framework of all the holy books.
Despite the dogmas that rain down on the centuries.

Concerning the invisible, and unnamable power,
in spite of the terror

considering the spirit,
because of something in the body that wants to be lifted.

Because if not God, then what in place of
 
near the firebombed willow,          
beneath the quilt that tosses the dead to the sky,

beside the still waters and the loud waters
and among the walking among?

from Then, Something, Tupelo Press, 2009, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Alternate Worlds

They are what fuels the dark, what lies
beyond the sheer curtains.
They are mysterious and hooded
like the woman in your dream, the hollow
before birth, what hides beneath the casket lid.

And this also: what whoops out
from the forest, the claws
of moles in their tunnels, the moon’s
long fingers trailing across cheekbones,
the breath dispersed into ether.

You can see them from the corner of your eye,
hear them hum in the background of everything.
Or, on a summer night, a huge moth,
white-winged, full of grace,
darts across your path — and is gone.

from Then, Something, Tupelo Press, 2009, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

The Gifts of Linnaeus

after native New England plants named by Carl Linnaeus

What is sacrament if not to take in the names —
the twinflower for instance he named for himself,
Linnaea Borealis, its fragile bells ringing

long past his brief moment in the world.
Or smooth sumac for making ink, for spilling
on the page, for keeping what might be lost.

Not for me the altar rail or the intonations
of the priest. Not the vessel lifted up,
nor the disc like a diatom on the tongue. 

No, this is the body — this mountain laurel
it is forbidden to pick, its blossoms like lights
against the dark woods, or the red mulberry

that failed to survive New England winters —
someone’s dream of silk that didn’t come to pass.
And this is the body, the common milkweed’s clouds

of blowing across the field and this, too,
what is left behind — the dried husk. And this
is the body — lobelia whose name fills my mouth.

And this is blood — the wild grapes clinging
to the wall behind which the traffic
of the interstate rushes with a river-sound —

and this too, high-bush blueberry whose bright
gems gather a sheen of morning dew, their stain
on my willing tongue.

And here is New England aster, its flowers
bluer than wine. Eat and drink, here, now,
on this giving earth, these sacraments.

from Then, Something, Tupelo Press, 2009, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Hunger

It is the gnawing within the silence
of the deep body which is like
the pool a waterfall replenishes
but can never fill.
The watery room of the body
and its voices who call and call
wanting something more, always more.

Once in a dream, the trees in a peach orchard
called out saying: Here, this bright fruit,
hold its roundness in your palm,
and I held one, wanting
the others I could not hold,
as the light fell through the trees,
one cascade after another.

Now, the wind from the hurricane
that veered out to sea
and the hard rain blow through the space
where yesterday men felled the spruce,
its height and beauty, for no good reason.
Where it was, only emptiness remains,
and the stump level with the ground.

The wind finds its own place
and waits there holding its breath
for a moment, calling to no one,
surprising us by its stillness,
surprising even the rain which comes in
to my house through the untidy gardens
where it has been sending its life breath
over the dying mint and blood-red daylilies.

Summer is dying and I grow closer
to the shadow moving toward me
like the small spiders
that inhabit and hunt in the corners.
And the wind stirs, rattles the panels
singing its own hunger, its own water song.

from Winter, Hobblebush Books, 2013, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

The Guest

In the long July evenings,
the French woman,
who came to stay every summer
for two weeks at my aunt’s inn,
would row my brother and me
out to the middle of the mile-wide lake
so that the three of us
would be surrounded by the wild
extravagance of reds that had transformed
both lake and sky into fire.
It was the summer after our mother died.
I remember the dipping sound of the oars
and the sweet music of our voices as she led us
in the songs she had taught us to love.
Blue Moon. Deep Purple.
We sang as she rowed, not ever wondering
where she came from or why she was alone,
happy that she was willing to row us
out into all that beauty.

from Winter, Hobblebush Books, 2013, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Shadow at Evening

After all day walking the Vermont craft fair in the sun
after the goat-milk soaps and rose-scented sachets
the bright pottery stalls and the wooden animals

while my shadow preceded me along the grassy aisles
and disappeared reappeared as I moved in and out
of the shadows of maples and gray ash trees

where the breathy music of the accordion player floated
where the field was vibrant with color and motion
stalls of candles relishes and pickles cotton candy in plastic sleeves

I drove home and my shadow rode beside me drove lazily
watching the Green Mountains pass outside the windows
home to my own small cache of solitude and grace

then my shadow disappeared into the brown carpet
disappeared into the bookshelves and the books
I never missed it but just continued on with my quiet life

but now through the east window evening approaches
but now night is knocking against the long shadows
of the street lamp as my shadow rises mysterious and compliant

and I beckon it to enter me until I am one with it at last
and I allow the day to  close and dream to come
allow the dream to rise from nowhere and come to me.

from Winter, Hobblebush Books,  2013, and
        Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017

Should the Fox Come Again to My Cabin in the Snow