The Priests in the Trees

The priests in the trees
have changed their robes,
their yellow
substantiating earth,

to the brutal temple
of the woods have
brought back gold,
lit the branches’ tips.

In wind the sticks
have conclave
debating the
splintered month,

at last issue
a crown jeweled
with cardinals
whose gold melts

through the rusting dark.
The priests of
burningbush
render God’s voice

in blood colors,
shear down the veil
that parses hung lofty
from earth-bound,

to the undone temples
of a copse have brought
back music,
frozen the cardinal’s heart.

At Castle Neck

A wave’s white flag unfurls against the headland.
We’re pleased with summer’s long foreseen surrender;
hot noons betrayed by maples fringing umber,
horny insects dying in the wetlands.
You told me victory can read as loss—
The pale moths of our days mating in long
grass until their sailcloth bodies fall
apart. That will be the way we gloss
a season. The way I’d name your legs
laid down together dawn horizon,
or you my beard a tangle of black weeds.
For both of us, the ocean’s tannin dregs
will mean September. But you? I won’t rely on
Proserpine’s name to frame you. Of frames you have no need.

The Loaming

Behind the grumpy
Powder-blue rototiller,
Interned in dust and

Shriven by the bloody
Stations of Essex county biting flies
Across my shins,

Hangdog to its blistering
Handles, I level bone-jigging,
Snarling progress against

The fastness of buried roots,
Wheedled stones and
Disobedient hedgerows,

Working the lines at Bothways Farms,
A wind-whipped acreage running away
With the declining light.

Here turned up loam ensconces
Me, black with fertility, a touch,
A labor bordering on

The verbal, in a rot-
Pungent atmosphere both
Suggestive and inarticulate,

Where I can sweatily
Follow through the mental
Seed-death in these trenches

That will raise me up another season,
Baskets heavy with a harvest of words
Equal to the speechless.

September, Inverness

Tomales Bay is flat blue in the Indian summer heat.
This is the time when hikers on Inverness Ridge
Stand on tiptoe to pick ripe huckleberries
That the deer can’t reach. This is the season of lulls—
Egrets hunting in the tidal shallows, a ribbon
Of sandpipers fluttering over mudflats, white,
Then not. A drift of mist wisping off the bay.
This is the moment when bliss is what you glimpse
From the corner of your eye, as you drive past
Running errands, and the wind comes up.
And the surface of the water glitters hard against it.

-Robert, Hass from Time and Materials

Station Clock Bomber

The sun’s round fist takes one mountain maple by the throat.
Breakfast steams hard in an iron pan, spitting pigfat.
Redstarts and thrushes tune warbly orchestras
among the fiddleheads.  Chill of dawn. The cool junipers
suffer their arthritis, turning knucklier in low-bound fog.
My neighbor’s taken him a lantern out to check his chicken fence
for fox holes, walking that gangly shadow down the stubble
of a well-grazed lawn.  Then in the distance, a tinwhistle,
the train. It was strange to us at first, who’s kin settled this blessed
muck as a tribe of Irish rejects, records to their names
they’d cross the Atlantic–a salt-slabbed grave without a bottom
–to erase. Then we settled here, and our days were permitted
to wax primordial. So a dawn-to-dusk routine
sprang up in our rudimentary furrows. Then came the city
planner with his tobacco wad, his cash wad and his deed.

Not long after, we got made aware of time, hooking trains
like the sun’s declension hooks the cows
by their shoe-tongue napes, marching them out to feed,
and lulling them again to the companionable shade
beyond a scudded clearing. Time rose from a turd
beside the railway where our kine waited to be packed
for slaughter out in Charlotte, one fly hatching,
cleaning legs and wings, then rising, then another,
and as the swarm filled our ears with predatory ticking,
we lost status–falling from the regency of cultural imperatives
to an amicable enslavement: Some town-wide
doctrine of promptness as alien to us as a separate
hemisphere. Time was an antarctic star rising through Orion.
Now so much is sour–the days packaged like bacon
in cellophane–but not all. I told my neighbor:
Not all. There’s still the statement of dynamite
to be made; proof even this hick excels at punctuation.

So now, the train yard’s absurd dins and silences,
the heft and thunder of iron meeting itself in the dark,
then nothing but the soft snore of cicadas. I’ve planted
enough year by year, only to reap nothing but a long
line of mayoral ink, so now the whirlwind’s seed is going to ground
in the heart of this industry. The station being empty,
I kill no one, or just the shell of me,
rough old corn cob that I am. But it’s a damn sight
I’ll take this clock with me, that’s pounded down our plans
to make a bolt or two in a caboose, or to cast
girders for a mineshaft. I choose this dark depth,
cold as it is, instead: Lighting the short fuse that
makes my name a curse to bless the land.

