On the Fear of Going Down
Love. It’s terrifying.
Why anything can happen.
for Jay
If I gave you release you wouldn’t like it,
the petit mal of passengers on an all night
journey, the giving it up of letting it all
go, the slack-jawed mouth opening, deaf
joints or fish flesh cooked to perfection.
It takes less than a minute to fall in love,
less time than it takes to scale a dollar
of dimes from a salmon, than anger’s
claw or grasping a fish stunned under
a boulder’s tumbling waterfall.
If I fed you would you metaphor
into blossoms of cheek blush,
would you flourish and survive
on a Grecian sea, chopping the wood
of Seferis? Would you fill
on French fried sardines and harden
into countryside, into the infinite beauty
of waves and the impeccable blue
of what mirrors light on the filled
significance of the empty?
The light was unbearably living
as the dark is unbearably dead, shattered
as the exploded pods of weeds; the sear
of your eyes in a dim room, an ignition
of spark, of steamer flare on rail.
for Jay
“It’s the waves,” he says, “the closest
I’ve ever come to eternity
is the ocean.” It’s the closest
I’ve ever been to infinite desire
and the fulfillment of salt.
I was born here. I’ve got brine
in my billowing hair. I’ve got grit
enough for a continent.
There’s a foundation here
beneath the gentle lapping
of the have and have not
of distance; there’s a horizon
of difference here, Plymouth Rock
under the shoal and the balein
from migrating whales, the gentle
ignorance of natural selection.
Tell me some things. Tell me
about travels and the Ark of your
baggage. You can ballast the levee
with the blastings. Slag,
cut to a fine aperture,
is as good a master as not.
This I know. Deceit tells its tale.
It’s winter. The heartbeats
of sea lions pound into the wood
of the pier. On the rock
the golden wolves’ eyes catch
the searchlight of the lighthouse.
They can’t help it, for the look
of the light drives them
to this blind alley where I walk,
heavy with the towing of ancestors,
along the coast where my grandmother’s
grandmother dived for oysters
now extinct. I can’t see them,
but the eyes tell all
they’re there, lounging
Lords of an element but dumb
to the light that blinds them,
that reveals them now in the flesh.
Precious few have seen it.
Fewer among them have touched it
past the kelp. Fish eye
the boats, masters of none
but the palate. I watch
the stolid seals preen their blond
whiskers. I see the sleekness
of their leap onto the pilings
and wonder at impossible
distance and the weight of things.
That cloud bank, for instance,
the darkness behind it that’s
either storm or a trail.
We could walk, I say,
we could let go
these horses and watch
the waves of their hooves
fly eternally into a sunset.
That’s what was said,
before the cavalries came,
Walk with me, will you?
You and I walk.
for Jay
If X were a stream leading clear
to Y and your lips were aspen
leaves falling, falling as a heart
balks above the precipice of winter,
there would be no divide, no
division of time between the breath
of your goodbye and the fine
crust of this distance between us,
and I would be the first to break
the ice of your longing, Persephone
returned, lugging her pomegranates
disguised as a young woman’s breasts.
I would hold you as I hold
my longing now, still, enveloped
in dewlap folds, a crease of doubt
in the thunderhead. No, Pluto, you
are better cast as seed. Here,
let the white netherland gorge
unroll from your window. Let it be
my window sill. I will lean.
I will need if you need me. Pull
your ballads from the darkness
to the light of zoneless flesh.
We were brought here to stare down
the beast. You will butcher. I will
tan the hide the color of my skin.
I will teach you secrets, what never
wastes. We will walk. We will
fish. Here, Neptune, together
we shall stick the knife into
the carapace, split the claw
and ladle in every direction.
For now it is September
And the killing has begun.
—an old Irish folk song
My man wants to kill.
He longs to shoot his guns into the air
sacs of still steaming breath. He tries
to heave himself into the sight
and narrow his anger into a new
dimension. My love wants to stun
the living daylights out of creation,
hang the dead ruff in keening
wind and break the wings
as rigor mortis sheds the feathers
easily into his fine and slender hands.
