Notices by Moira (moira@c.im), page 5

#Poem a day for about eighty days, #thread. These are from my #poetry books from awhile back. >>

s h e s e l l s b o o k s

from nine to six. They are
good books, well bound, well written, colorful
to the eye, and children love them, but

the town is poor. She sits waiting for hours
for one grandmother to come in and buy one book
for a favored grandchild. The owner of the store

is her friend; she cannot leave her just now, but the store,
she knows, is not her place in life. All
she has ever wanted is to farm: at evening,

when the dinner things are cleared, and the hot sun
drops behind the cottonwood, she farms.
Food for the ducks, and soapy water for broccoli;

old lettuce gone to seed comes out; the hay
is rearranged, and fall peas go in. She stops
only to hear the geese pass overhead,

then bends among her plants until the stars,
first one and then another, leap and are caught
in the hair of approaching night, so like her hair.

She comes in, soiled to the elbows, leans against
the table, extending an open palm. "Look,"
she says, her eyes afire. "Marigold seeds!"

Terrified of them she was through long
Experience being swarmed with stings,
Running, her hands over eyes and mouth,
Running to the house or jumping in the lake,
In whatever way possible to stop the punishers.
For years, she made herself their nemesis
In revenge, setting nests afire! Or in
Evenings inverting a glass bowl upside
Down over their holes to watch them starve.

Only in recent years, as her ways have slowed,
Finding in books their part in the scheme of

Things as helpers in garden and orchard,
Has she learned to move more gently
Even as they light on her cidery hands,
Milking fingers for juice, never stinging.

t o o k a p i e c e o f br e a d

and wandered:
down to pools, to streams; examined the undersides
of clouds, swimming on their slow grey backs

in still water. These and the spring-bare trees,
and winter teat of thawed leaf mould,
and new birds on old nests, breast-brave,

egg-rich and cocksure, and the
first fawn mothered in close twilit last-year's bracken
say the old songs in the blood (again), the stories

and the root-songs sung to wordless waters
passing these, through and among, to the sea:
we all do this, take breath and be not afraid.

i t w a s no t e n o u g h
to see, in colorful maga-
zines and costly books, the country homes
and garden walks that men and women build

who have only ready money and a few ideas.
I too wished to sit sometimes drinking

tea by firelight, admiring a work of beams

and plaster, hanging fruit and herbs, good books
liberally strewn, and a sleeping cat (or two).

To which end we labored without cash, days

and even nights with saw and chisel, scraper,
hammer, knife, and plane, using such wood,
such paint, and even such nails as came to hand.

Our friends and friends of our friends remembered us
when their surplus had to go, and I went forth

with battered truck and pry bar, gathering decks

and fences long past keeping for those without
the patience to rebuild. We have learned
to watch for stones of certain weight and shape;

to lay a course of ninety-year-old brick,

to scrap a window sash to get the glass

for cutting, and to fill the oddly angled wall

with joint compound. When supplies ran short,

we turned to the acre of ground, and forked and spaded,
laying out long beds, piling them with straw,

covering the paths with leaves of oak, maple
and ash. Seeds bought last year at sale,

ten cents a pack, were sown with trembling hand.

They all did well: the new shelves are fat

with harvest. This all has come late to me. Now

we do sit in chimney-corner like English cottage-

keepers, tea in hand and cat in lap,
ready to peruse an act of Winter's Tale
or book of Faerie Queene, only to find

our eyes no longer focus on ten-point type

for an act or a book at a time. I call the youngest
child; she reads to me from Sendak, or

our mutual favorite, Potter, haltingly,
but with a will, improving as she goes.
As she sounds out words, I watch a knot

of fir collapse into the coals, and fall

to long, light sleep, with not unpleasant dreams.

@Moira

b r i g h t l y c o l o r e d p a ck e t s

She spreads the brightly colored packets
round the table, and speaks of hope.

I lift a flat paper envelope, with its picture

of a perfect beet, and shake it like a rattle,
"Hey-ya!" She sits across, nodding and smiling,
and hefts a half pound of peas, offering its promise,

like incense, to the gods of our little life.

