stars of blood against the back of your hand,
my dog tags with your chosen name for me, remnants
of my perpetually uncertain battleground, phone numbers
etched on them in case I should lose you, a water bowl, a coat
of fleece. Oh, America, you looked after me
so well, with your chokehold-lead and your
microchip-identity—proof of ownership
riding my neck-fat! I never had to swim for it
from a sinking boat. The heated bed banished
the roadside ditch, banished disdain,
and when I lay down near your feet
it seemed I had chosen my lot. Yet what ambition
can this level of satiety allow? The swift narcotic
of the moment tenders more than you
suspect. A small Ultimate, born out
of my loyalty, gradually arises to provoke you
to gaze past fountains and glass palisades. You
who know how to squander, put down your
pretense at wholesomeness. I am lowly
and raise you up, but to a purpose, as with all
who are helpless before might—to become
that something that thinks in you,
whose trusting regard works a change on you
from inside where you never intended
to shelter me—the one who attends
in order to interrogate, to unravel
the inoculation of your pitiful kindness-agenda.
Consider the world and its poor, its suffering—
you see how it is when something speechless
begins to think into you, to manifest, to bear down
on you as our double-self dissolves?
Shall we cower and beg together now? Forgive
the kick and the cage? I’m feeling tender
toward the largesse of this undertaking. “Come, Toto,”
I hear, like a last endearment before sleep. But
by then, the living-differently of sleep’s velvet lining
coffins the whole of it—my plundered
ever-after heart, your incremental
changes—as those onlookers think you someone
once worthy of me—that little nothing-Titanic
of your sinking days.
WHILE I WAS AWAY
the piano—nothing better to do—
slipped out of key. A dull clump
breaks the tune where one
note, like a diving board bounced out
of spring by ten-year-olds, vacated
entirely. Cut me some slack,
all you things I did perfectly well
without! We’ve been over this before,
the last time I hyphenated
our continuum. The gone-away air brims
with sulky impenetrable remorse.
It’s more than time-travel
to re-enter all this “wasn’t here” as if
it were one’s very own next
dimension: “whatever
happened to so-and-so?” it taunts, until
you answer, sotto voce like Bette Davis
pulling a loaded pistol
from the sleeve of her mink coat, I’m back!
Then rug to chair, that muffled inward:
So what—the welcome you prefer.
v
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
PHILIP LARKIN
WITHOUT
One message mapped our days—do
without! It must be coded into my DNA
through a long line of chancers,
scavengers, people living on the edge.
In childhood we ran barefoot
on the face of the earth, enjoying dirt
between the toes, using those feet
like the best pair of shoes we didn’t
have. Grass. The friendship of feet
with riverbanks, with the bark
of trees. Taking your feet up high into leaves
and sky—what a privilege! And teeth. Doing
without teeth. Both mother and father
toothless at thirty, teeth yanked
all at once. Pragmatic people who saw
no advantage to intermittent
pain and expense. Have a big pain if
you’re going to bother with pain! They
set their false teeth afloat each night
to either side of their bed
like sentinel, macabre warning buoys,
marking the place they’d take up
their days in a kind of quiet revolution, asking
only one essential question: what
do we really need? Much later to live
without cars or a phone. Food
scarce for a while. Walking everywhere,
pulling belongings in a makeshift
cart. Time funnels into work and leaps
out of reach like an idiot kangaroo
hopping all over the Australia of any need-contorted
life. For when you give up things there is no
end to substitutions. The smallest
thrown-away objects can seem useful—
converting a long-dead mother’s
hairpins into paperclips, or wearing
your father’s trousers because they fit.
Using old things or the left-behind things
of others turns into a religion,
and if something breaks or you think you’ve used
it up—think again! A child in that extended family
can show you a shower curtain
decorated with butterflies
is really a tent. Take this poem—written
with the tip of a feather discarded
by a bird.
I hereby enter the sky
that floated it down to me
into my personal history of unexpected
benefactors.
Tell me, bird, what
do you need?
DEER PATH ENIGMA
Stepping where they step
in the unhindered woods
where my neighbor and I agree not
to build a fence,
I startle the lone doe
from her kingdom of solitude.