In the season of the dark spill
I see him shiver on the rill, and feel
his dogs’ tense happiness, smell
the blood spoor of his wolf and hair
matted and close as after sex. His toes
are cold as bullets in the blind. The siren
of his eyes as taut as cat gut as he
waits.
My sullen angler performs his task
with attention all his own as if in sleep.
His murmured cell of breath escapes
a life of smoke within the mist. He gives
the added slack, pulls the line in sentences,
in the Morse code of fish, a diddled dance
of prey. He settles for my cold blood
but counts the nights before his holiday
of death.
For ten centuries I want to be birdless
—Jay Griswold
He sends trophies from Sunday’s kill: a China
pheasant—feathers despicable starling coal,
backs the color of Chilean copper. They shimmer
in the distance, a beautiful expectancy of only 2.2
years so who could feel bad about the downing
of another rooster? The species about wiped out
for the hats of the thirties are plentiful
game now. They succumb to harsh winters,
feral cats, coyotes, wild dogs, farmers. The hens
preen in the spattered leaves. A speckle of blood,
nearly unnoticed, backs the wolf-down, and at
the quill’s tip, a dark tangling in the fluff
of a ringneck’s queue. They gleam iridescence,
what was more precious than gold to an extinguished
race. I walk among the ghosts of history, the
agony of the tortured condemned to their barracks
of serene mustard slopes. In California: China
berry, manzanita, wild boar imported from Europe.
My ancestors leached acorns, hollowed granite
at river beds with kindness kneading in a steady
procession. My grandmother knew only one
constellation, the Seven Sisters, and she would
ask them to help her remember her grandmother’s
story of how they descended to earth from
a fusion of difference. But it’s an unremembered
song cut off at slavery’s beck and call. Her
eleven year old hands deadened at the hard
sale of cash, unlikely, untutored, caring.
She taught me the rights of a hunter are inalienable,
spinning the head of a chicken. It is true.
We are the fallen angels returned to teach
the tenderness of hands, the tough choice
of heart. My grandmother’s heart was pure as topaz.
She knew what gives out comes back quantum.
She taught her babies patience with the eye
of a feather smudged with honey. A day’s work
could get done as the plume was passed from hand
to hand in the brilliance of sunlight, bright
as it is now as I finger the fray
and nap of this gift.
You are of the tender
heart. I know nothing of your hands but what
they write down, what graphite is bound between
horizons of blue, what nature of carbon skin
of dead birds coats the page. It is true. You can
buy the lean meat of plucked birds. You can buy
fresh hens at the market, quail the color of
chardonnay grapes. You have reservations where
you can purchase the tokens of the dead. They bear
their own speeches, these silent ones
trading the winds, their own histories and stories.
Tell me a few. Give it 2.2 years to come to life
and tell a tale of triggers and steel, of tumblers
and the slut peg of the chamber; mail me a silver
bullet from the mountains of your memory.
Your trophies bear witness to gunfire in the
numbed trees of eternity’s forests, of winter
in the eastern plains—while I fashion
these feathers into the fragile art of my tribe.
I will wear them when the black of white
never dies, this gift of intent woven in a silent
bead. I’ll let it blow through my matted
locks, the weight of a kiss. What you kill
I will pray for, what you let live
we will praise, ignore it, and eat.
for Jay
If it’s kindness you crave, here’s the soft
ash of the hardest wood I’ve scavenged. Drifts
complete the reams of smoke billowing off
your knotted eyes. My hardest year was autumn
before the ban on burning, when what teared
my eyelids was the leaving of what sticks fast
in rip. I skim a surface grace, a shoal now hard
as ash, more brilliant in the shine than aspens
on the dark rills of your western slope. Before
a winter wash I come upon this shore where grebe
and egret print the beach in black and white,
and the stucco of my days unglues the tile
remembrance in this wet and ice and stolid fire.
