May I

  Taking Pictures   Maybe that’s why we want photos most of all, the caught pause, the stationed   place where no matter where we are or how we age beyond   it all we will have that moment & some- how our brain will deliver us to   the terminal & we will look through panes of glass at everything that is   passing & then at the one thing that is held: from this perspective the sun   coming down like it does & framed precisely in the window, the burst star   of it safe to see & see & see & see & it can make no claim to pull us into   blindness – remember Galileo & all his lenses & the gradual way his world   shut like a blind coming down in his room at eventide?   Here we can walk   for decades & look back at that sunset and say: I remember that.   I remember that,   don’t you?

  Because   Because nobody tells us how to do it or can to loose the still sticky sinew we pinch into the print of our fingers its grip insisting a rhythmic kinship with the distant umbilical cut from us some seventy plus forevers ago its dust                      it’s dust as rises up the thermal pull of her departure and by some intimacy of design is aligned to the aquatic quality of her breath to manifest there until renovated to snow that as we walk toward our future alone of her     it falls on us our clavicle our exposed throat so subtle a touch as to make us part our lips so we can how long have we held it         breathe again

  held   “An Academy of silences” Diane Seuss said   and I was just before thinking about how so many relationships are carried on as though someone has just stepped on the detonation pin, & the long aftershock pause has stopped it all: the victims, intimates and random passersby.   The fragility of its nearly imperceptible sound, or, for those who didn’t hear it, the stock-still posture, the absolute awe of the flesh yet cleaved to its tendon & bone not yet cleaved from its tendon and bone.   Toe pin.   The lift of the heel, the perceptive listener, like a piano tuner at rush hour who can sift through so many so many notes on those slack wires . . . her hand goes up just as her face is drained & everything is quiet.   This my friends is the true test of strength, the caution of the tipped   bomb, the unlifted weight, the people feeling their face their ribs their crotches to to...

  toward meeting shaker village canterbury, nh Ensoulment   Slice of ice or             like a pie’s pastry                         dough lining the glass                                     plate.   Layer,                                                 layer the folding,                    ...

  How   the only way to see the wind is to witness what objects to it—what it can or cannot say. Though   isn’t this all in the eye of the observer: it’s yes, it’s no, it’s some degree of maybe.  Watch   the shredded ends  of each prayer flag be lifted be sifted be skittered to the plane edge of places to the rising   foundation                         of places to be either struck there by other debris rising and falling in this wind               leaf sideways pasted             sheet flip knitting   always makes me think it’s a creature being chased.  mouse.  mole.  ground squirrel.  something bound to be   small.   ...

  Misericordia    Gates of Mercy, stop breaking down.                                       Charles Wright                                     ARS POETICA III   The visible, vulnerable—a season & a season & halfway into a season.   Of making leaves.   Of making.   Leaves.   When the rain is finished falling, & the wind   that catches all that has been falling in it and has been moved on, when the field seems still as it's ever been   from this distance.   The small copse of white pine.   & a  ways off: the becoming bare sugar...