Given time, given space. Easier said than done.
Altogether elsewhere, north, in a house by the sea,
the landscape’s all circles and arcs. No, to be exact,
it’s inexact squiggles—tangles, and unexpected
headland hills undulating, a shore of irregular
marshes and marsh flats, blurry margins all around
in six rectangular windows, a sheen on the water.
I learned to paint by numbers, two Pomeranians,
eight plastic rounds of oily colors. In the beginning,
it was nothing but faint blue lines on cardboard,
obsessive hairy streaks of white and tan.
One thing, I discovered, could become another.
Now it’s all Rothko and Benjamin Moore, soft
but definitive box squares of Cloud White,
Tapestry Beige (a kind of fresh light celery),
Hale Navy on the vanity with the white knobs.
Colors of matter gathered from the landscape.
Earth, pollen, weed tucked into an apron,
ground, boiled, mixed in a mud hut.
Pots and walls colored with the potions.
First cause of all beauty beyond knowing.
Slow day here. Fog settled in. What I thought
was a marsh hawk is, closer, a vulture, wheeling
and tilting. Nothing’s dead yet. Tiny people,
a couple? a father and daughter? are walking the spit.
Their dog off leash runs ahead, waits for the humans,
who ignore him. They must be talking. He runs again.
It’s too soon for the kitesurfers I saw yesterday,
four of them under power-red curves catching good air.
I’ve become a contemplative, of textures, of what
I can feel between finger and thumb, of what happens
that is not balance or clarity, that comes not from
knowledge or training, that is at the edges of mystery
where light is changed and water tidal, where dark
green jags of cypresses mass along Bodega Bay.
Swan-Boat Ride
from a fragmented draft of an Elizabeth Bishop poem
never completed
In the Boston Public Gardens
when I was three, a live swan paddled
among artificial birds, pontoons fitted
with tall wood wings and yellow pedals.
The white paint peeled like feathers.
As our boat drifted in the dead water,
my mother’s hand meddled idle
in the wet—dirty, cold, and black,
then proffered a peanut from a sack.
A thing to do to amuse a daughter.
Ungracious, terrifying bird!
Apparently it had not heard
that it’s unkind, cruel to attack
a woman dressed in blackest black,
as widows do; she was my mother too.
“See,” she said to me (it’s all she said),
her black kid glove split and red.
I saw the hole, the drop of blood,
the hissing beak, the mark of teeth,
the finger’s flesh, the amniotic flood.
Afloat, afloat, atilt the boat,
the whole pond swayed—
breath suspends and death descends
and madness comes
to flower beds so bright and trim,
to the State of Massachusetts seal,
the State House Dome, its thinly crusted sun.
In that dream I dream again,
my mother lifts her veil
to kiss me, a patterned lace I memorized—
her fading face and fragile eyes—
fine and dark and real.
Shucks
in memoriam, Alice Brice
In a bar in Boston, somewhere near the aquarium,
gentlemen in white coats shucked oysters. We sipped
cold brine, a taste not of heaven but of earth,
and the oyster, loosened, slipped from the clean inside
of the shell, no human hand or finger ever touching,
just the lip, then the tongue, then the teeth in that soft flesh,
the one chewy button of muscle. Alice ordered
Campari “with lots of lime.” “One for me too,” I said.
Among memories of reading Keats on the lawns
of the Yard that summer, I keep this one. The bitter red drink
she called for years later in Santa Fe. Just a weekend.
After persuading me to buy a red cape from a woman
in the market, we settled into a late lunch at the Pink Adobe,
sipping, shucking our stories. The last time I saw her.
Red Oaks
I wake to trees in a window
or rather four windows
like a Japanese screen,
each panel a version
of a New Hampshire wood.
It’s winter white under the trees,
a ground like crumpled silk
or parchment flecked
with fibers of rag—
the litter of stump and stone.
And though morning is not brilliant
and there is no sound and nothing
is moving, I know
under the mounds of soft snow
are rivulets of melt refrozen,
layers of hard black leaves,
white roots growing
quietly, quietly.
A few stiff leaves cling,
the color of grocery-bag paper.
The subject is trees—
tall-slender or scrub-bent,
brown-gray against
white