Poetry 365

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
rom your touch, left empty the jars

you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken rom the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

The woods are green, the path winds
through blackberries.

You dream of his hands on your thigh,
you dream of his hands on your neck.

You follow
a narrow path, can’t smell
him up ahead, the bear, nose
deep in arbutus.

But always his breath
on your throat, his hand, his mouth.

You will eat the blackberried, listen
for the tremble of clear water
on mica-flecked rock.

You dream a cataract, an edge. But the bear prowls and eats
on the far side of the river.

“They found the woman’s body
under the porch of an abandoned
house,” Mary told me on the
second floor of the bookstore.

“She had been preparing a meal
and discovered she lacked one
of the ingredients. She was one
her way to the store when she
disappeared.”

Mary began to sob as she read me
the newspaper story.

“I just wish I knew what she
had been preparing. I want
to finish it for her so much.”

The winter of Yolo County Fair’s 1989
First Prize for Apple Pies showed me
how to keep my pie flute golden while
it baked by simply making an aluminum
foil collar for the pie pan like you might
for the TIn Man’s whip-lashed neck.
While she showed me how to weave
a lattice tio for y cherry pie she
told me her apple pie won because of
the Gravensteins, those large, yellow
red-striped apples she drove 40 miles
to Sebastopol to buy that are only ripe
two weeks in July, the same time her
husband’s parents came from Pittsburgh
to discuss her bad marriage getting worse.
While her husband and his parents
drank Wild Turkey in the living room
in her kitchen she rolled our the pie crust
dough made of lard and butter for a nutty
flavor and then she arranged inside the pie
the Gravenstein slices, apple halfmoons
halfmoons, a perfect swirl ad infinitum so that
when the apples baked down in their juice
the top crust would not go hard and fill
with stale air and many bourbon highballs
later, after her husband’d told His Side of
the story, his parents came to the decision
that their son’s obligations to his baby and wife
should not interfere with his personal happiness
or life and the last place her husband took her
before he went away was to the Yolo County
Fair and when she saw her First Place blue
ribbon, she covered her face to hide her tears,
asked him to leave her alone with her pie for
awhile so he carried their baby away to see
the clown. The main reason, though, she told me
she won was simply because those Gravenstein
apples are the perfect sweet-tartness for pies.
You don’t have to add lemon or cinnamon
or sugar or any other spice. That way
all you taste are the apples.

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter - bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

There, spring lambs jam the sheepfold. In air
Stilled, silvered as water in a glass
Nothing is big or far.
The small shrew chitters from its wilderness
Of grassheads and is heard.
Each thumb-size bird
Flits nimble-winged in thickets, and of good colour.

Cloudrack and owl-hollowed willows slanting over
The bland Granta double their white and green
World under the sheer water
And ride that flux at anchor, upside down.
The punter sinks his pole.
In Byron’s pool
Cat-tails part where the tame cygnets steer.

Its in a country on a nursery plate.
Spotted cows revolve their jaws and crop
Red clover or gnaw beetroot
Bellied on a nimbus of sun-glazed buttercup.
Hedging meadows of benign
Arcadian green
The blood-berried hawthorn hides its spines with white.

Droll, vegetarian, the water rat
Saws down a reed and swims from his limber grove,
While the students stroll or sit,

Hands laced, in a moony indolence of love—
Black-gowned, but unaware
How in such mile air
The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out.

1.
I won’t say much for the sea,
except that it was, almost,
the color of sour milk.
The sin on that clear
unmenacing sky was low,
angled off the gray fissure of the cliffs,
hills dark green with manzanita.

Low tide: slimed rocks
mottled brown and thick with kelp
merged with the gray stone
of the breakwater, sliding off
to antediluvian depths.
The old story: here filthy life begins.

2.
Fish-
ing, as Melville said,
“to purge the spleen,”
to put to task my clumsy hands
my hands that bruise by
not touching
pluck the legs from a prawn,
peel the shell off,
and curl the body twice about a hook.

3.
The cabezone is not highly regarded
by fishermen, except Italians
who have the grace
to fry the pale, almost bluish flesh
in olive oil with a sprig
of fresh rosemary.

The cabezone, an ugly atavistic fish,
as old as the coastal shelf
it feeds upon
has fins of duck’s-web thickness,
resembles a prehistoric toad,
and is delicately sweet.

Catching one, the fierce quiver of surprise
and the line’s tension
are a recognition.

4.
But it’s strange to kill
for the sudden feel of life.
The danger is
to moralize
that strangeness.
Holding the spiny monster in my hands
his bulging purple eyes
were eyes and the sun was
almost tangent to the planet
on our uneasy coast.
Creature and creatures,
we stared down centuries.

he is salt
to her,
a strange sweet
a peculiar money
precious and valuable
only to her tribe,
and she is salt
to him,
something that rubs raw
that leaves a tearful taste
but what he will
strain the ocean for and
what he needs.

I couldn’t have waited. By the time you return
it would have rotted on the vine.
So I cut the first tomato into eighths,
salted the pieces in the dusk
and found the flesh not mealy (like last year’s)
or bitter,
even when I swallowed the green crown of the stem
that made my throat feel dusty and warm.

Pah. I could have gagged on the sweetness.
The miser accused by her red sums.
Better had I eaten the dirt itself
on this the first night in my life
when I have been too busy for my loneliness—
at last, it comes.

It seemed like suffering, or a lesser form of anguish,
though I’m not sure where it comes from,
watching the possum choose an eggshell
from the garbage can, there in the night orchard
of this minor city, the streetlight’s hum so peculiar,
clumsy nest bright above the alley. I knew right then
the earth loved it more than me. A city possum,
no “o,” no rat, two babies asleep on its back
and a hunger shot through with fear, with purpose.
In the awkwardness of its living, I feared the city
would abandon me. The possum, too.
I had grown accustomed to its visits.
It lived under the abandoned house down the street,
where the prostitute’s body was found last winter,
where the walls grow gentle with rot, a gentleness
gone wrong, harm and permanence, whole and flaw.
Everything is sacrificed to something. The fill the spaces,
I guess. Ash in the trees, then the two stars come out,
the only ones the city allows, little-blue-star-pale-in-its-cups,
little-junkie-trackmarks-thanks-for-nothing.
The city has two mouths, the river and the sky,
both brown in the darkness, and open.
More than likely, there is a place inside the body
that is not afraid, but I haven’t found it yet,
there is not returning. The hills bear down.
The possum is not jealous, mores slow
through the walls. We can lie down in our emptiness.