Seven Days

Five Days

A Far Green Country

Home

Its That Simple

you're so
country noir

flannel and wool
starry desert
gold light gold leaves
raining on the creek

smoke in your clothes
patience, patience

one lit up kiss
just the once

fireworks
of course

firebreaks to keep
fire from spreading

all the grasses dry as the
rough of your cheek to
my pink cheek

blushing.

Bessie Parks Polhamus

Last weekend Carolyn and I made our annual late fall trip to close the cabin for the winter. The air, woods, cabin and company were transformative, heavenly. On Saturday afternoon we spent hours looking at every object in the antiques house, filling our hands over and over: a sweet new old plate for the cabin collection, a 1940's cream and red transistor radio with the longest telescoping antenna for Owen, a tiny cermanic manatee. In the furthest corner of the upstairs corridor was a pile of old photo albums, postcards, and this slim linen-covered baby book, smelling of powder - kept in someone's top drawer I would guess. Each page carefully filled out by Bessie's grandmother, and detailing her weight, length, first laugh, gifts. And then, unexpectedly, under the benign heading of Babyhood Events, the brief story of Bessie's sudden sickness, decline, and then death at 8 months old. There were two photos tucked in the baby book's pages, one of her father holding her, and one of her mother holding her. Her grandmother wrote that they were they only two photos ever taken of her.

Well. How do you leave a thing like that behind? I'm not responsible for Bessie, or the billions of other babies, adults, children, anyone that have died. But I can at least have her home to my attic, find a spot for her book and only two photos. I'll forget about her for years and find her when we move or have the attic insulated. I'll be dead and Owen or Molly will have to clean out my things and wonder what this baby book is and decide what to do with it. I'm not going to try to research the Polhamus family and return Bessie to someone.

I can't assume responsibility for Bessie. She's not mine to grieve, memorialize, or keep alive. But I have room in the attic. For three dollars and a little humanity, I guess, I can keep her. That was the best decision I felt like I could make, at the time.

Await Your Reply

It made her think of the days after her parents died, the laundry basket still full of their unwashed clothes, the refrigerator stocked with food her mother had planned to cook that weekend, her father's cell phone filling up with calls from customers who wanted to know why he had missed his appointments. At first they would leave behind a few empty spaces in the world - customers who relied on her father, patients who were waiting for her mother to nurse them at the hospital, friends and coworkers and acquaintances who would miss them, for a time - but these were very minor rips and tears in the fabric of things, easily repaired, and the thing that shocked her most was how quickly such absences began to close. Even after a few weeks you could see how soon her parents would be forgotten, how their presence became an absence, and then - what? What did you call an absence that ceased to become an absence, what do you call a hole that has been filled in?

Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply

October

All we have
is the light left in the air
that's sinking
and dissipating

into fog and mist into
evening, into
scraps and remnants, strips
of night fabric

we can wrap up in it, you there
wherever you are
in silence
walking, thinking, having those dreams

about us, warm on warm,
spooned like this
in a world

where October leaves
are wet on sidewalks, vivid and
glowing and good enough
to eat, as a salad, of

fading colors, fading lights,
the fading of the years
and light in air
is a suspension

I use the night scraps as
bindings, to hold
me to a mast

it could be a way for me to
weather the
dreams you have
you can have anything you have
sirens, siren

I can have my mast

and two wet leaves on my eyes
for blindfold

we're walking, thinking,
having those dreams

I was there. I was there.

Untitled

You want to say it
you say it. That
was simple
everything is simple
though you have to
give it everything you have
all of it
day after day after day. My
blue ocean is your
black sea. Its no trouble
to you
or me
or anyone else. I remember everything
and you do too. Tick away
sandalwood beads through
your fingers
like a rosary. Here and
now here and now here
and now.
And now.
Love will
stay in the way it does. In the way
it does.
Skip it. Beat it. Tick it
through your fingers.

It does.

I Remember Everything

All I Can Think About Is Touching Your Face

There Are Times When I'm So Lonely For You

Untitled

Once when I was
harboring a secret, or a problem, or a demon, or some trouble
depending how you look at it

I excused myself politely
from a dinner table of friends
and went into the kitchen
lit with twinkly lights

and took such a slug of whiskey
that twenty minutes later

I excused myself politely
from the dinner and the friends

and went out the front door
and onto the sidewalk

where I lay down
on the concrete
under the dark sky and sparkly stars
and was discovered
with some alarm
by the friends
twenty minutes later.

