May I

  At Chesterwood   written on a blank page above a sticker nametag: Hello My name is May     Birds doing their bird living in between leaves & twigs & the fallen-   in- their- beak- seed or a breathing thing briefly wriggling.   Their diamond maws   are broad across their entire face then break the jaw of their nest-mate to make it through   their almost fledged month with this old brood.   It’s a bird eat bird world   out there.   Clutch it.   Clutch this brief unsteady living.   This getting on   with things.   & OH! the sky they’ll gain for the passing of it! How one minute   there’s a half a katydid in their throat & the next they’re cold, their others   flown, this twiggy home’s poking their breastbone, & all the while this   moment folds to this moment folds to this moment—so, clearly, naturally, no?   So. ...

  On Naming   Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground, Each verse returning like the plough turned round.                                       Seamus Heaney                                     Glanmore Sonnets, II   Is it true we name things out of our longing for them the breath of their enunciation in our ear when we lift the syllables from our tongue to our lips? Do we wet those lips before we speak or after?   Is it a dish we’ve come to savor but all aroma no flesh or fat or broth?   There’s salt on the air.   The brining kind.   The kind splayed and blo...

  Orchid   We were walking talking about how erotic certain flora were especially tropical fruits & so who wouldn’t see a mango as a woman’s breast and that stem end her areola her rough used-up nipple?   To me   that’s an intelligent design.   To make a people crave the flaying & impetus of their own lips into the electric flesh & come away rashed ravished & having ravished.   Take this lady slipper I say: look & see her rising up, hemlock/oak   sprill & leaf skirt quieting all this time she spends in her cellar-dark conjuring sisters’ talk with urges with dormancy with aching complacency until the convocation stage is placed & made to wait until all the guest tickets checked are ushered   to their rained-on seats.   It’s as if so much waiting is so much life going by not being seen I mean heaps and heaps of life passed over and so what’s a fruit to do?   Or an or...

At the Olson House Cushing, Maine   Wherefore   To taste as if something tasted for the first time what we will have become then.                                     Jane Hirshfield                                     I Would Like     Where does it go after gathering after all that lather has evaporated?   Imagine up- stream the stallion-black havoc is that fast & has  insisted his dawn call in the slip of wind listen it is  this ripple beginning humbly nearly thoughtless or not thoughtless but still without cause just because   not aimless but without aim it simply is i...

  Infertility   And when at last the leap comes, it is most often also from the side, the rear, an overhead perch; some word-blind woven of brush or shadow or fire.                                       Jane Hirshfield                                     Poetry and the Mind of Indirection   How long, wanting, to root?  Does turning in or turning away?  Or tuning for for that matter. Does sideways?  Does sight but not sight only and scent does scent then its becoming somehow tongue?  A mouth and then a lid for the eye.  Then the other eye. A summoning of touch?  Y...

  nesting wrens     Wrens, twa &   twain             their   twist—ellipsis in mid-air             insist & dip & instantly                         lift the ground to sky                                     a notation’s rise while I forever dressed in gravity             fight my ever desiring                         eye—not envy—no—      ...