The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem SERVING TIME

                                                    for J.

 

Think fairy fly, think

small wasp digging with her legs

 

through a water’s skin.

Think wings, think fringed

 

and beautiful. Think

of the thing done

 

by the boy that cannot be

undone. Think swim,

 

think down, think

of the paddles, which are really

 

wings, which are really

beautiful. And the thing done

 

by the boy that cannot be

undone. Think of the eggs

 

she is looking for—the eggs

of the water beetle into which

 

she will insert her own.

Think of the boy, think

 

of the thing done by the boy,

think of the boy undone

 

by rage, undone

by its rising, rage undoing

 

what he thought he knew

of his mind, to undo that

 

of another. Think of the thing

done to a boy that cannot be

 

undone. Think of the eggs

which are not her eggs

 

which will become her own.

Wings, fringed

 

and beautiful. Think of her

exiting, think of her

 

climbing a stem, waterweed

perhaps, without which

 

she would be unable

to lift her body

 

back into air. Think

of the boy, the beautiful boy.

 

Think of a thing done

that cannot be undone.

URSUS

Today I walked the road from end to end.

If you want to know, yes, I looked

 

for bears. My whole adult life I’ve looked.

Before sex, there was not a bear. And

 

so on. While I walked, planes came through

the valley, two together, antique, I think.

 

My thoughts went to air show.

Crop duster. Forest fire. First flight.

 

I don’t know where you are.

 

So now I’ll say I hated and loved the time

the young barista gave you your receipt

 

with her number on the back. I was

right there, like another customer,

 

a book bag. Just this morning,

the man up the road told me

 

a story: one evening he sat alone

in the yard with his book and sensed

 

in the quiet a presence—what he took

to be his wife sneaking up. He waited.

 

Finally he turned to see sleeping on the grass

behind his chair a large bear. I could

 

have wept. Tonight the roar coming on

is one plane, nothing in chase or warning

 

or relief, nothing but the late sun

and everything’s invitation to face it.

PATIENCE

Between the kiddy park the town closed for repairs after recent

flooding and the new three story senior center, there’s a piss

poor wooded area in the bow of a runoff creek where teenagers

go at night to drink and smoke but during the day is always

empty. I can walk my dog off leash there and when he shits

I never have to clean it up. It’s hardly woods at all so much

as tall bushes, weeds, and a few dead trees swallowed up in

dead or dying vines, some thick as the trunks they’ve twisted

up and strangled, a stranded understory shrinking into itself

while the town goes on subdividing all around it in a meiosis

of cement, blacktop, concrete, steel, and glass. One time, I got

there early before rush hour. Sunlight passing level through a

prism of leaves broke into variegated greens I had no name

for. The air, it seemed, had come alive with green gradations

and degrees, a green kaleidoscope the sun had summoned, that

quivered with a chilly symbolism I could feel but not decipher. 

At my feet, across the emerald moss shell of a log disintegrated

nearly into dirt, a single ant was clambering into and out of

melded bands of darker and lighter green, over tufts of moss,

which when I looked closer I could see were woven of paler

tufts, and those tufts too of even paler and shorter ones, none

of which so much as bent under the ant as it went where it was

going, where it would get to, no matter what, as if it were the

ant articulation of the green shades moving over it as it moved

down the crumbling log into the weeds among the crushed

and rusted beer cans, shreds of cellophane, and dog shit. Little

hoplite genius of a place of unfathomable patience with all

time to accomplish what its tiny ant heart, if it had a heart, was

beating for.

LETTER TO MATTHEW OLZMANN FROM A FLYING SAUCER

Listen son, when we shine this tractor beam on you,

you need to hold still. Not that stillness, son,

is something that can be “held,” but that’s your language,

not ours. What we’re saying, son,

is you keep skipping like a stone across a pond and we need

that to stop. What we’re saying, son, is let the light

bring you home. Never mind the way

the tractor beam incinerates all it touches.

We’re pretty certain this is safe. It’s gonna work. Trust us.

There are things in your skull, son,

that do not belong to you, thoughts you can’t explain,

songs you’ve never heard, colors you have no name for.

We’re not saying you’re special, son. We just needed a place

to store our luggage and now we’ve got to extricate

that luggage and we need to extricate it all intact.

Think of the light as all the problems you need to face.

You’re afraid of being alone in the world? You’re afraid

that when the light shines on you, you’re going

to be exposed and everyone will laugh? You’re afraid

that you’ll never be moderately competent? You need

to deal with that, son, and now is your big chance.