I decided because of the
secret, and the problem, and the demon, and the trouble
and also the whiskey
not to get up
or admit the whiskey part

and so was taken
in the back of a Chevelle
to the emergency room

where I knew the jig was up
when the phlebotomist came
and then the doctor
and then the nurse

waste waste waste
of time
of space
was what they said
or I thought they said
or I thought they thought
at the time

and the years inbetween
I won't tell about
except to say:
secret, problem, demon, trouble

which takes us to now
when I wash this peach
after my dinner
and my day with friends
and slice it
because I notice it tastes different sliced
than eaten around the pit
and I eat it while listening
to one last night cricket trilling
trying with all his might

to win my heart

peach, cricket

and I notice when I cup my hands
for a drink of water
from the sink
before bed
that I can still smell that peach


from twenty minutes ago.

Good Sweet Night

You're Beautiful

I Hate It When We're Not Talking

No Matter How Hard We Try, Its Still a Relationship

There Must Be Some Use For You

It Was a Great Carniverous Monster From the Deep

Even Men Have Nipples

You Know Exactly Who You Are

Some Flames are Old Flames

I Know

I Wish I Could Touch You Like This All the Time

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Untitled

1900 - 1978

I am a fortunate man. I grew up on a frontier, escaped early success, had things to say when I matured. I have been able to make a living at work I wanted to do, to write what I believed and find an audience.

Hal Borland

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We visit each other
in the low-hanging wall of
clouds the thickened and
middle space between an altitude a
thin and cold and sunny sky
and the abrupt reveal of misty woodlands
when we descend, and drop down
through the bottom of
this opaque
call it dream

one in which you are
sick with fever and confused
I can't find it in the woods
and because somewhere you're
awake and I'm alseep you
can't respond to me when I
talk to you, can't hear or feel me when
I hold your hands and say
I found it, it was there
I do what anyone does
in these situations
I run for cold water
and find
its a clear and fresh pool but
guarded by a wolf swimming
lazy figure eights
underwater

another in which we are
both somewhere alseep and so I can
see you and you can
see me except we are on
horses on a plain in
Montana and they are crossing
their feet sideways so fast in a
floating dance and its like we're being
swept to sea and so we are
mute watching
each other go
and be gone

and the last one where I am
asleep and you are awake and I
call each number and
get your message and find
your note and leave you
messages in
every way I can and am
in your room and see
signs of you the evidence but
I can't find you
until just as I am waking you are
gone to sleep and I
meet you in that fleeting middle space too
enough to
reach and touch and
know there is only one second to say
all that matters which is
how I love you

and I'm awake to light in my bedroom and
the fan humming low and

by any determination then

bound to recall
or bound to forget

these interludes

that bound me to you.

The Great White Way

Everyone Yearns For Something

G.

A month ago I went to G.'s little old house in the woods where he lives with his daughter M., who takes care of him. He has a bed in what was the dining room, and nothing else in the room remains. The house is mid 1700's, and the room is spare with drunken angles. The floor is wide chestnut, honey-colored, the walls are a bare plaster white. There's his hospital bed, with an air low-pressure mattress that gently hisses away, an old wedding quilt, and a wooden chair with a red cushion, where I sit. The windows are west-facing, and I like best to go in the afternoons, when the room is lit and golden. The glass in the windows is wavy. A weeping birch outside rustles, and you can always hear cardinals calling.

G. has thick and longish snowy hair, and I asked him if I could put my hand through it. He was in no need of that kind of comfort that day, and we were joking, which is what he likes about me. He likes sarcasm, and a sense of humor, and he likes to sit quietly for a very long time and then say all kinds of things, and have me say nothing in return, just listen. I pull the chair alongside his bed, and sit just a bit behind his head, so he can see my knees and feet, but not my face. He likes to look at the wall when he talks, not at me.

This summer he has told me stories. One afternoon he told me about six men he killed, and one little boy by mistake, in World War II. It took hours. He told me about his sister's kitten he killed by accident when he was 10, stepping on it, and how he sank its body in a pond and everyone believed the kitten ran away, and he never told anyone, and that his shame affected his relationship with his sister his whole life, and made a distance he knew she never understood and that hurt her. He told me about how the happiest day of his life was a January afternoon where he had his six children on sleds on the hill behind his house and how he just kept pushing them off and sending them down the hill, over and over, and the sight of their fresh pink faces running back up the hill to him, over and over.

A month ago I ran my hand through his magnificent hair, and it made him really laugh. Today he told me that his wife never touched his hair. She would always take his elbow, rub the back of his hand with her thumb, kiss him behind his ear. But it was not her habit to stroke his hair.

