May I

  moonrise west quoddy head lubec, maine Lucia—Lux—Light   For St. Lucy, Patron Saint of Eyesight   How sight is so simply sundered. True the variegated blue cleave Miles received deep beneath The placid seeming black seeming   Sea.   Pods of predators clouds Jaws all gawp and saw.   Halfway Through the host is hoisted To her own behold and who:   The bread itself spying the eye Of the righteous, eye of blight, a kind of Conjunctivitis creeping the white Up the spires only to spike the sunlight.

  Mea Culpa     How gratitude?   Is it even possible Without our believing Some part of us isn’t worthy & this Bridge someone named humility   Is beneath our feet the moment We lean ahead?   Like that Scene in Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade,   When he trusts it it’s there and rubs Dust on it, and it’s solid but without Rails so each step is true, is Genius in his seeing blind mind?   What’s beneath us? Broad Jaws with their lolling tongues always Slick somehow and acrid, lazy? The way they take the breaking   Change in hesitation, a mockery of Compassion?  The plumb line Crumbling with its chalk that falls near Invisible?…The throbbing thumb that   Couldn’t get out of the way of our Maul? Sucked & rubbed against the  Mark, that blue dust the briefest Seeing in the thin penumbra of grace?   Or maybe mercy? the friar Friar's Head, Campobello, NB

  rosary   Oremus   Assundere’d undone a hundred fissures slimming to a rosary’s Bead of blood.   Strung.   Thumbed. Under each thunder rumble-hums   Cyclonic, destruction cupped In a stunned tongue.   What mystery Seemingly simplistic, so few to choose: The one where I saw   You walk off, skirt to calf, away And beyond the yet green burning Bush rubbing your elbow, your hip. Chin up.   Months   Would glide by, brightness died, Light died, a night sky, my private Respite, invited me like I’d never left.   Bare footed, wrung.   I was unmothered.  

Green Point West Quoddy Head Lubec, Maine Missing It    Does it bother you, that mercy is so difficult to             understand?                                       Mary Oliver                                     From the Book of Time   Last week we missed the eclipse We missed the eclipse Last week.   Partial in these parts. In these parts  I was  partial, Wanting to witness the slicing The slice I was wanting to witness When the moon went sliding into herself Becoming the moon she went Into herself becoming something pen...

  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...