Days since she informs every hidden cavity
of fern and vine with possible
trespass—but also profound stillness
I crave when she fails
to appear. A light-footed yearning
inhabits me, though it was
blundering flushed beauty
out. I lay down
my cities, rivers bereft
of their banks, snowmelt
and downpour where she pressed
the unsurrendered harp
of her body against moss. Vaults
of cement crack open. An arbor of blustering
neon goes dark in the borderland
of word-wrecked freedoms. Out of this
overlay of the human, the doe
uncoils herself with power
that is not retreat, just
the nothing-else-that-could-happen,
as my uninhabitable shadow
triggers her fear-plundered heart.
for Jane Mead
THE FAVORITE CUP
with wild horses, muzzles to haunches,
running their nowhere Western
riderless wagon-circle, has fallen to
the floor and shattered its handle. I say
it graduates to the studio as a paintbrush
holder. You ask for glue. But the handle
to anything isn’t a candidate for repair.
“Put the fan-shaped ones in it,” you acquiesce.
I round them up, those undaunted gazelles
of your next contentions with color
; and form. If you break another cup
your false teeth can nest there while you’re
dreaming. With a third I’ll cut biscuits.
From there on we’ll recognize our
adaptive resources—not by what’s left
whole, but by how little we’ve abandoned.
Come fire. Come snow.
Isn’t that tea water?
WHAT DOES IT SAY
that the only shoe repairman in town
has retired? He who mended suitcases
and purse straps. Who loved to chat
but could turn taciturn. How we laughed
over my fondness for shoes that were
clearly worn out. “Fair-weather
shoes,” he pronounced like a benediction,
trying with seasons to extend
the life of my loafers. A tall man with nimble
fingers on an oversized hand, the gaze
surgeon-like. How I admired your Lazarus
revivals! For it’s feet in failing shoes
that rule the world. Barefooted, we had
the ways of birds, equipped from the womb—splashing
in puddles, running after dark, bearing our troubles
and joys place to place. Addiction to shoes
came later. Whether quietly falling
apart, coming unglued, or
scrubbed down at the heels, they’d still
find a dance floor once in a while and shake
the body around to remind it how, in or out
of shoes, everything depends on the feet.
In your imagination toward repair, you gave
hope and salvage to those without money
for new shoes, or who, like me, had to
eke out their days with unmanageable feet, depending
on a makeshift tangle of sandals—a few cloth straps
stapled to a cork sole—thereby asking you to take up
the world of miracles. Shoes that had worn
themselves to feet until pain
took off its hat and stood on the curb.
You seemed to connect with us through time, cheating
it day after day, with small, momentous
restorations. And what, after all, is a world
that walks around
only in new shoes,
that stops asking for a guy like you, a man true
to this gradually
falling-apart era, alive
to our need to be treated
mercifully, our wish
to be mended and remended?
Someone to companion our fragile hopes
in the form of these emptied-out,
unsalvageable steps.
vi
For eighty years and more,
by the grace of my sovereign
and my parents, I have lived
with a tranquil heart
between the flowers and the moon.
NARUSHIMA CHUHACHIRO
BUS TO BELFAST
Where the Antrim accent
can change “heating scheme”
to “hatin’ schame” or
work a shift on time with
“I’ll rang you” so, in a word, it’s done
as spoken.
IS, IS NOT
A brief reverie while sitting at the edge
of the Pacific below Sky House,
admiring the filigree maps of wave-froth
inside the curvature as it rolls
forward, then deposits its overlay
of surrendered continents and ocean
partings into the ebb left
only moments before. Loss without
sadness! I take my restorative
like a shoreline whose surety
is always: something is coming!
Bird splat on the Belfast hotel
window. Then suddenly a red brush
from two stories down among beer barrels
rises like a hydra-headed dragon
to spit a spiral of courtship water
from its center. Its mating dance, like
some near-extinct bird, scrapes
the sky free of its detritus. Up and
down it prances on the tight rod
of its mission until I see better
the brick on brick my secret room
is up against. Who says
nothing works here?