He said he loved his wife very much. He said he also loved a woman who was his neighbor for 37 years. He loved his wife. He was never unfaithful to her. After 10 years, he sought to move away; his wife loved the neighborhood, wanted to stay. He could not convince her and he never told her. He held himself in check. He never sought the neighbor's company, but he never lost awareness of her. Which light on, which light off, when. Sounds and glimpses. She loved him too, he said.

Once a year, perhaps, he said, they would have some exchange. One time in a pantry at a holiday party, he went in to get something, she was already there. He said he placed his hand on the small of her back, and his other hand up under her hair on the back of her neck, and she put one hand on his heart and the other on his cheek, and they said they loved each other. Another time, his wife asked him to go over and borrow eggs. I held her in the hallway as long as you can explain getting eggs, he said. I tried to memorize her. She whispered in my ear that she was happy, and that we had happy lives, to know she always loved me. And she ran her hand through my hair.

And once, he said, they were at the pond, each with their grandchildren, after so so many years. A thunderstorm came up, and his wife took all the children home. His wife told him to ride home with the neighbor woman. The children's shoes and shirts and toys were everywhere. It took some time to gather it all up. There was a willow tree and they each walked under its branches to pick up something belonging to one of their own grandchildren.

We walked into each other, he said. I think we knew we were getting older, and that we might not have the chance again.

They sat down. They held each other and thanked each other for loving each other so long, and so much. She put her hands through my hair, over and over, he told me. I put my lips to her cheek and I did not kiss her. I just touched my lips to her cheek. I did not think I could ever come out from under that tree.

They got up, she dropped him off, he went home. Three years later she had a stroke, and died a week later. His wife sent flowers to the hospital. His wife thought it best not to disturb and visit. He didn't visit. She died and the day of her funeral his wife had a colonoscopy scheduled, and needed him there to drive her home. He did not go to the funeral. His wife died a couple of years after that.

Today I sat in the chair by G.'s bed while he told me this, and on my timesheet it says, Client Contact, In Person, 1.5 hours. I'm connected to the mainframe right now, and I'm replicating my timesheet and documentation, sending in that summation of today. Its hard, somehow, to reconcile.

It took an hour for the story. Then he asked me to read this to him. He said the neighbor had given the book, a second-hand collection of Robert Frost poems, to his wife as a Christmas present the year after the day at the pond. He said he was looking through the book this week, and came across this poem, with the page folded down. His wife was a librarian. She never in her life folded a page, he said. This page, folded twice. His wife would have thought it not strange, being second hand. He is sure the neighbor folded it, for him, never knowing if he would realize it, find it. It was the only message she sent me, he said. The only time I know of that she sought me.

To Earthward

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of - was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

He told me her name, where she is buried. He asked me to go there and bury the pages from the book there.

I did that today. I left him, I found her grave just where he said it was. I called him and left a message with his daughter: Tell G. I ran the errand he wanted me to -

It was a white headstone. Under a willow tree. It was thick and humid in the cemetery. And it was thundering off in the distance as I buried his pages with her.

Some Loves are Old Loves

In Time, Everyone Finds Their Broken Hearts

And examines it closely, and turns it over and over, at least once.

Because You're Mine, I Walk the Line

And It Burns, Burns, Burns

Please Drive Me Home

A Long Wait/Come Back

Found

Untitled

I give you
a flower. You
take it. You
put it in a vase. You
she loves me, she loves me
not. You smell it. You
take
a picture of it. You think
its beautiful
and put it
in the
pages of your favorite book
and keep it
and find it
when you're old. You
discover that it is
edible
and you eat it
in a salad
and marvel
at being wild like that. You
take it
and drag it slowly
up my leg
my inner thigh
along the line of my cheek, my jaw, a flower a
feather to my lips. You
put a flower
on my grave
when I'm dead.
I water my flowers. I hope
they take root
I hope
they flower. I hope
they come back
after
a long winter. I
hope they last. I know
they're beautiful. I am
never over flowers. I give you
the substance
in the packet
that keeps flowers
alive
for longer
than anyone thought
possible
and everyone says
they're beautiful
and they're beautiful I finally
fall asleep
to the sound of
night flowers
bursting open
this once a year
their perfume
everywhere
their perfume
in my neck, my hair, you
inhale you are
drunk with
flowers and with
me and I am
never over flowers I am
never over I am
never over you I am
blooming I am
full I am
dripping petals and
drops of dew I am
adorning you
I am
full bloom
you are
in my hair I am
a scent
that makes
you close your eyes and
breathe in
how drunk
we are how
never over
how complex, and simple how
loved and
not noticed how
encouraged and gardened and tended and
grown and how
in drought, and desert, and how
flowers smell, and perfume
the very air
and how it
makes everyone
happy that there are flowers and that we once
threw flowers under
the feet of
horses as
men went to battle and how we use
flowers to say I am
sorry and I
miss you and I love
you and I am
drunk and beautiful I am
flowering I am
behind your ear I am
in your hair and
in your fingers and in
the end I am
she loves me I am
yours I am
wild on the vine I am
in a jelly jar
at home
where I
wake up to a
flower on my pillow from
you
saying I will
be right back I can't
wait
to tell you
how beautiful
this morning was I
picked you
a flower I will

