and sterns means trading
fish for birds.
I take up the invisible oars
put by for just this
occasion: a banishing
scald of sun blotted inexactly
by a succession of windblown clouds
able to lift the entire flotilla.
A bird
flies through me. Then
a fish.
viii
Who’s singing? The one who just
a moment ago wept? Who’s going to live now?
We who are dead.
JAIME SABINES
OLIVER
He appears like a genie
in my sun-shattered kitchen,
ten years old going on fifty. He’s
full of eagerness this first day
of his spring holidays. “I’m
coming to see you, Tess, every day!”
So he exposes any near me
for casual reluctance.
Croissants are coming out
of the oven. His timing exact.
Yes, he’ll have a cup of tea
with his. He settles himself
at the end of the table like
a helmsman. Delight has driven
every shadow from not only
the living, but the dead, his
child’s voice drifting out
the open doorway toward
Abbey Ballindoon and its
cache of tombstones, their
chiseled names muffled
in moss, the language
of eternity. Tell me everything,
my prince. Don’t leave a chink
in the air. Ripple your rill
across my living heart
like a balm. We retire to
the open fire, the flames
calling out his songs, the nimble
fast ones that trot across
the brain like wild stags or
hares terror-thrilled by
hounds. We are each other’s
as surely as song stitches breath
to air. But I’ve grown old,
forgotten the courtship rituals.
How did he learn to imagine
the strange exact gift—that
shadowed errand to Sruthlinn
Spring, kneeling there to pick
watercress to be left in a plastic
bag at my door?
“And what did you do with it?”
“I ate it,” I say.
“Just like that: you ate it?”
“Yes, just like that.”
The rare limestone prickly sweetness
gone into me like his spontaneous
offering of song
and, on leaving, the bright clasp
of his arms at my waist, so
I glimpse those loves in his future,
the ones who will never taste
wild watercress, the secret currency
of land-flushed water
finding its dayglow green.
And of the young letting the old
know, that memory is that other
seeping green that melds
each moment to silence until
it reappears as something else.
for Oliver Wall
A “SIT” WITH EILEEN
It is always warm where she
is—a condition of heart. Gladness
reigns, that you have arrived to her
oblong room in which a fire burns
at an unperturbed temperature
along her left thigh. Remarks
pass on how long it’s been since
you sat with her, but any yesterday
is gold today, and you easily
turn to present joys—grandchildren
coming or at hand, an outing to
a garden center, the bouquet
Marese has gathered on a side table,
she your daughter who appears now
with the plated evening meal
to be warmed later. Lassie,
the black-and-white collie-mix,
cavorts at our knees explaining
that all greetings must needs be
out of bounds and must demand
being toned down to the mannerly
thump of her tail under
the table. Fifty years we’ve met
like this, pouring tea, slicing cake: milk
or not, sugar or not, then mulling
times that keep those absent ones
in breath—Yvonne who, even when
we don’t speak of her, seems
leaning breathless in a doorway—Maurice
forever in the photo above
the couch with a favorite
Connemara pony. (The women of
Okinawa who live to be over 100
are singing to each other and being
attentive in small delighted
ways.) There is mild seeking here
to see how one really is, what so-
and-so is doing, and if something is
amiss, a generous helping of silence
might salt it down. The snowy room
of cut glass and candlesticks
at the front of the house where
family photos keep the story entire
was given over once to the poet
as a girl, reading aloud poems
composed near the abbey, her hair,
now spiked with age.
A beautiful complicit quiet
attends as we bind up scattered
elements of the day—morning hail
that rattled gutters in shattering
sunlight, the hardworking neighbor
who cleared the ditch one day only
to be unaccountably killed
trimming hedges for the county
on the motorway. Padraig. “So
close to retirement”—as if to say
don’t look for what’s deserved or
expected. What comes is what
comes—our part to keep balance
with the unseen-unseeable.
Something calming in this lifting
of cup to lip, the hot tea, milk-cooled
and taken in, as if to swallow is itself
tonic, is to lean into the powder blue
of dusk, my life just next to hers
any chance it can be, which is the deep
unteachable mystery of friendship
over years. Our arms go around
each other in parting. It is profound.
I come. I go. You stay. You keep on
staying. I come again. You are here.
