cheeks sag on
jaws now jowly,
hold their own classed by weight
as gold, we know, is. Atomic
Number 79. Pronounce aloud
its symbol, Au. Awww.
On another table, fill with awe
your bowl, the late fruit a little
soft on the surface. A windfall.
MAY CONTAIN A GEODE
$5.99 per rock in this bin
The odds are 80/20. Not every one’s a winner. Each the size
of your father’s closed hand. History opens like a cave,
a mind, more rock. Your geo-tool is close. You’ve chosen
not to open the rock. You already know past the crust
what you’ve seen in field guides, memoirs, museums. It’s there
you believe, caught you believe in every closed hand, wave
or particle, the light just for you undisclosed.
INEXPRESSIBLY
Of course that’s how silence reveals itself.
I want to hear it but there’s the beep
of a forklift in reverse; there’s the ringing
in my ears. A bug crashes against my
daughter’s high frequency curls.
Refrigerated food breaks down despite the cold
and there’s the deafening deconstruction
of this make-do bookmark, this postcard written
by my mother days before she died. In church
the interpreter wears solid colors, a curtain
behind her hands’ deft evocation of God
whose beguiling privacy unsettles
the heart, the “lub” addressing its twin,
the other side of the river
where women wash work clothes, the shift-change
siren of sweat released into larger bodies
of water, where a sister’s hand will slap
the surface, introduce rhythm by skipping a beat.
THRESHOLD
Let a fast place, with one door, enclose thee.
—Rule of St. Columba
Atop a wave, a narrow door floats—blue
against the lake’s own blue. It seems a test: what
pitches toward shore meaning more than nothing,
or less? The ex-nun’s here on fall retreat,
to learn among her chaste and faithful friends
what God and she might ask for at this point.
The blue door bobs to flash a bit of brass,
a glinting hinge or knob or fish. A swell
rehangs the door. The lock’s still on.
The lower panel’s blown, perhaps kicked in,
or thrown by weather up against a rock,
flipped over time itself the open frame.
TIMING
Late, the swimmer flips from the board into the diving well
as the Country Kissin’ radio blares: This is the moment
you’ve been waiting for. Not knowing she was supposed
to wait, she kicks, sounds, clicks like a beluga.
Never at home on the surface, she wriggles,
rubs her cap-knobbed head on the drain grate
12 feet down. Goggle-eyed, she stretches
the length of her white body extending back
epochs when the breathless elders’ stubby legs stumped up
onto their arctic beach; when lolling in air, blowholes
sandy, the whole pod flipped and sang till—oh!—the life
guard blows the whistle. Out of time. She has to return
to the radio, leaping across stations, picking up sound waves,
grace notes, off; a fluke then, the unexpected depths of silence,
another moment she hadn’t known she was waiting for.
LANDSCAPE OF THE MIND
Wit-struck, the mind takes a stride off the side of its boat,
the Tempus Fugit. Don’t look down, says the divemaster.
Watch the horizon. Eight hours into this twelve-hour drive,
It’s all horizon, geological forms that undulate, thrust,
and flatten as they did when this was a nameless stretch
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