be right back.

Untitled

We are going to become old, and I will sit as close to you as I want to.

Untitled

I'm the surgeon.

My hand

has a perpetual

tremor and there is no record

of cadaver

of lecture and training

of knowing this, doing this, teaching this

in my background.

The Filipino scrub nurse

knows it

gives me inscrutable stare

behind her mask

glare of operating lights

opaquing her judgement, her eyes.

I'm your surgeon

and you are prepped and draped

laid before me

under

somewhere in the vapor. How you came

to be

sprayed with buckshot

is unknown to me

not in the record

not witnessed by anyone in this room. You'll

keep that mystery.

I excise you

bit by bit. I am

unqualified and the room

is silent what would they

love to say?

I have done

the best I could and

we have

both survived.

In the cold, and hush

I untie

my mask, my gown, remove

my gloves

and touch each one of your

wounds, then

climb up onto the table

beside you

and kiss

each place, with my mouth

my lips

to your broken skin

and whisper to you

with my hands

in your hair

This was mine to do.

Vow

I honor your path.

I drink from your well.

I bring an unprotected heart

to our meeting place.

I hold no cherished outcome.

I will not negotiate by withholding.

I am not subject to disappointment.

- traditional Celtic

Untitled

Sometime during the

night I slip out

from between the sheets and go

out to the backyard

and dig a shallow grave. I lay

Resistance

down in it

and cover her up

patting down the gritty dirt over her

face, eyes, mouth, belly. The dew on the grass makes a mud

on me and I can see the little

mound of her feet

by the starlight. The stars are moving.

Back to bed. Surrender

curls up beside me

nestles her face in the curve of my neck

breath like a moth

on my skin, in my ear

intertwines her fingers with mine

presses the soles of her feet

to my legs.

The Truth watches us both

from a dark chair in the corner of the room

gets up, walks heavy-footed

into the bathroom

and has a smoke with the lights off.

Morning comes with a breeze

bright white light

reflecting off the paint

and a luff of the curtains. I have

no memory

only the evidence

of the dry dirt and grass collected

by my feet

at the foot of my bed

and a vague recollection

of a dream

in which I tended some piece

of my heart

stored in a battered aluminum milk vessel

pressed into the coals

of a small fire

to keep it warm

and alive

high up in the Andes

with the wind whistling

waiting

just me

and the goats for company.

Some Accidents are Happy

Untitled

Grieve not

nor speak of me with tears

but laugh and talk of me

as if I were beside you

I loved you so

'twas heaven here with you.

Isla Paschal Richardson

Family

Bedtime

It was enough to open to the page

where I left off. Where you had asked me, hated

question, what are you reading? Where I was

when a sudden breeze lifted and blew all the curtains, the ones in the

bathroom too, just next to the toilet, where you sat, where

you had to catch them, and pin them shut with your fingers

so that the neighbors wouldn't see.

I found the page, and I had more than one choice

of method. Without bookmark, I could have let

the book fall open

to its natural spinal crease, its

memory of me, bending it back

to flatten the pages. My

I was here. I could have remembered

page seventy-eight, or remembered a certain thickness, skimmed through until

finding unfamiliar words.

I found the page where I left off, and you

came to bed. It was enough to open to it

while listening to the sighs of the maple trees

the irregular little scrape of the drawn shade against the windowsill

that might or might not make it

hard for me to fall asleep. It was enough

to find page seventy-eight, the page-facing-page

juxtaposition of what I remembered from before, and

the utterly unknowable to come, except perhaps

your habit of raising the shade a few inches

in any steady amount of breeze

it was enough

that we got there.

