It will be 24 years in March; but if you add
the 15 years I somehow lasted in another,
now dissolved marriage, you could say I'm
a veteran of nearly 4 decades of wedded
life. Less often now, I ask who ruined what;
or, what does it really mean to watch love
turn into a wreck? I never thought I'd do it
again. Newly wary then, even the mysteries
of solo motherhood held for me unequal parts
foolish pride, untested courage. Yes, we
still flounder through narrow, half-lit passages.
We make hot soup and bread when despair
knocks on the windows. Wars go on, birds keep
flying south to winter. A wolf moon hauls
its mottled halo through the trees. We fall asleep
in bed—one's leg hooked around the other's.
Lagomorphic
At my office as I was receiving money of the probate of wills, in came Mrs. Turner, Theoph., Madame Morrice, and Joyce, and after I had done I took them home to my house and Mr. Hawly came after, and I got a dish of steaks and a rabbit for them, while they were playing a game or two at cards. In the middle of our dinner a messenger from Mr. Downing came to fetch me to him, so leaving Mr. Hawly there, I went and was forced to stay till night in expectation of the French Embassador, who at last came, and I had a great deal of good discourse with one of his gentlemen concerning the reason of the difference between the zeal of the French and the Spaniard. After he was gone I went home, and found my friends still at cards, and after that I went along with them to Dr. Whores (sending my wife to Mrs. Jem’s to a sack-posset), where I heard some symphony and songs of his own making, performed by Mr. May, Harding, and Mallard. Afterwards I put my friends into a coach, and went to Mrs. Jem’s, where I wrote a letter to my Lord by the post, and had my part of the posset which was saved for me, and so we went home, and put in at my Lord’s lodgings, where we staid late, eating of part of his turkey-pie, and reading of Quarles’ Emblems. So home and to bed.
joy is a rabbit
in the middle
of the night
we whores hear
some symphony
in the key of E
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 7 January 1659/60.
In the Registry
A square of paper, on which was hand- written: name and date of birth, address, civil status. Applied for at the start of the year, good for the entire year—at the end of which, one surrendered the invalidated document. If lost, you could file for a certified copy. An apparatus that relied on a certain kind of trust—and many rubber bands and shelves for alphabetized filing. Who am I if not the myriad changes I took on through paperwork? Though I've abdicated some names and selves, there is one I glimpse still sitting patiently amid the rubble.
Burlesque
In a forest of headless trees, the one tree with a burl is Pope of Fools.
It’s no accident that burl rhymes with pearl. I mean, it is an accident, but one that makes you think.
If you’re ever in the woods and feel as if you’re being watched, that may be due to the presence of burls. Though to me they have more of a listening air about them.
Brain surgeons could train on them but don’t, as far as I know. Woodworkers could turn them into bowls, and some do.
Such a bowl wouldn’t do for an ordinary salad. It would have few if any practical applications. You’d just want to have it out on display where you and your friends can gather around, standing very still and whispering whenever there’s a wind.
Break-up
This morning Mr. Sheply and I did eat our breakfast at Mrs. Harper’s, (my brother John being with me) upon a cold turkey-pie and a goose. From thence I went to my office, where we paid money to the soldiers till one o’clock, at which time we made an end, and I went home and took my wife and went to my cosen, Thomas Pepys, and found them just sat down to dinner, which was very good; only the venison pasty was palpable beef, which was not handsome. After dinner I took my leave, leaving my wife with my cozen Stradwick, and went to Westminster to Mr. Vines, where George and I fiddled a good while, Dick and his wife (who was lately brought to bed) and her sister being there, but Mr. Hudson not coming according to his promise, I went away, and calling at my house on the wench, I took her and the lanthorn with me to my cosen Stradwick, where, after a good supper, there being there my father, mother, brothers, and sister, my cosen Scott and his wife, Mr. Drawwater and his wife, and her brother, Mr. Stradwick, we had a brave cake brought us, and in the choosing, Pall was Queen and Mr. Stradwick was King. After that my wife and I bid adieu and came home, it being still a great frost.
at our break-up
ice on the clock
time made us palpable
not hands
not a promise
to be her other
other water
other frost
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 6 January 1660.
Water, Light, Lightwater
Sunlight coils in discarded
water bottles, a miracle harnessed
by bleach. College students walk
through shanty towns, teaching
how to cut and reattach the plastic,
how to plug holes in the roof
with them. Every so often, the news
shows pictures of children
earnest under street lamps, poring
over sentences or sums.
One boy gets a scholarship,
another wins a debate. A girl
goes to culinary school.
What did the world-famous chef
see in their dark eyes gleaming
in the alley, as they lapped up
sugar syrup and ice?
A clump of rippled fern
revives in a palm-sized
ripple of light. A glass of milk
of magnesia settles a sour stomach;
its use goes back to the 1870s,
scant decades before the sale
of an archipelago. To this day, no one
knows where the 20 million dollars went,
and what that shine looks like.