We’re saying step into the light, son.

Never mind that you’ve doubted

whether or not the light is real. What is doubt, son,

when you have a chance to be hauled into the sky?

IN THE NEALE, NEAR CONG

The thing is I am not

like a wood pigeon

with a white collar

and gray head that looks to be green,

a tail that wants to be a pheasant

loping from branch to scarred branch.

 

We looked from the road

the kid who became my grandmother

took from church a century ago,

a few kilometers of her eye-level

being on the top of stone walls

and the mountains to the southwest,

Galway, Mayo, out past Cong,

mountain and sea-bucked places.

 

The old place we saw decades ago

had gotten overgrown, with a family

running a terrier kennel

in the habitable half now.

It was noisy. There was a baby in back.

 

The mountains are green folds

of a sofa, whose television viewing

is the sea, wildly carved by it.

The living room is the whole scenario.

 

All day here

looking for cairns

in featureless field

rectangled with stone

after featureless field,

each a different width

or length, from above

not a pattern

but improvisation,

 

it was that crazy feeling

of abstraction,

irritation, sunbaked.

 

I was ready to go all day.

WHEN THE GIRL BECOMES THE BEAR

There’s no terror like the terror

of the sensory-deprivation tank

(because you supply your own terror).

It will not be the men who kill me,

it will be the women

                         who hate the men.

When they cannot kill the bear, they blame

the trees.

I am limb-sawed, uprooted.

A mute stump.

The bear still roams—his eyes shine,

his coat smooth as if freshly groomed.

(By whom?)

In the tank, I blink and blink

                                     into dead air.

I think, If only I could be the bear for them.

Listen,

if you meet a bear

            who whispers, Kill me,

you will know my voice.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem SERTRALINE

Object permanence: something my dog doesn’t think
I possess. She sits on the ball when she no longer wants

to participate. I wish to one day hold that kind of boldness.
Near us, a heron puffs his chest, wades knee-deep into

the marsh. What is more than one heron called? I never learned
that one. A flamboyance of flamingos, watch of nightingales,

bouquet of pheasants. My mother is somewhere, probably
working or maybe driving to the store. She likes to shop the sales.

We used to have the same birthmark, right over our left hip.
Hers: gone. Mine: bleeds. I look for deeper water. The dog likes

to float. Isn’t that how witches were tested in Salem? Something
about floating, something about weighing the same as a duck.

To keep still, I imagine the oil-sheen of a mallard in the dog’s
mouth, my mother’s hand in mine. It’s a siege, a siege of herons.

CROCUSES

 

 For Stuart Dischell

After nearly hacking them down

while mowing my back lawn,

I think of Rimbaud aroused

by their purples and greens

as they spiked between

the stones of the Rue de Buci,

barbarous among the modernity.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award ON SEEING A BEE DRINK HIS NECTAR

Here I sit almost 25 years old,
never knowing how a bee drinks
its nectar til today, having followed one
from geranium petal to geranium petal,
leaning in close, seeing his tiny hands
grab each tiny flower, watching him
extend a shining, black cone
from the center of his face to lap up
the sweet stuff. It’s a dipping tongue,
apparently, which I was calling a
retractable nose, and butterflies
have one too, and I don’t know
how I made it this long never properly looking
at a bee! There should be entire grades
dedicated to this stuff and other grades
set aside for looking up at oak trees from underneath.
My ignorance of the world is oversized
like a shirt. It has sleeves that drag the ground
when I walk. My neighbor tells me
how a mother robin keeps her nest clean—
carrying the young birds’ waste in her
mouth and making deposits in the grass
somewhere. It’s true. My neighbor has watched
this happen, she says, and all at once I love her,
want to marry her impulsively, buy a big house
just for the porch, and spend the rest of our lives
uncovering the daily routines of moths,
listening to the sound spiders make
when they slurp liquefied guts, wondering
what chipmunks dream about, and if they kick
their legs in their sleep like a dog sometimes does.

A SORT OF ART

They made a sort of music with their feet,
a seesaw slapping as they hit the ground
in time with undead, resurrected years—
the monochrome past of sepia suffering.
They made their music ring in children’s ears
all day and night with its staccato beat,
then made the children make another sound,
something like an orchestra for the king
with mami, papá, dios, retch, and wail
for notes. It quivered through the king’s rich heart.
Now they make another music with bones
crushed and sifted through screens, a whispered trill
that sounds like burning notes. A sort of art
of no remains. Not names. Not even stones.