May I

  Of Day Hauls                         for Joseph, my student, sophomore, Lubec, Maine   It’s a pier only punts and dinghies can moor to at the slack tide watch its flat as glass rise and decline                                     wide into the parting lips of the bay cliffs be drawn down that channeled throat and out to the Atlantic. Here a magic waxing moon hauls on each wave, see how days the table of the pier deck is categoric each eye socket rub a soft clink rise and rub fall along the pier piling.  Days the deck is a gang- way ramp on the ebb watch the men in December in February ready their rigging and motor out and tie off their punt at the buoy the gear glistening in the moony ice.  Watch and wait. The dock rises and falls. Rises and falls. The fog blows off and crawls in its own stray doggy life and the howl and hunger inside   of it is bewitching it is a poor woman’s divination.  She sits in its ghoulish humidity in her wool and rag.  His thermos is tucked and chaff-rubbed

Last year’s hydrangeas, see how               they sit yet with their full heads                and measure themselves against             these February melancholies             together with their self-             preservations to absorb nothing             of winter and its required               privations. See how they still cling to their own twig and branch and root,             their moss and sod, how they rely             on the falling away             fence for some of their staid straying.   I am glad of them in winter, and I want to             like them more this way,               with their elderly hair             stuck to the twig, their head             dressed by the busy beauticians             of before and during and after blizzard with their washes and rinses and sets, with their tonics and talcs and trusses             to keep it all               up within this to the end, the closure of the lasting last

  For Frances—Who Lately Found             Her Granddaughter Alone             in the Back Bedroom Gone               Gone Forever –   Somehow, when you take flight I am not   watching at least not close enough but the green   that eased off the field between me   and you is graced with lupines and wind raises   phrases in the grasses only you can hear somehow   when you take flight the green is the light   we are both reaching for  and somehow it is a jesus in each of us   

  I want to tell you, because you’re away, that   it is dark yet and a week to November a week and a day.  those folks I know   will grow more in their bones they’ll coat themselves against the cold and go   out onto the stony shoals where just moments only moments ago a late fawn and her still   mother doe stood to look in the kitchen window, the dawn light, the wife measuring   one and two and two more spoons of espresso grind, test the tap with two fingers and a thumb   and cant and decant.  all the ritual ablutions to stave this chill.  but oh to breathe   the same very same air, a chuff still hovering, the two deer disappeared as soon as the latch   is lifted and the sun yet hovering underfoot of the mountain and the red in the maples   waiting to show off their tiny night diamonds frozen on every dendritic vein, shivering…