Have you known heartbreak? Have you known danger? Have you known hope or doubt?
You remember lace-like residues of frost on windowpanes, each pinpoint distinct and ethereal; a prism, a crystal city before its circuits dissolve before your eyes. You remember your mother covering your entire body with a towel, just out of the bath, as two men working in the yard lunge at each other with knives and run through the house. At the beginning of the year, the skies wear a veil of gunpowder. A man gathers oranges from the trees. He peels them and cuts the rinds into thin strips. Steeped in honey, most of their bitterness leaches out; but not all.
Foreign affairs
I went to my office, where the money was again expected from the Excise office, but none brought, but was promised to be sent this afternoon. I dined with Mr. Sheply, at my Lord’s lodgings, upon his turkey-pie. And so to my office again; where the Excise money was brought, and some of it told to soldiers till it was dark.
Then I went home, and after writing a letter to my Lord and told him the news that the Parliament hath this night voted that the members that were discharged from sitting in the years 1648 and 49, were duly discharged; and that there should be writs issued presently for the calling of others in their places, and that Monk and Fairfax were commanded up to town, and that the Prince’s lodgings were to be provided for Monk at Whitehall.
Then my wife and I, it being a great frost, went to Mrs. Jem’s, in expectation to eat a sack-posset, but Mr. Edward not coming it was put off; and so I left my wife playing at cards with her, and went myself with my lanthorn to Mr. Fage, to consult concerning my nose, who told me it was nothing but cold, and after that we did discourse concerning public business; and he told me it is true the City had not time enough to do much, but they are resolved to shake off the soldiers; and that unless there be a free Parliament chosen, he did believe there are half the Common Council will not levy any money by order of this Parliament. From thence I went to my father’s, where I found Mrs. Ramsey and her grandchild, a pretty girl, and staid a while and talked with them and my mother, and then took my leave, only heard of an invitation to go to dinner to-morrow to my cosen Thomas Pepys.
I went back to Mrs. Jem, and took my wife and Mrs. Sheply, and went home.
one was expected
one was promised pie
in the old dark writing
of other places
we were playing at cards
it was nothing but discourse
no time to shake
off the soldiers
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 5 January 1660. (Here’s the Wednesday 4 January erasure.)
On the Ownership of Mountains
We have our own private mountains, but are they already too tired from waiting for us?
Etel Adnan
a break in the rain
itself a break in the snow
i take a chance on a walk
on my own mountain
the one i live on but also
the one that lives in my head
without their leaves
and most of their birds
the moss-footed trees
couldn’t be quieter
where snow lay until yesterday
the forest floor glistens
the sun is a bright wound
that soon heals over
two ravens converse
from the tops of adjacent trees
croaking high and low
they fly off into the clouds
then the fluting of a goose
with 27 followers
so low over the trees i swear
i feel the breeze from their wings
the tiredness drains
from my legs as i walk
i’m stopped by gnarled
skeletons of mountain laurel
one still clinging
to a fallen oak leaf
what is this blight
where are the snows of yesteryear
i pass a hollow tree just in time
to see its resident porcupine
tail like a spiny piñata
disappearing up inside
below on the road a fresh litter
of chewed-off hemlock twigs
the creek is high but clear
boisterous but well-behaved
yesterday’s ice already seems
as far-fetched as a dream
but how is it that even in winter
a mountain can give clean water
to the mink and muskrats downstream
the heron and trout
a forest grows fitter as it ages
better at filtering water
better at storing carbon
even in steep mountain soil
so the oaks as they sleep
are making fresh compost
growing the mountain
they grow on
attentive in a way that i
alleged part owner could never be
whose woods these really are
i think i know
a land trust oversees their right
not to be destroyed
but the mountain belongs
as all mountains do to the moon
earth’s own private mountain
alive only in our oceanic bodies
which are made for walking
for circling like pilgrims or scavengers
for going from full to dark
to full again
Stone Fruit
~ after Li-Young Lee
In another land, I used to know
you only in one form— drenched
in syrup, packed 6-8 halves to a can;
unnatural gold, firm at first to the bite,
tufted cup sometimes still faintly rouged
with pink where hands pried the pit loose
in a factory, perhaps somewhere in the south
where I now live. But I never knew the way
light fell through orchards at dusk or dawn,
how the smells of ripening mingled with dust,
or if every fruit picker in this country still looks
like me. I read a Chinese folk tale of a boatman
who lost his way and wound up in a village fenced
from time, suspended in peach blossoms—
The story says, everyone who forgets what such
happiness is like, loses the chance to be immortal.
I also know a poem that gave me a peach before I ever
bit into the actual flesh of one: that traced its provenance
before a boy at a roadside stand dropped them,
still warm from the sun, into a paper bag. And thus
I learned how words, too, conjure the same
sugar and skin, how they dapple in both
shadow and sunlight. As for what is impossible
and what we find we can hold in our hands,
it should always be a bittersweetness, tasting the gift
which comes from seed we did not sow ourselves.