I know the gentlest down, incorporated on a ridge
where something hungers, green to the breastbone
red patch at the throat like what mistakes you,
singing, for a flower. For this the shallows
give up ghosts, and what’s glued up tight
as shell unfolds hunger in the black grit
of a tide embarked on patterns in a
shell-shocked sky. The iridescence
of my age glistens me in on this weathered
wood I cling to, and opens when the crash
collapses against a man as soft as sand,
stone, engraved, with hearts and names
that wear in wind. My open edge
expires on a season’s dusk, in red
lips of thunderhead upon a blue shell,
pearled, found, and full of wonder,
of you, of smoke, this kind of ash.
Towards midnight our bodies turn into themselves.
The cupboards open, hands help themselves to things,
small bowls of beluga, strawberries, sweet kernels
of luck, nippled and sunned under nightlight. Thick
hunger catches them, turns them to breath. They
breathe in scents of kitchen spices, auras of basil,
released ticklings of nutmeg, coriander, unexpected
openings of orange, dusks, dawn’s harvested moons.
Intact, and beaming over fields of musk poppies,
amaranth and maize, they’re pulling in the nets,
the fresh haul, the first scent.
for Jay
My love sleeps best
beside a brook or when
the ventricles of a heart
slush against his chest.
A steady rain now beats
upon our tent as he goes down
into that sound and comes up
dripping and fighting for breath.
He dreams fish the size
of bulldogs and he dives
into himself at night, deceived
by the shallow ridge of flesh
where there is no end, no bottom
land to plant his bony seed,
only the lull of the quest, just
the shadow he sees pulling him
under into that greener state
where he nests the speckled trout
in the gold cups of his glimmering
palms. He’s happiest in the pull
coaxing his line up from
the depths, penetrating
the interior, that inner green
circular hiding where the dead
chortle and gurgle like
carp in the alluvial debris
scribbling messages in the mud
for those still breathing in
the invisible air. He is this movable
element, visible upon the currents
of the dark, an intelligent wind,
a stalk of wild grass; he goes now
to the bend in the river fork.
Someday he will find his golden
shoes of fish fins, take the rippling
gill between his fingers, spread its
lips, and discover what is written
there in the land between bloodlines,
riverbeds; and something will
speak an unhearable tone, a trophy
of throat and slime. And his lines,
the taut parachute silks of his fall,
will weave themselves into a bridge,
a crossing into life,
the greatest death of all.
Half my life I have slept beside a man
cradling his slender bowl of body between
my wheat. I have dreamed into his pillow
and he, sunk deep into that cylinder of my other
heart, would beat with the traded ritual of mutual
moons. I have waxed and waned within the single
shadow of his cleft and our bloodburn mingled
and ashed into the calligraphy of a landscape
left or vanished into giving. There are acres
of seeds we have swept into a shaft as the picket
fence of daybreak/dusk, the sincere sets of white and
black, marked breadth. We have lived our dreaming
awkwardly at best. We did not pause to reflect
but danced fast and in staccato as characters
splayed upon the silver of some aging screen.
There would be no turning back as the ratchet
of our distinct and distant hearts buries itself
against the pawl: one turned the wheel, one slams
the door, an engine guns itself of summer. Gone.
Half a life lived listening, bearing witness to the lapping
faucet drip within the furred nectar of his chest.
Half a heart, womb-sunk, misted, steaming opened
entrails in his midst. Now a cool sun sets frost
upon the silken strands of corn fifteen years picked.
Now he stands before the blonding stalks, stunned
in the focus of an unprojected slide. I can hold him
to the flailing sun and see him gold again and flush
with the grimace of pleasure, a stirring satisfaction
in the shovel spooning earth to feed. It would appear
as such, again ignited with that inner, first
married light, that other knowing, growing, love.
