Patience: In the Mill

     Through a place in the roof the sun came down

Where in a hail of light Mike Cole sat up,

His menial harness broken on his arms.

It shed a circle upon him.

As if he certainly were blessed, to be filling the cockpit with blood

Blushed eagerly from his face,

And laid on the sunburst of dials with glowing hands.

He could not look, but did,

And saw a smear, like egg, on the ragged panel wiped.

It was his other eye, which last had looked 

In seeing his engine die from a vibrant disk

To four great innocent sails.

Through his own incredible sternness

Of pain, he heard the sirens flare

On the gunned dust of the strip,

And motes from the stacks of sugar whirled

And unsupported slept upon the air, beside his props

Like petals carved from the basined floor.

A tooth lodged in his throat.

He did not speak of it, but a loft of children 

In the light he had let in

Were standing piping. He could not sing with them,

And almost wept,

                                but like a child, forgot,

And wandered, lost, among their faces,

Opening the bags, tasting the slanted sugar as he would.

                                                                  James Dickey

Rain Downriver

It has been raining now since
long before dawn, and the windows
of the Arab coffee house of Delray
are steamed over and no one looks
in or out. If I were on my way
home from the great chemical plant
on a bus of sodden men, heads rolling
with each swerve or lurch, I would get
off just here by the pale pink temple
and walk slowly the one block back
and swing open the doors on blue smoke
and that blurred language in which two
plus two means the waters of earth
have no end or beginning. I would sit
down at an empty table and open
a newspaper in which the atoms
of each meaningless lie are weighed
and I would order one bitter cup
and formally salute the ceiling,
which is blue like heaven but is
coming down in long bandages
revealing the wounds of the last rain.
In this state, which is not madness
but Michigan, here in the suburbs
of the City of God, rain brings back
the gasoline we blew in the face
of creation and sulphur which will not
soften iron or even yellow rice.
If the messenger entered now
and called out, You are my people!
the tired waiter would waken and bring
him a coffee and an old newspaper
so that he might read in the wrong words
why the earth gives us each day
and later brings darkness to hide
what we did with it. Rain in winter
began first in the mind of God
as only the smallest thought,
but as the years passed quietly
into each other leaving only
the charred remains of empty hands
and the one glass that never overflowed
it came closer like the cold breath
of someone who has run through snow
to bring you news of a first birth
or to give you his abrupt, wet blessing
on the forehead. So now I go back
out into it. From a sky I can no longer see, the fall of evening
glistens around my shoulders that
also glisten, and the world is mine.

PHILIP LEVINE

At 3 A.M. It's Unfair to Ask

You always ask
"must we mean what we say?"
You speak of bridges, of indeterminacies,
of a lack of universal.
And in some mean sense,
I agree.
But it's late October; the evenings
are far too short for Rorty and discussions of meaning.
What I mean now,
with the cool wind coming over your shoulder
and your hair forgetting its length,
is that we should go down into the park
and pass beneath the pines and the trellising jasmine
to see what the stars smell like in this crisp October air,
to see how the ants rearrange the earth beneath us,
to seek out the lake that moves slightly
leaving its rings around the sand shore
the way a strong red leaves its legs,
begging for sugar, begging for its body back
the way we all do.

If the ants haven't taken the hill to the north of the lake,
if the wine is good, the path silent, and the earth
round enough to land us in a clearing,
maybe we will find some point of perspective
that will allow us to love
the length of the moon falling from apogee.
And if after the dew falls
across our bared bodies
we should submit to saying nothing at all,
submit to the rising and falling of chests on a cold ground,
we will both understand, thick as grammar,
what it is we mean to say to each other and the world and the ants,
as the owls fade to sparrows
and the sun pulls the day over its horizon.

Dust Is 90% Skin

I remembered it a pit,
tall red walls with the water held in.

But today, it's trellised to the east with ivy
swinging like loose promises,
speckled with yellow and red wildflowers
brilliant against the deep ivy,
against the fallen terrain,
against the memory of shooting clay birds
from that peak just to the west.

