— for Robert Bly

On the side
of a Maine mountain

while walking toward
a bare stone summit

a high wind storms up
out of nowhere.

I know how to walk
against this sort of nuisance

when I’m on level ground, 
but this feels 

different. Moss underfoot,
and if I slip I may fall — 

non-fatally, but far enough
to be in pain, to perhaps need

assistance or even rescue
afterward. But I’m so close

to the highest point I’ve ever
reached on my own — this

high wind out of nowhere,
it’s nothing. If I fall, I might fall

or I might fly, I might rise
even farther. If I call out

for aid upon falling?
Whatever being might answer

might choose me to let me fall,
or might elevate me — whoever

or whatever makes the choice,
I should be grateful 

that I was here
upon this mountain

for as long as it took 
to be chosen. 

to desire is to have
a hand full of 
smoke, 

wisps slipping 
between 
fingers as they

disspate. to desire
is to be ready
to close 

a hand upon
what may never be
seized although

that smoke seems
thick enough to
be held. to desire

is to understand 
nothing but 
a need to hold smoke

as it rises from
fire around your feet.
hold it like a staff.

hold it like a handle
for rake or shovel.
better to desire than

to hold what you desire.
to hold is to require
action once it’s in your hand.

to desire is 
to play with
smoke as if it were

more than 
ungraspable scent
and obscured vision, 

is to ignore
how fiercely 
you are burning.

Every animal in the house 
asleep except for me.

Maybe there’s a mouse at work 
somewhere in the walls,

but not to my ears.
It’s quiet enough that all I hear

is the warm air rising from the grates
and a plane headed for Boston,

or from Boston, forty miles
east of here. Soon there will be

the sound of the early train
passing the bottom of the hill;

traffic on the highway ramp
will pick up and after that

the apartments above me
will come alive and telegraph

busy mornings through
their floors to my ceilings.

We call this place a city
but unlike some others,

it definitely sleeps.
The animals here

take their need for
unconsciousness seriously,

as do I and I sit here acutely aware
of my own desire to fall away

and forget where I am 
for a few hours, yet here I am

watching the cats sleep
and thinking of my lover

asleep in the next room
while I pursue yesterday

all through the night
and into today,

hoping to catch it and shake it
until, somehow, it changes.

You stood by his bedside
the day you left, offering
blessings for the life
he would live without you.

He lay there and sobbed
and reached out for you to 
stay and talk and stay and love
and stay, just stay.

You walked off in a cloud 
of blessings as if you’d sprayed
the room for bugs or to leave
some floral camouflage.

Understand that your blessings
by themselves healed nothing of wounds
the boy did not even see
until he became an old man

and lay back in a different bed
understanding at last how the damage
inflicted back then was neither your fault
nor his own, but that regardless 

the scent of it lingered
in every bedroom he’d been in since.
The stinging in his scars
was the burned-in message

that everyone leaves, eventually;
it might as well be him leaving, even
if it’s not today, even if he is alone
at the time, even if the room

is stifling with blessings 
and protection and love.
Nothing is forever,
his wounds have said at every dawn

since you walked away, applying
a serum as protective
as any blessed potion, 
if not as sweet.

Things broken
from long fruitful effort,
too shattered to be repaired,
shout more loudly of triumph
than any fanfare ever could:

a desiccated tendril of
a wild grape vine clinging to
a wooden fence after
the vine has died and fallen away;

an egg case 
for some insect or
spider, empty
on the back porch;

a pair of once-strong boots,
soles worn through, peeking 
at sunrise from where
they were placed neatly
inside a trash can on trash day,
as if ready to be worn again at once.