Finnish

In the dream someone is yelling:
tell us a whorer story
take us to the maul
bundle ‘em in summer
give ‘em grottoes
a fringe goddess, a tower nanny,
corner spinners in palaver,
recalcitrants in wedding shops.

A wake. black silk. clouds. Then, half a wake,
half corpse, half dead, a half a loaf of pumpernickel,
Finnish newspapers, blue appointment books,
mahogany desk, marble tableau, ruin
wears burnt sienna, rests a hand on iron lampstands.
World without end, rain without end
church among blankets, window ajar
smoke from hedgerows, a whistle,
low laugh, people up in the mist
you’re in, you’re in someone whispers
and whispers do a foxtrot, a globetrot,
ripple the gunnels of your mind’s playdate
like bacon seizing up and sparking grease
in the morning of platonic excellence
when light opens and the wake is over
that is, waking up at home to the tiny glories
spilling out, overflowing the rooms, gilt air.

Speaking of a Mammal

So in the ruins of Cracow man turned wolf.
Collecting amber on the Baltic coasts was forgotten,
brief stripe of the lighthouse on wobbling skiff hulls,
glow of a breast when his wife’s nightshirt slipped
like a line of contested territory in her sleep,
the cold faucet water in the morning that was the sign
of society as much as anything else. And here was Crusoe,
Fridayless, wheedling away his weekend under acrid cloud
in the cannoned-out cellars and spent brickwork, hoping to beat
rats to the last stashes of hardened bread. Every tree
in the wind sounded to him like a panzer’s tread
busting a skull. Heroism was gone, unless
there was patriotism in squatting out survival, as was music,
unless the rush of crumbling hotels and theaters
reverting in an avalanche to their charred ordinates
struck some chord in heaven. Afraid to light a fire,
like Peter he rolled scrap grain between his palms
and watched the darting sparrows of the spring
migration begin to find new roosts among gray beams
and the torn ribs of the rafters. Birdsong. Blending days,
last light. The mantle of Adam began to feel heavy.
And if he should see another darting the alleys, another
uprising veteran he might’ve sworn to die for months ago
in the gaslamped offices of the underground, he knew his duty.
The new salute: walk away.  The password they each
memorized by one consent: homo homini lupis.

Early

One job is explaining to May
The taxonomy of social medias.
Try to picture a wandering albatross:
How he hefts the sun on his wings
And delivers it post haste to the morning.
Try an Osprey snatching thirty trout at once;
Try reading more of your nature book.
Have you noticed the dancing bees,
Dancing bears, dancing birds of paradise?
May, a recent five, acquiring a sense of shy,
Giggles small giggle bubbles. I smile smoke rings.
Robins on bright lawns. Cardinal in a Maple.
We’re quiet under leaves, in white light;
We almost breathe the ether of disproved forms.
She smiles, sudden, old. Warmth, a bee dance
In earth— the half-lit beacon and half-doused.  

History Lesson

A long time ago,
before there was skyping,
there was scalping.

People used to say,
“I have to get ready for my scalp date.”
And girls would do their hair

with special care.
Because even long distance,
scalping was something

taken seriously—
Just like we do
with skyping today.

Nesting

In the still cold, freshwater-crisp
dusk, oaks push a birth of leaflets.

Out too late, past the park’s hours
watching the thrusted rockets of song sparrows

spear the roughage with their bodies’
brown crud. The quiet is packed with lust.

Shit-thick scraps are being gathered
for the homemaking: last Autumn’s

trampled tawny, wire bread bag ties, selvage
of moldy straw they will whirl into

cradles. Heron-tense, evening fishes
for the original star. Wing shiver and cheeping

rev down in the undergrowth, where a bridle
path unravels through breezy lung-scalding chill:

voice of April fiddling at the pan-pipe cattails, luring me out
with her moodswing charms, her reddened fingers.

Rain Writing

All night, tree-lash,
marionette spider, bulged shadow
dancing shapes of torqued limbs against the window.
April, in his iron crown, leans on a nimbus,
widens half-hail payloads against our shingles.
Groaned arguments of rain icemelt
through oaken curls. The ten plagues of sleet
are rehearsing in the hedge, darkening
their moans into spirituals. Something tries
to escape from my pen: a black translation.
Nothing does.

And afterward, in peeking moon
the slapped leaflets convalesce
like new crystal thrust up from a cavern–
life, green-hardened
and thriving, neat as print.