He would cock back the heavy spring,
trail the string in in his hands light as twigs.
"pull it slowly." In the voice only fathers have
and then release the bird wingless
to be scattered like fog
across the bare walls below.

I remembered it a pit,
and I picked up the tiny box that held his name,
his seed, his fallen hairs, those ten slightly crooked toes
and the nose that found its way back to the mirror
only just this morning
and made my way to the peak
just to the west, where we'd shoot clay birds.

I sifted his fingers
through the damp sprinkling of my palm,
patted him down like a bulb, like a delicate shoot.

I planted his feet like cedars at the base of the gorge,
hoping for water. I climbed to the summit
and planted what was left: his footless legs,
his shoulders too thin for support, his ideas
legless in the upturned soil between my fingers.

And what wouldn't bury
and what clung to me, I carried out of the gorge like a compass,
hands in front, upturned for the reading.

But that was ten years ago.
This Easter the cedars are tall
and the ivy hangs in locks like his.
The entire valley is full of butterflies,
and from the bottom, in the midday wash of sunshine
they flutter like live confetti
through the sweet breath of spring gardenias.

To Have Without Holding

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives,
then of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch, to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry.
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

Marge Piercy

The Resurrection

I'd dared her to go in, and we came on that dare
to the road above Rose Hill Cemetery, and sat for a moment in the cab of my truck,
quiet, not talking, looking down
at the valley of stones, the bone-white
testaments prickling the hills.
All the way out she talked of death, her desire
to be cremated, have her ashes scattered
over Lake Rabun. In the new life she'd return
as a swan or a dove. What did I say?
That I believed in the new life too,
the resurrection of the body, and though I knew
the Lord could mend us ash by ash
I wasn't the sort to put Him to the trouble.
So I wasn't afraid, we were as different
as East and West, and the night was still cool,
not quite the season to fall in love
with the wrong woman. And if she was afraid
of anything, she didn't show it, only took
the flashlight off the seat, zipped her parka.
A bright half-moon, white as marble, hung
over the river, and I followed her
in that light as she edged through the trees
down the hill toward the gardens,
toward the creek, the row of bricked vaults.
I'd dared her to go in. Not into the graveyard,
but into a grave I knew lay open in the side
of a ridge, an old haunt, reputed hangout
of a witches' coven. And I wasn't afraid
until I stopped where the rock garden
bridges the creek, and the wind off the river
seemed the breath of the dead, or whatever
inside me was dying. Let's go, she said,
and pointed up the ridge where I had pointed
to the grave, and we followed the creek
up the valley, past the wrought-iron fences
and chairs, the patios and bedrooms
of the dead, without talking, without touching
or ever having touched, until we came
to the end of the valley, the black mouth
gaping behind branches. She knelt then
by the tree and shined the light----
wine bottles, a sardine can, stubs of iron bars
jagging those jaws with rusty teeth----
and with only a slight shiver against the cold,
we crawled into that belly of earth.
And what had I really expected to find? A pit
of beer cans, a clay chamber of dry roots?
Or that stir in the sudden falling of dark,
like the brush of a cobweb against an ear,
like the silky crawl of the first hungry worm,
the gentlest touch,
that first delicate laying on of hands?


David Bottoms

Working Copies

A misreading implies
a proper reading.
At five AM it is still dark
and I hear no wind,
and the only light in the room comes from the red analog of the clock.
"It smells like rain."
She curls her head over my shoulder
and makes a space for the statement.
I think she's being poetic
and doze back off.
When the alarm goes off at six
it is pouring.
I reach for her to pull her back to that place of clairovoyance--
I want to know sports scores, lotto numbers, chicken or egg
but she just asks
"Can't you smell the weather?"
and pushes her back to me.
Nine minutes later the alarm is going off again.
And the pillow next to me bears long dark strands of thick black hair
in no discernible pattern.