We lift our cups. Time is tagged
in the child’s game and has to stand still.
We lift our cups. We smile over their rims
a conspiracy of always.
for Eileen McDonagh, and her family
REMEMBERING EACH OTHER WHILE TOGETHER
Your triple bypass and plastic heart valve, my
sacrificed breast, and the boy-figure
with which your beloved passes
in and out of the room, threading the three
of us together, doe-eyed. No wonder we
are young again, though in the back-there of youth
I’m nearly killing us, plus all your potential
grandchildren, sliding in the wake of a twenty-ton
truck up the New York State Thruway in a rust-eaten
Buick. When I thought you brave, you reveal you
were only terrified. Remembered snow,
making us distant, drifts to either side,
forcing us down the rabbit hole of the brain’s reduced
vocabulary for near calamity: crash!
And because we didn’t, we can also remember
Edmonton, the cold Presbyterian pull of it
on a Sunday, the three of us seeking in vain
our essentials: light, music, warmth, the pint
topping out to foa
m, the company of natives
telling us where we were. But all was
shut, everyone tending their souls elsewhere.
Nothing to do but make our own circle
of comfort: fiddle, flute, and my invisible
instrument, listening. Our three-way promise
radiating from banishments of need—my
given-over children, your lamp-lit hearts
sworn to carry me with you, despite oceans,
continents and the twist of cultures branching us
up into the moment you hand me the tiny
smoke-blue perfume bottle that must have
been sitting for years and emptied years
on your Belfast mantel—the missing stopper,
escaped perfume—emblems of rare
infusions, when, with threat all around us,
we linked imaginations and whistled off
into our one-way dark.
for Ciaran and Deirdre
OPENING
I entered this world not wanting
to come. I’ll leave it not
wanting to go. All this while,
when it seemed there were two doors,
there was only one—this
passing through.
WORD OF MOUTH
When the dawny foal won’t stand
to nurse, the vet tries his hand, but
the eye that sinks a world rolls
inward and the coiled
being, its still center, incubates
crucially, neither life nor death, but
some plateau from which
it might yet be called earthward.
That fume of breath they court lies
heavier than lead in the grass.
Some arrogance of the just-born
cripples their wills to interfere
with Nature’s right to carry off
what she will. But one of them
quickens, leaves the circle
while the other horsemen shuffle,
take their voices to low registers
reserved for the “probably-not”
of any stalled creature. Armed
with a naggin of brandy, their
comrade is back to administer
a cure he heard once long ago
in his youth—that a jounce
of brandy could spark a foal
to rise out of its birth-stupor
and take legs. Wordlessly, he
bends to tilt back the newborn
head, parting the lips to splash in
the lid’s worth of hope. Call it
fool’s luck or memory brought
to bear on the actual, for the foal
jolts to air like a stag and pummels
its nose into the chest
of the kneeling man. His falling
backward into laughter carries
them all over the brim, and suddenly
there is a world, and they are
more in it for how that foal has
stammered itself to the mare
as the only island where brandy
turns to milk. They can go now
to other chores on the brow
of this day, having outguessed death
one more time. Words spoken
across years, suspended
in a tincture of memory, now
flushed live again as gamboling
flesh. Was it miracle, chance, or
divine favor they witnessed
on that pasture knoll? Words
stanch the goodness out
by noon and no great thing
will have happened. Still, one
scalded moment baffles,
and the day’s-end ceremony
of drink at the local will spill it
night into night as wonder,
their hearts made simple enough
to believe, and all over Ireland
reluctant foals will again gargle brandy
to bruise spirits up from ground.
DAYLONG VISITOR
Had I grown up in Japan, our meeting,
my Kokeshi doll, would not have been
delayed into adulthood. I would have
carried you everywhere as I grew
steadily into your image: the mirrored
arch of brows, impish plush
of lips—their red ambush fading into
the long neck of cherry wood decorated
with feathered red-and-black designs.
All childhood did you sense my soul gone
wandering for want of your safe haven? Or
are you fled to me now,
a stand-in for one of those “day-
long visitors”—a female breath sent away
to prepare enough absence for the desired
male child? Ko-keshi: “child-eliminated.”