We've drawn out and made domains of the gardens.
The east one, very small, is on the highest ground,

and drains superbly. It is all hers.
She loves
to dig in early spring and late in the fall,
coaxing brassicas, beets, chard, sugar snap peas

to grow in long succession through the year.

The south garden, sheltered from hot winds,

but prone to wetness, is mine. I've raised my beds

high as I can pile them, tossed away stones,
and spread out golden chunks of bales of straw,
redolent of the ducks who've nested on them.

Here tomatoes and sunflowers, limas and vine crops
broil in the sun by day and rest by night.

The north garden, on the only at, gets sun,

but stays colder longer. It is the largest,

so we share it, and here we fight. I look for
long rows of corn and beans, and always more

tomatoes. She tries new things I can't pronounce,
and seeks the permanence of berries: raspberry
is her favorite thing under the sun, I dunno.

We fight over water, when to use, how much.
We fight over planting depth, shade, what

to harvest when, and how long to blanch beans.

We fight all the way to the bedroom; its north window
opens onto the windswept beds. In plain view

the rustling rainbow windsock

presides there over the rustling corn, and our
fighting turns to sudden loving. We hold
each other's life, like seed, in careworn hands,

and sleep, like seed, until the sun's return.

just-enough

The ubiquity of Queen-Anne's lace annoys her;
it's not the plant's not doing its job; her soil
is loosened and enriched; in time of human

hunger, roots, young leaves and even umbels
would have table use. But there is so much
of it; her chickens dislike the stuff, especially

in its second year, allowing their yard and moat
to fill with cohort-ranks of pungent spikes.
Her friend keeps bees and tells her they will feed

on this exclusively, bittering his honey,
bringing down its price. So he watches;
when the umbels bloom he moves his hives.

She'd like to query those who thought of Anne;
these tiny droplets in a sea of lace
Need not have been a queen's: she tells herself

her own blood has fed this thorned and rock-
embedded acre thoroughly. So, queen
of weeds, she! Or queen of just-enough.

It is quiet out there now. She
Takes her hat, stick and forage bag,

Into which she slips her pruners, then
Slides her feet into green clogs, feeling

Quite exurban-agrarian, ready to look
Under brush piles and into cottonwoods --
In every place that might consent to harbor
Even a hint of birds' music. They have flown,
The silence tells her; those that haven't died.

Out along the roadside she waves to cars,
Understanding her neighbors have to drive,
Then pockets up her apples, rose hips, leaves

That now are turning away from green: cat's ear,
High mallow, chicory, plantain, sow thistle, her
Ears pricked for passing flights of geese.
Really, thinks she to herself, there ought
Even now to be more birds. There are

Not so many feral cats round here as that.
Or could it be the sprays? She supposes
War has been declared. A war on song.

w h e r e t h e w i d e w a t e r s

roll, the fishermen
roll their nets and go to the sun, to the broad
boats, where light, dancing, leafs boats

bright in gold, and gulls cross, crying,
the scene, and cross again, complaining, where
the fish, deep-dwelling, wait. And waves

rise foaming, and the long swells' song
breaks like bread, or prayer, on the blood's tide;
all here oar-raised, green-psalmed, time-stopped

and the soul-strewn hulls gull-followed and gold-leaped,
arriving, see God's sung gifts named and given
into hands, working the nets, pull! And make

all things new, as gulls ask alms, and fish,
lashing, gape their salt breath out, and lie
still, communing. The wine-dark seas pass under,

and the heavy boats swing round, and the men roll
their nets and go, numb-handed, backs bent, harbor bound,
gift-laden, home: where light, fast fading, locks

land in gold, and gulls cross, crying, the scene,
and cross again, crying.



(This one is when you have been watching a Sicilian documentary and you think you're Gerard Manley Hopkins. Date about 1994 I think.)