Half my life, in time, a third. I wait beside
a book, before my cooling coffee and the coal
slow icing of my hair, and the place would be
blank where once he stood and held, where he sleeps
alone now, inundating as a dream, recurred,
reorganized into a picture, that certain look decaying
into sunset rusts. A quarter life—it will come to pass.
A fifth or sixth of it if I dare not stop the steeping
breath rasp. Until finally, stilled and spinning
down to wire, it will surface, old nightmare
ascension, the emptiness of flowered desire;
my half-life, final delivery, a shucked single
kernel of care, my you and me transparency.
Here in an immense forest of winter
I think of you as a bird barely missed
but noticed in the armory of distance.
Dazzling as Da Nang your first virgin fall,
the sarongs of autumn popularize the countryside,
huge sides of color lengthen the Flatirons,
burglaries of purples and wine clot the foliage
of my first life without you, here, where the picture
puzzles fuse into the refuse of my calendar
drift. Pumpkins, aspen, sumac hold their brush
to the painted mirrors of the virtuous ponds.
Like women they enfold upon themselves as they
age. They become fertile as grass, then asphyxiating
as the cold clear eye of the season’s last
lake—amphibious and killing. It lifts my vision,
solitaire, chosen and found. I’m caught again
by a stolen joy, by love, by absence.
Where you are the willow never yellows in December.
Here the owl’s final visage soars and clamps
about the rippling muscles of rodents. Toads
in the marsh smell swell and belly curl their
mimicry of distant cows lowing their love
cries from the herd. You are no love of mine,
yet you are a persistent barking from the kennels.
Hear them running on the wire? They’re testing
the measure: I’m one thousand miles without you.
Here, where winter pleases me, where the sunsets
of my youth happen and a light as fine
as my puzzled march through time seizes
me leaping the turnstile—I know
I will go on in this life, without you.
Man owns four things that are useless at sea:
rudder, anchor, oars, and the fear of going down.
Pity the man who sees the water running and says,
‘The thirst I have cannot be quenched by drinking.’
—Antonio Machado
Boats on the bay cull the willing
daggers of fins and fishtails, sleek
in the wake of the breaking tide.
They swell with light as sails
slap and the lockets and chains chime
Chinese music in the pentameter
winds. We are going down
where the sun first cut apart
a horizon of olives, ice and bruises
now opening with the shark’s teeth
of spring. A light as fine as
the line of bone on the ridge
of your nose appears, a beacon,
a quest, resting on miles of shallows,
and the winding of signal begins
its descent. Cover me, will you?
The set sun gives out and comes
away all painted mercury. Plunged
in the coal of insomnia’s shadow, I emerge
like the face in the vase no one sees.
The smell of your sleep going down
or the mark of your skin when
my pressing has left lies
persistent as the promise
of rain. And what if age should
knead my face to a handsome
dime? Or the blusters of winter
whittle my black linen nest
at the nape of my neck longing
for your errant kiss?
I sleep alone and count the night’s
lean ribs. Thirty six twigs at the foot
of this shaking tree, forty two beatings
of my sudden heart fall before your
sword of daffodil oozes yellow light
from the line of my emptiness, dawning,
and the stalled hulk at the road
sounds a warning, an owl’s breath
calling out fog or the terror
of blindness, passing.
And my heart, what of these boats
who have nowhere to go but the sea?
And the sea which has nothing
to share but the lives we pull
from her gullet? Hide them again
from my sight, these wooden buoys,
these stick sailors going down
for the final count.
I wear you like a love
that is really a sweater. I love
you like the filling of slough.
I don’t know where to take off
above the barren ghost trees
at the heart of your river or
if my wings would hold
more wind than a sleeve.
Could you tell the pilings
have shattered? And the decay,
does it come to you brittle at
hand as a sound that falls silent?
We are going down. There, where
whales break water and the bears
who have returned to an element
they once despised ride hunger
beneath the bows now loaded
for arrival. They are leaning
on their nets. They are taking
what comes to them: the catch
of their lives is the sea.