Maps and Plans

 

Grandfather would instill himself long hours in the whining rocker
Giving thought absently to the wind’s manipulations,
Considering her forward way with his cigarette smoke.
He would judge the uneasy melancholy of unfinished summer,
‘Visioning himself king on the throne of nature
With the great Douglas Firs girt in green, thickly bowing
Low to him over the fern beds in stormy supplication.
He would ‘vision a lover he was of yet to make acquaintance;
Mostly perceiving her mouth, watching her tongue gather the sunset
Then diffuse it back in words, as an opal reflects in colors:
Various and unsullied. Words she gave had a way,
And their way tugged his soul. They were lustrous.
So at dusk in the still of time, yet with night quickening,
He would ease the chair to the rhythm of their manifestation;
He later related his thoughts on those evenings before his death,
How life took shape before his mind’s eye as a spectrum,
Which he claimed defined the peculiarity of existence.
It spanned red to violet in seven decades, black at both ends:
The dark where it sprang from and the end light so bright
His eyes believed it to be dark again, for which I told him
You’re a damn fool.
But that was the nature of his mind;
To negotiate for life with pictures and thought games.
When the sun had gone completely, he slept.
His left hand dangled down to the dusty porch
Where the hand’s index fingertip brushed it.
Each night it felt the same spot, stained it with oil,
Which he joked was his mark on the world.

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Sign and Signified

Later he would reveal that the campaign
had been largely farce.
It had been a pleasure to pretend
that the squares routed near A—–
and outside B—- during numerous engagements
had not been ordered to disperse
after briefly engaging or receiving minor casualties.

Even the families of the dead eventually learned
that there had been no war
other than the elaborate sham—
the blue and gold brocades, the signs and standards
maneuvers, counter marches, plumes, parades—
even the sealing wax was not sealing wax,
which, like the congealed blood on a surgeon’s frock,
both legitimated and defied death,
Contrived dying and denied dying
while authorizing both and permitting neither.

No, there were no acts of war;
No blood-soaked missives came or went
or appeared sudden and sharp to splash the ranks.

But who could tell the difference?
In the no man’s land between what happened
and what was forbidden to have been.
It was whims and children’s errands
lived and executed upon satin charts for pleasure.
They were scarlet intestines and black bile
Chained and choking in the mangled smut of battle;
Horses and men screaming in a narrow defile.
But whose horses? What men? And which were which?

Later, the emperor,
addressing the battalions
seeing the wounds it had sustained
knowing which were illusion
reminded us it was a sham campaign—
Refusing the weight with pithy conclusion—
“no glory lose, no glory gain.”

Guilt

You said, the water will be slave
to nothing. The rain heard
first, burning in the woods,
then its tambourine in the gutter.

You stayed out standing
too long. The sins of perfection
gluing riff-raff down to the driveway.
By your feet, a leaf got dappled,
damp, damper.

Haiku: Five Desires

1. Newbury Street

We shop for shirts, rings,
half aware it’s we who’re in
and out of season.

2. Thirst

Vermeer’s plump milkmaid,
white as the cream she’s pouring.
In dreams, she gulps it.

3. Make-Out Bench

June. The Tennessee
wading a thicket of stars.
Her skin. Fresh coffee.

4. Flaneur

Walter Benjamin
paced his narrow library
looking for arcades.

5. Travel

That globed, rising light–
was it the moon, or a sign
over the highway?

Barn Owl

Sometimes close to sleep under the bedroom’s
beveled wall, though the window
I kept open in all weather but a storm

belted the torture-screech of a witch
at the crushing stone; something like steam
ripped through a narrow hole,

and I knew a rabbit was under the owl’s claw.
No fear to it. Past the foot of the bed
the wooded law dealt quick, leaving only a pelt,

without justice or hate. The blanket’s
weight felt good on my shoulders, quiet closed
in thicker, grape-scented; sleep’s wings swept down in the dark.

Proust Ghost

We step into Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea. Proust’s ghost passes through the wall and whispers: “The person with whom we are in love is to be recognized only by the intensity of the pain we that we suffer.” Then everything is “kisses four” and “elfin grot” until we wake up to watch the rockets in Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold. 

Oh Sweet Arab Sauce! (Being the Second Part of the Coffee Cantata)

Oilslick of the brain’s engine
Who left your paper cave
With its cleverly emblazoned sleeve
On every curve of my long commute
Be quicksilver to my hair of the dog Monday
Let your groundsy bottom make my ethic
Bottomless as Oprah’s riches
Everlasting as a Mercedes Benz
Invert my work and play, tighten your fist
Around my pen, inscribe the progress report.