She likes red in September: viney maple, poison oak;
Her plum trees dress well in it. Where she lives, all
Else goes brown. Except the dog roses

Leavening hedges with their hips. She stuffs these
In her pockets on every walk, then does research,
Kindling a ken of potions, liqueurs, oils.
Easily, drying comes to mind; to prep for that
She'll split each pod and rake away hard seeds,

Removing them to her freezer to stratify;
Else they might not emerge come spring. She
Digs out also myriad tiny hairs,

Irritants if retained. It's a slow business,
Not for the impatient, which well describes her;

She know of this but means to tough it out.
Each hip's a silent mantra: she'll
Push, pull, twist, scrape, sort, and set aside
The emptied husks for drying or infusing.
Eventually the pile is done, just as light fades.
My eyes, she tells herself, are getting on,
But this I can still do. I'll make rose tea;
Evening will fill my cup of mindfulness.
Really, there's nothing more than what there is.

I've built a fiberglass-roofed hut
where there's nothing to take away.
After eating, I conk out.
When the hut was completed,
it was a children's playhouse.
It had long been abandoned —
covered by blackberries.
Sometimes I live at the hut,
drying out weeds.
No need to go shopping.
No movies, no popcorn.
Though the hut is nine feet square,
Nowhere is there a place not here.
Within, an old nun
gawks out the window.
With her gnarled hands
she trusts being/time.
The neighbors can't help wondering —
what's going on in there?
For now, the old crone is present,
losing track of Meaning.
Knowing she does not know up or down,
she looks straight ahead.
A wide window below green cottonwoods--
five star hotels can't compare with it.
Just nestling in her zero-g chair
all things are settled.
Thus, this mountain nun
doesn't squint at circumstances.
Living here she no longer
hankers for escape.
Who would proudly arrange place settings,
trying to lure guests?
Doing as a Buddha does
cannot not be what a Buddha is.
Instantaneousness can't be
looked toward or away from.
Meet the lineages and spiritual friends,
absorb their guidance.
Salvage fence boards to build a hut
and don't give up.
When your begging bowl breaks,
which it will, relax into your day.
Open your face
and walk, de-stressed.
Thousands of teachers
babble, but the message isn't garbled.
If you want to benefit
from dwelling in your hut,
Don't expect to be polishing that begging bowl
forever.

B a b y g i r l,

you almost kiss
the bed with your small lips,
sipping night in these

surprising infant gasps
that hold a little life in you
for seconds at a time.

You sleep well, unless
the hour is cool, and then
you hunt for arms, and nose

to cold nose, tell silently
all you know into our beating hearts
until dawn comes.

I listen in fear,
for I suspect
that when I learn

what you are saying here between
your parents in the dark,
I will weep and mourn

our having brought you here
without your wings.


1986

The first few fires of autumn laid by me
Here in this stove aren't much; I acknowledge
Even the hummingbird's still caressing blooms, so I

Feeling only a brief dawn chill, build accordingly.
In thickets of summer I range about,
Ratcheting my long-handled pruner among stout sticks,
Stealing from oak and ash, letting in a little light.
These I pile in the long room where that stove squats.

Fueling it with paper and a stack of twigs, admiring
Even the least hints of gold and vermillion therein,
We sit back, warm enough for one dark cup of tea.

For awhile; then day overtakes us, ready
In sweater and chore coat to see to hens;
Really, we shuck those soon enough, sweat on our
Ears and eyelids, summer reborn briefly in our knees.
So; until the ground grows cold that will hold our graves.

Nothing can stand still. If it were to do so
absolutely, I could not see it; if I
were to cease scanning, I could not then see;

therefore change is all. These were my thoughts
as I walked a dog, watching my year run down.
Apples were falling; I chose one to eat.

Hips blushed fiercely; I stuffed my pockets full.
Ash and maple and willow turned and turned.
Restless mice and voles risked their all

for seeds. We reached the river; a trout rose, an
osprey plunged; they met and flew as one.
An osprey will turn a trout head first in flight,

you know -- for improved aerodynamics. I
disbelieve it; surely the bird is kind.
It turns the trout to show it what's to come.