Hearts in Atlantis

Happy Birthday

The Vibrations Inch Me to You

Hope Springs Eternal

I'm Waiting For You

Untitled

When I look up at the wall from where D., the nurse who cared for K. up until his death earlier this morning, and I sit, this is on the wall of the meeting room in the funeral home:

Mourn the dead
by tending to those
they have left behind.

I think that's how it went. I tried to memorize it as I sat, waiting for K.'s son to complete the funeral arrangements for his father. The shirt he's brought is on a hanger on the coat rack, and its covered in yellow stains. His prayer shawl - what is the proper name for it? - and a black clip-on tie are on the table in front of me. I will call at some point and ask the funeral home staff to walk in and read me the exact words, so I can get it down. It was that sentiment, but put as nicely as you could ever hope to put it.

After the young and nice guy from the home excuses himself, I ask K.'s son the relevant questions. Do you intend to kill yourself, as you said, as soon as your Dad's funeral is over?
Yes.
Are you willing to go talk to your doctor if I take you there?
No.
Are you willing to go to the ER with me, to talk to someone?
No. They'll try to stop me, and I don't want to be stopped.
You have had hope in the past, that life still has something for you. Do you have any hope of that now?
No.
Is there anything I can say to change your mind, anything I can do, to change your mind?
No.

In the end, I cannot get him to go voluntarily, and I cannot detain him gracefully and demonstrate the compassion and sorryness I feel by at least accompanying him through his transport and evaluation. In the end, I and D. spend about 45 minutes trying. It doesn't work. Its too far gone to be workable, or I fail too much at it, or both.

I let him go, then sign the section paper and fax it to the police. I tell them where he is headed, and his home address. The young and nice guy who was conducting K.'s son's meeting is stunned. He didn't perceive any of this going on in there. He says a few things that I find both funny and understandable. I don't feel smarter than him, or anyone. I do feel glad I know what to ask and that I can do it, that I can ask. I feel nervous. My hand shook just a little when I handed the section paper to the lady at the funeral home to fax to the police, and I think she noticed, and I think she is used to not commenting on things like that. She must observe things like that everyday.

Two days later, at our meeting where we review all deaths, admissions, and active patients, one of the first things we discuss is this case and the medical director who heads our meeting congratulates me on an excellent job, as do most of the team. I feel humiliated, a little, at the congratulations, because I feel that no one is perceiving that I stripped this man of his freedom and rights, although I know it was for exactly the right reason, at exactly the right time. I was still the one who stripped him of his freedom. I have to sit with that, indefinitely. One day, maybe K.'s son will have hope, and will look back on me as the person who helped to save his life that day. Maybe he will spend the rest of his life in unhappiness, neither able to live, or end it all, and blame me as one of the proofs of the horror of this life. Maybe he was discharged and maybe he's completed his suicide already. I can't say, and won't know.

I do know there is something about the grocery store that brings all of this to just under my throat and just behind my eyes. There is something about walking up and down the aisles and contemplating the items on the shelves, the solitariness of being alone in mind in such a busy and crowded place, that makes my heart feel achy and full and timeless and aware of all love I have ever had and ever lost and the simultaneous enormity and insignificance of that. The certainty that in one generation, I will be remembered, as a thin resemblance of myself, and in two generations, I will be all gone, from memory too, and be only a name with dates. I will be that. I am OK with that, even now. But it makes me ache with a heartsickness for all this, all this, this now, what is already spent, the precious little left. That is how I feel in the grocery store.

This morning they read this in church, which I find myself going to, because it is better than the grocery store for feeling like this.

I was hungry and you gave me food,
I was thirsty and you gave me drink,
I was a stranger and you welcomed me.
I was naked and you clothed me,
I was sick and you visited me,
I was in prison and you came to me.

Here is the bread of life, food for the spirit. Let all who hunger come and eat.
Here is the fruit of the vine, pressed and poured out for us. Let all who
thirst now come and drink.

We come to break bread. We come to drink of the fruit of the vine. We come
to make peace.

May we never praise God with our mouths
while denying in our hearts or by our acts
the love that is our common speech.

I come to be restored in the love of God. I come to be made new
as an instrument of that love.

I know that I am worthy. I know that I am welcome. All are worthy.
All are welcome.

Come into the embrace and remembrance of this communion.


The grocery store is where I most feel and know my dual existence. In the morning, when I wake up, I sometimes remind myself: it is my right, my delight, my decadent gift to waste my life in all these small little ways. My life is abundance, and today I will squander it beautifully.

I was sick and you visited me. I cannot comment or offer anything on God.

I was sick and you visited me. That much, I can do.