Here’s one for the brothers 

in drink and sports fandom
whose cars have kissed telephone poles
more than once after hours

One for the boys

who drive along old roads
daydreaming of their well deserved
post high school comebacks 

One for the men

who swerved into careers
after head-on collisions with a payback
for mistakes and accidents 

Another for the boys

who dance awkwardly around
how good it felt to hug and slap asses
after the win in the Thanksgiving game

Another for the men

who say not a word about all of this
who shrug it off then sink
into stained recliners or basement shops

One more for these brothers

who may not even understand
that what hurts them
is demanded of them

from the backseat wherever they go
on whatever roads
they end up driving

This is
a freshly washed dish
in a drainer

Later today
it will be full
of food and then

will be washed again
The cycle will repeat
until the dish breaks

sometime in the future
when my hand loses its grip
through some illness or injury

I know this because of
how often it has happened
How often something

has been destroyed
because I lost my grip
through injury or illness

or inattention
to detail or how much care
I should have been offering

but I was hungry
Couldn’t wait so I grabbed
for a plate and then

crash
Pieces
Rarely I was cut and I bled

all over the clean dishes
I’d rinse them and
do it again

This is a freshly washed plate
in a drainer and
oh my appetites are

so wild for it that I must consider
that it might be the dirty
afterplate I want most

In the decayed eyes
of the recently dead
sparrow

(who likely hit my window
when I was not home and fell
to the mulch below and lay there
unnoticed until
I went out to replenish
the swift-emptying feeders
tha brought it here)

is everything that is coming:
vision sinking into the bones
that supported it
that will disappear
in their own time and 
feed whatever is next

I felt deep sorrow
and offered my apology
for making it so easy
to indulge hungers that
in the end it led to
your unexpected death

then I
refilled the feeders

in the correction
of faults there is
an opportunity
to diminish the
need to repeat
the behaviors that
led to the faults
but since so often
a fault is just 
the side effect of
an overused strength 
one must take care
not to weaken
what you are at core
in an effort to create
perfection where none
can exist

take for instance
a volcano bleeding
flowing rock and hot ash
doing what it was
made to do 
when it stops for good
the people move in and 
make a life on top of
its scars and skin as if
its seeming extinction
was purposeful and good until
when it shifts 
in its sleep
the people scream as if
betrayed when all that’s happened
is what has always happened

see
when a man falls apart
he may well fall
back into himself then
double down and surge
into the same forms as before
he cracked 

magma is magma
no matter when
it finds its way
blows out
of the cracks

If a dark chocolate
ice cream cone
appears in mid-air
between you and a child 
in danger, you will 
no doubt push the cone aside
as you rush to the child’s
salvation.

If the sobbing child
is comforted when you
turn back to seize the cone
and give it to them,
you will eventually convince yourself
this has all been 
preordained and that you
were indispensable here. 

You will cease questioning
the appearance of the cone
in the crisis moment, assuming
a divine intervention or
alignment of planes
created this, and you
will feel no horror
that a child
may have been endangered
just to help you feel special,
that magic was forced into service
just so you could feel heroic,
and that the anti-gravitational nature
of the final piece of the scenario
was a conjuring that had a meaning
beyond the moment; that you 
were in fact a means to an end and
as much a mere cog 
within the situation
as all the rest
of its elements were.

The rejected being
was appointed to
a special committee
examining the status of 
healthy creatures. 

The press photo of them all together
in their meeting room was
lovely enough: everyone smiling
broadly, any tension in their eyes
probably a result of bad lighting.

The rejected being took it as
a small step toward acceptance
that the camera
picked them up at all 
as there had been periods

of utter invisibility
in their career. Times when
they knew they’d been at the table,
had done good work, been acknowledged
in the group, and then disappeared

from view almost as soon
as the work was wrapped up
and tied in a neat bow.
(Theirs was the finger
in the center of the bow.)

When the rejected being
suggested early on that the alleged health
of healthy creatures was
in many ways a confidence game, 
the others nodded as if

a nod was better than the wink would be
to a long-dead, well-beaten horse. 
After that, the rejected being could smell
dead horse permeating the meeting room
so often it seemed that

there must be mountains of them
somewhere nearby, invisible
as the rejected being had once been.
They began to speak less of the stench, 
spent meeting time staring

at the press photo
hung so prominently 
behind the head of the table,
where the chair couldn’t see it
at all.

Raptor alone on high:
dull-black speck

against sky
a shade of deep yearning.

Somehow both bird and observer,
I am seeing myself up there:

alone, seeking,
soaring, desperately

not looking straight down
as if seeing myself there

so far away
from what I desire

would initiate
a dive to solid death

for both
seeker and watcher.