Ancram

I.

1.

Orion slipping down past the treeline

spit on the windshield down the

white tail a deer flashed me

semaphore of what light so far away

so perhaps the hunter has already

fallen, or risen again, though now’s

pattern remains a rigid pressure his back

gripped to the dome of the sky

a tensor at the back of words.

How is it all things fall to some pull

absolutely never known and it is angelic

privilege to stand there weeping

you learn to taught suddenly

crisis in the middle of the woods

you seem to have forgotten we’re all trees

it’s all wood even that stuff you call air

through which the branches unload their keys.

2.

Snow on my lilacs

in far off Ancram

namrac 

marnac 

carnam

caramn

when it’s done a beat of silence

snow thud on your lonely shoulder

the birds keep low on your periphery

beginning of a medieval hunger

a slip of cold knifes under the doctor’s door

door to amputate your true love’s name. I mean to remember.

3.

Lower down the bucket into

stars there and your own face

has nothing to do with reflection

it’s all the first person a sorry lot

we ever had this one way to see

the old men would expose themselves where

the sun don’t eye can’t I’ve

got to see you that’s the only me.

The moon on your skin

no mirror but hand’s well

I lower in from the other side

my bucket up from the earth

everything you do is lowering

towards you– I don’t bother to 

scoop up the stars, unless you do.

II.

1.

In frozen nowhere out of all meaningful continuity (we thought)

the yellow fat candles helped warm the little shack if there is any

failure to writing it is I cannot express

the boredom of life there, only how

every thousand years: maybe it was

over here I lost that thing  .  nagged at us

unquiet of its happening

and happening, this lone orbital birthpang–

just the one forever

holds you

    in its severance. (ouch!)

The thing maybe you left it upstairs

a shadow behind the stars  .  haunting your haunting of it

The Great Bear all year

watching her hunters come and go.

2.

He levels at the break, the sword to close wounds

but there is no healing, a wound deeper than

closure.

Her sturdy legs as she

in slippers and coat

looks up

the actual

bear scat next to her on the lawn, eyes closed

she hears your motion, sounds

skin rustling  .  fur side in

love kills you

tense shoulders say

I can hear you wear me like I you

      and yet survive, a pain enough to keep 

      warm in the oldest wound there is.

3. (after Olson’s Orion:

How is it there was a cold room & Orion tensing up

from the tree-line, that this

heart different   than moonrise

lunged up

  through the branches

stirs in

us, we stir

where she’s always been  .  who would see to find.

III.

1.

It’s as hard to read

as it was to write, methinks

how long are your teeth grown?

arms of my mouth,

how hungry you are, take

only excuse me for being there.

“I have no trouble finding meaning in J.C.P (paraphrase)

everything, it’s a personal thing

I’ve problems with.”

2.

That I could

get between the parts of the fire:

you’ve come to hear all about it;

a tooth long enough to break

between the shadows and the light

and put its own ravenousness there

stirs the precedent–

and you come in

complaining about something, no I don’t

want to watch a movie when I’m writing

by candlelight of beasts and the vague

intimation of some saber toothed intelligence

presses against my shoulders

the vegetable 

powers give one hard tap against the window

where was a black lushness lapping

at my mind nearly howled after you

go ween your heart on phantoms!

3.

But who am I,

when such dramatis personae

as mind or movies

meet in you still, I say: in her own plot

the creature in my body knows what speech is natural.