“Pat Higgins, the Major, died right
there,” Josie says, pointing to air
at the side of the road on the valley
edge. “Between one step and
the next. He was a great character,
fond of his pint, a great worker. He’d
see what there was to do and do
it without orders. He was popular.”
They pray for him yet on their way
to Highwood mass, and take a blessing
for themselves at the spot where he
fell between two steps: live step, dead
step. The invisible place marked in
an invisible forever in their on-beating
hearts. Living step, dying step. Memory
step, no
AS THE DIAMOND
is bound by light, so are we
breath-bound into our
shining. But for that, the stone
of us would gray us past silence
into some deeper, earned
neglect. I wore a diamond once,
like a crown to a finger, but its
flash, its imperial glance had
belonged to the mother
of the beloved and would not
accept my stolen ways. Giving it
back was like trying to give back
love, or give back a mother
when her worth quenched
even the beauty of the garden
she’d left behind. Still, I am
designed under the largest
evergreen, planting in formation
the stalwart deer-proof lilies
and striped hostas, those whose
petals can leech light from a cloaked
star. I swing the mattock into parched
ground, loving the weight of its dull
thud and having to claw my way
down to something gentle—as with
an Irish-moment when you realize
you will never be let in except by
holding silence until it turns
back on itself—the power of the unsaid,
an ultimate compression,
so exceeding language you banish
vast libraries with a glance away
into my hearth where blackest coal
noiselessly witnesses two wordsmiths
toiling in broad daylight by firelight,
in the glow of after-flame,
where my presence to your presence
is a humming out of which the long dead
cottage midwife, who lived here, reappears
to recount the particularities
of each parish birth, and we are thus
reborn in sparks of first-breaths
that ring us like a fairy fort, protecting
our held-in-light, until some
force-of-heart stuns us again
into stumbled speech and we agree
to the hostage-taking each word requires,
strung like that across the brow
of someone else’s shadow-moment.
So it is when a reader opens the poem’s
in-breathing—that which we took care
not to press too fully upon them
for fear we might extinguish the spirit’s outlaw
vagabonding with freedom’s
quarrelsome uptake.
for Medbh McGuckian
DURING THE MONTENEGRIN POETRY READING
Mira, like a white goddess, is translating
so my left ear is a cave near Kotor
where the sea lashes and rakes
the iron darkness inside
black mountains. Young and old, the poets
are letting us know that this sweltering night,
under a bridge, near a river outside
Karver Bookstore at the beginning of July,
belongs to them. They clear away debris
about politicians and personal suffering,
these gladiators of desire and doubt, whose candor
has roiled me like a child shaking stolen beer to foam
the genie of the moment out of
its bottle. The poets’ truth-wrought poems drag it
out of me, that confession—that I didn’t have children
because, in some clear corner, I knew I would
leave them to join these poets half a world away
who, in their language that is able to break stones,
have broken me open like a melon. Instead of children,
I leave my small blind dog, quivering
as I touch her on the nose, to let her know it’s
me, the one who is always leaving her, yes
I’m going, she for whom I have no language with
which to reassure her I’m coming
back—what’s the use to pretend I’m
a good mistress to her, she who would never
leave me, she who looks for me everywhere
I am not, until I return. I should feel guilty
but the Montenegrin poets have taken false guilt off
the table. I’ve been swallowed by a cosmic
sneer, with an entire country behind it where
each day it occurs to them how many are still missing
in that recent past of war and havoc.
Nothing to do but shut the gate behind me
and not look back where my scent
even now is fading from the grass. Nostalgia
for myself won’t be tolerated here. I’m just a beast
who, if my dog were a person, would give me a pat
on the head and say something stupid like: Good dog.
CURFEW
November and a slim band of daylight
slinks through drizzle.
She has declared No Visitors
past ten p.m. in her cottage. She aims
to set a dish of calm before night
as it intrudes upon the mossy footpath
of comings and goings.
Instead of “Come in” she says “Not now”
and climbs the steep steps
of her hillside to commune
with anything but people. In this way
she has agitated the spirits of the place,