May I

  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 penumbral...

  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...