Selah

Dripolated from the appliance’s teat
When I lay lip thirstily to you
Invert the gravity of attrition
Smash the normative rhythms
Of Owl and Songbird

However I might complain about it later
Do for me oh sweet Arab sauce
What I shuddering asked you not to
Last night in bluish glow of nightstand clock
Set slumber aflame in a sappy bonfire
Of glorious crackling workaday cheer
Be my Christmas on eternal loop
Except a Christmas of the cubicle
It is quieter here my sweet-tongued genie
Now that I have arrived from the drive-thu
Without my former troubles, galvanized awake.

Seattle Harbor

The sun sackcloths itself, at first, in cedars.
Then a forest fire: blood orange
dashes in spiced haze.
Light broadens
on the white toy houses, the huge Pacific.
Chinese faces, parks and conifers
begin humming underneath the burnisher,
the daily wrestle of earth-cold vs sun-hot
spreads a mat of sweat across the harborside.

Everywhere on yuppie cobble human stink
drizzles the familiar caramel. This is how
they got easterners to pack cattle in ’49:
picture mountainous crabs, fields of vaginal lilies
edging the Sierra, a grating of nutmeg drifted
onto whisked cream like snow–
picture getting daughters
under branches loaded with waxwings in some tuft
of your own acreage.
We know the thirst they had,
filling up their bottles, strapping hope chests
tightly to the cart.

Deep Covers

for Robert Siegel

The book’s pine musk, just as she’s sleeping,
arouses her. So life gets started,
the pebble wheedling down a ski slope
with snow heavy on the cliffs.
In December, pacing the baroque lobby shuffling
with dresses of the Nutcracker, to the distant fireworks
of champagne opening, at intermission, I dialed your number
about a reference for an application. Death in the click of the daughter’s
lips parting, in the chiffon rustle of background weeping
at my fool’s question, in the wrought-iron sitting-room stovetop,
mexican tile, the window seat she sits on where, as he wrote, a pentecost of finches
visited daily just past the glass, before dawn swelled over the firs.
Robert, that week I thought you still lived
was the last fleck of the comet,
your deer disappearing like sated lust
past trunks straight as columns of print, where autumn moss
still throbbed sudden, green,
straight as lines of the poems I pick up again
as she settles, with sweat on her chests’ concave,
between deep covers and sleeps.

Parable Repeats Itself

The mind would clear,
hungering for valleys
where streams pounded sharp
silver as fish scale

but we would ignore it,
ripping out the ore,
grinding it to make coffee.
I sat all morning in the sticks,

umended walls slumping a
prostrate green, and prayed.
No kingfisher flicked his jewel in answer.
Earth poured into the valley, river closed

soil into its cool digestion.
World eating world
made a sound like rain on reeds.
Moles crawled in the nape of soil,

pondering big mouthfuls.
Creation stood to attention
steaming with dawn, each oak
and deer with its perfect portion.

The honeybee unjealously
brewing a lifetime of sweetness
for the casual bear. And good bear kills
sheep for the hive to hollow.

The world presented itself soft and pliable,
tender, black with innocence.
There is a man shaped hole here, I thought,
or should be, picking up my shovel.

CRIS B

Cristobal Balenciaga lighting a cigarette and plucking a giant tote from the tote tree
You remind me of the shipwrights and carpenters in Barcelona
They used to say: birches ain’t ship, but warp and trick.

Women to make me cut away my eyelids in case a blink disappears them
You cruel ladies disturbed our sawing and our adzing and our hacking, but
Cristobal Balenciaga lights a cigarette and plucks a giant tote from the tote tree

I have teeth, hair, skin, limb, features, and complexion
But the proportions in Barcelona calibrate by higher codes
They used to say: birches ain’t ship, but warp and trick

Paupers are my buddies. Ash and sackcloth are my hankies
I have a flagellation timetable. The inquisition does my house-sitting
Cristobal Balenciaga smokes a cigarette and considers the tote from the tote tree

He wants to know we did right. How we measure in the black
Ultramarine is the bay, I check my spleen level, she’s in that red
We used to say: birches ain’t ship, but warp and trick

Rage, rage, Cris B. because we screwed up the giant lambskin tote
Broke all the ships in the bay and didn’t get anywhere near betrothed
To the bay hotties even when we used your parfums.
Cristobal Balenciaga lights a cigarette, pops a round in the chamber and plucks the tote
He used to say, birches ain’t ship, but I like a good banger, Ima cap you, the rest is rote.