Crepuscular

What a drubbing this sundown!—its gloom

hunting out my sorest remorses

to bludgeon me with. That’s what the light does

in autumn, slanting southward and brownly

between the hunched houses of the neighborhood.

It falls against the sidewalk like a slab

of meat, like a mugging the passersby pass by.

The church bells bang hollow vespers.

Is there any sound more forsaken

than the rainbird smack across the spent grass?

Yes. The ignition jump of a car

heading anywhere, tail-lights red

as the rubber stamp on a divorce decree,

its diminishing rev a metaphor

for the failure of metaphor. The car

is a car leaving, and then left.

Easter, Looking Westward

1.

The stars! the stars have fled the sky!—

Scratch that—the stars have skyed the flood, the sea

glimmering in pale beneath a starless black . . .

2.

No, scratch that too. I’m all exotic

metaphor, inkhorn snarls, never content

with the unelaborated thing;

always the forced apotheosis,

every least sparrow a visible sign,

strong-arming water to wine. So tenderly

I love this world’s profane loveliness,

its small, scarce loveliness, like a puritan

I batter magnitude out of homespun.

3.

Faithless my zeal, for the puritan’s faith

imputes us all with a roughhouse grace, most

lovely in our brokenness, bruised and bent

to glory. Scratch that—to sufficiency.

Start again: The stars are black with storms

blown shoreward; the dinoflagellates

smacked on the shoals leak light from shattered cells;

they phosphoresce the breakers in their roister.

Let me sing, then, the beauty of creatures

microscopic, who make the vastness gleam

in smithereens.

4.

See: starlike, after all.

Pater Noster

This garden is a miracle.

Aphids dropped with April, gorgeous emeralds

with teeth. They preen against the petals,

distill sweet sap to honeydew.

Down bark, down fencepost, tazzled branches

dart and pull their braiding shadows, a slapstick

of diffraction. Downwind the barnstormers

perfect their spectacle—stiff cloth, wood

prop, 2-cycle engine ascending like a prayer

to flame out, hang breathless, cartwheel

over and power swooping earthward.

It’s all for show, the windswept scarf

from forties matinees, the smoky trail,

the drama of the stall. The pilot streaks

to level, tilts a greeting as he buzzes

overhead, milks the throttle, rolls

headlong into a spin, whining, frictive, the form

of glory, and gloriously sunstruck. Seasonal

the ritual, pinching aphids as I kneel

upturned, squinting sunward for the sleek

daredevil flight, for the promise of the climb,

of sunlit wings, of plain things charged

and fulgent, of one perfect

performance, of earth as it is in heaven.

Helper

Of rock, of razorgrass, of standing

water tells the town wherein

the westbound Rio Grande couples

with a second locomotive, crouched and greasy,

for the last upthrust of Rocky Mountain.

Nightfall, and the engines skirl the incline

past the coal mine and its compressed stars,

past Wan Roads, where the aspen

alphabet inscribes the hillside.

Past Sheep Creek, where my father

lost his truck in nineteen-eighty—

the sudden blizzard carving an embankment

from the road. He felt it slip,

heard the suck of mudded tires, saw the sky

enlarging, whitened through the windshield.

Past Thistle, quiet valley town

until the mountain flooded down.

Past Childs’s Ranch, the pond disturbed

by nightswimming fish,

silver backs to the full moon bared.

The railside gravel jumps and glints,

the sleepers deepen in their grooves,

unappreciably. At Diamond Fork,

the clamor of uncoupling. The engine fires,

grinds, returning light to Helper.

Ode on My Belly Button

My original wound was my deepest:

half-inch divot where the cord shriveled off

and a plunging ache that never scabbed

where my umbilical name sloughed away,—

forgotten now, but it meant Belong. Whole

again and joyful when my ninth-month

belly swelled with genial weight, skin taut,

fullest at the center line where fragile

the navel flattened out, its secret flesh

splayed to surface, until my familiar

agony: headlong and vulnerable,

our mutual attachment already

obsolescing, you inherit your original wound.

—Your original loneliness.

Ode on My Appendix

My old frivolity. How I admired

your gentle defiance in my side, your

droll x-ray like a stuck-out tongue showed

sinews fooled to welcome . . . what? a tag-end,

embroidery, a thing indifferent.

So I believed. But when you flare up,

puckered heretic, my guts clench, bowels

revolt, breath short: you prove the searing

center of my frail cosmology, my

dearest intimate. I pick wistful

at the scar, each whipstitch tugs two grommets

open in my belly. In the body,

in the body’s hot memory, in sickness

and in health, there are no adiaphora.

Pomegranates

Fabulous, red desire!—these

could keep me here forever. Hours

bent at the basin you spent

breaking the casings burnished

and woody, stripping off pulp,

pith, and papery veil to reveal

where they lay in tight rows

snug as eggs in a wasps’ nest,

as perennial bulbs beneath ice.

Furious in the windowsill jar,

they glint the glass scarlet, like garnets,

your finger gone scarlet from touching,

juiced in the scratch and ransack.

Flagrant you fumble a few to my lip.

No fruit for romantics, this . . . the first

sweet thrill, honeyed bacchanal,

wet story of clustered orchards,—

inside, an underworld of stone.

Ash Garden

Spring begins in a fatness of front lawns,

but not mine. I whose blowtorch urge approaches

the ascetic, whose resolve to bury

luxuriance grows raw-handed from shoveling,

have duly torched and shoveled grass until

the baked blades crumpled like old palm fronds

and their upturned roots drooped. Let spring begin

in ash and dust, I say, and bloom as little

as possible out of them. I’m planting

stonecrop, and rockmat, and if the fireweed

insists on sowing itself in cinders

I’ll truckle it to my lenten aesthetic

or pluck it out: I’ll parch the ground six weeks

to prompt by thirst the fireweed’s fancy,

gratuitous pink to put on the drab.

Let it learn in sackcloth colors to thrive

on desire alone. It’s a discipline

I’m ripe to teach. I excel at fasting.