Coming late to me, you eliminated
our childhood together. My soul
got used to wandering, drew energy
from wandering, drew freedom from
being alone as only a child knows how
to be free and alone. You were to have been
my soul repository from the start, if tradition
had operated as usual. But thank you
for your lateness. Whatever past you escaped
I know it was just in time, and that you
join me at this moment, an emblem
of good luck, as my Japanese American friends
intend. You’ve earned your keep
in their wish—you with no feet,
holding kinship with ghosts.
One day I too will have no feet and you’ll
recognize me in time for the ritual
in which you’ll have to be fed to fire
to unloose my spirit
as flame, as ashes and air
after smoke. But wait, little tree-woman,
let me gaze at the round, armless,
legless shaft of you—contented containment
I’ve fought against an entire lifetime!
Together as fire we are vigor and brightening—
then, the much delayed, unseen.
for Karen and Lawrence Matsuda
CARESS
I am like new-fallen snow.
I don’t want to take a step away
from myself, as if death too
were like that, white on white
and without sign, until
the solitary heart-shaped
deer tracks catch my eye,
sinking in.
MARCH MOON
How unsatisfying half is
even when heading
full. Yet its shine dignifies
the bare trees
that make a lattice
for the chimney smoke
of my neighbor’s
late fire. Her husband
had died before
we met, and her children
were close about her knees.
Now they have children.
See how many fractured and
restored moons
it has taken to make
this very half!
for Eileen Frazer
THREE STARS
looked down on me
with so much dark
between, the word
“together” would be
trespass, except for
the greater dark
that gave their light
an intimacy of
multitudes. And if
I shut my eyes, I was
a memory of
multitudes until
I opened that dark on
just those three
the instant before
they took me
in. And though
I tell you this
we are unspoken.
AFTERWORD
WRITING FROM THE EDGE: A POET OF TWO NORTHWESTS
I begin to think I am sometimes trying to catch up to what
has happened in a time that hasn’t happened yet.
One outreaches language in poetry when the in-seeing elements of consciousness ask the unseen of life to come forward. My aim has been to unseat what we assume about time, about the verities of love and death, of the consciousness of those other sentient beings next to us on the planet. We must put aside the glib assumptions we make just to domesticate our walking-around days.
The kind of poetry that seeks a language beyond the very one in which it arrives may travel from edge to edge. It is provisional and can’t be too fussy about its sometimes awkward transport. In this pursuit, I find myself trying to out-leap what I can almost say—but that, if said outright, would utterly spoil the secret cargo that must somehow halo what is attempting to be given. I have even said that at this stage I seem to be writing in some sense beyond language.
I want my worlds to interpenetrate—for sky to merge with water, for fish and birds to exchange habitations so we re-experience them freshly and feel our differences, our interdependence, our kinships.
Drucilla Wall, in her essay on my work in Thinking Continental, hits on a central notion of my poetry when she quotes Vincent van Gogh from an epigraph in my 2011 volume, Midnight Lantern. Van Gogh writes: “The earth has been thought to be flat … science has proved that the earth is round … they persist nowadays in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death. However, life, too, is probably round.” This possibility telegraphs an involvement with what Wall defines as my pursuit of “an ultimate elusiveness of meaning that permeates the concept of that non-linear roundness of life, alongside the simultaneous sense of living on the edge of everything in the West.”
What she sees accurately is my attempt to bind up my two Northwests: their animals, my neighbors, Lough Arrow in County Sligo in the Northwest of Ireland with the high ridge of Bricklieve and its Neolithic passage graves reaching out to America and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the snow-covered Olympic Mountain range behind Port Angeles, Washington. My fifty-year connection to the dead of Ballindoon graveyard merges with my haunting of my late husband Raymond Carver’s gravesite at Ocean View Cemetery, west of Port Angeles, where I walked every day for two and a half years while writing Moon Crossing Bridge, that elegy to love and loss and ongoing gifts.
One way to see the roundness of my life in these two places is to realize that when I situated my caravan in 1974 just outside the graveyard wall at Abbey Ballindoon to write Under Stars, I knew no one in that graveyard. But as recently as this past December, my companion of a quarter century, the painter and storyteller Josie Gray, passed out of this life and was buried within those walls. In mid-August, his death was followed by that of his sister, Eileen McDonagh, who had first welcomed me to Ballindoon fifty years before.
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