Entropy. Cartilage has vanished from between
long leg bones, and I have become
dependent; may I have some help please
with these pants, these socks, this clacking

knee brace, this burgeoning heaped skunkish
laundry full of everything that leapt from
the spoon onto my clothing, this tea welling up
somehow from my cup's brim to spread across

the tidal flat of my shaking hand and fill
the sea cave of my sleeve? Huh, and if
last night's frost has subsided enough,
perhaps even with such a day's beginning

I can hope to step into these two unmatched
clogs and shamble on, past undone chores,
gathering up my left-hand stick and my right-
hand stick, and walk the dog. There is no dog;

what he left behind lies there: that small
basaltic stupa, littered with seasonal
offerings -- lately, deadnettles that wilt
in such hurry. But I call to him anyway;

he loved these walks so, that I feel obliged,
knee brace and all, to retrace our kinhin route
each weekday Armageddon fails to materialize.
Oaks throw shade; in summer I seek them,

in winter avoid. This is a ritual. As when I sit,
as when I chant, I know, even when tongue tied,
or falling asleep, or feeling my knee brace loosen and drop
just as I stagger into the ditch to avoid a truck,

that ritual is a kind of living being, made up of
my life and also the lives of all who participate
in some way, such as: "are you going to 'walk
the dog?'" Yes. "Have you got some water and

your phone?" Yes. "Okay; if you're not back
in an hour, I'll come looking for you." I bobbled
the Heart Sutra this morning, as I always do,
but this little exchange of hearts is itself

the Middle Way. Along the road, taking tiny
steps, tinier every year, I stop
to watch a robin angling for its worm.
The little dog that isn't there

wags his universe of tail.

The things to do: bring an egg from her
Hens, a found apple, beet leaf, cat's-ear foliage,
Ensuring freshness even in October.

The skillet she heats, oil frisking.
Here's egg: break yolk, turn once or twice;
Insert chopped fruit and greens, with salt and pepper;
Now turn again, wait, remove from heat,
Give all to a spelt wrap. As she sits to her meal, a
Sun rises, invests her eastern window, spills in

To caress and warm six thick maple boards
Of her grandmother's table. Whatever remains to be

Done's already forgotten: the meal an emblem
Of all her morning cared to be.

Chiyono married very young. She gave one child,
then lost her husband, and, as was the custom then,
she was dispatched to an abbey to begin anew.

Thus vanished, she married wood and water,
chopping, carrying, blowing through a tube
to brighten fire beneath the rice and tea,

hoeing radishes, sun and moon her companions.
Work done, which seemed seldom, she would sit
as the black-robed women sat, hands folded,

and this attracted kindness from an elderess.
"What are you doing?" "Gathering Mind," said she,
"as I have seen them do." "There is no Mind,"

the Old One chided, "that is to say, none
to be grasped, either by sitting or not sitting.
What's to be done is the same sitting or carrying

wood to the cooks. Do you wish instruction?"
She did, and studied with this nun for years,
while not neglecting any menial task.

One night, while making use of moonlight
to bring to the cistern her ancient bucket, full,
she watched in horror as it sprang apart and spilled --

then stood amazed, free. "This," she later
said, "in spite of my ceaseless effort, was
how it was. No bucket. No water. No moon." In

after years she shook the world of Zen,
founding five abbeys, taking in
homeless women, teaching strength and grace.

She'll choose two cans of color, exploring them
for the soft caramel of good set, putting aside
flakes of air-dried dross with her inking knife.

One, a can of orange stuff, she's been given
for imprinting brew-pub six-packs; the knife
scoops up a dollop and ferries it to the disk.

The other is your standard black; the smallest
bubble of this she'll add to the orange, and stir,
in hope of a decent brown. A heave of the flywheel

begins the inking-up: the disk turns a bit
with each revolution of the wheel, and the ink,
smashed paper-thin by rollers, spreads evenly

across its face, painting it, painting the rollers,
as her foot pumps the treadle, and her face
admires, as it always does, the view from here,

of garden dressed in straw, of mountain air
training the rainbow windsock northward,
of Jasper Mountain becoming a hill of gold

in the sunset. Gathering the furniture, reglets,
quoins, quoin key, and the new magnesium cut,
she locks the chase, fastens it to the bed, shoves

the wheel, this time with impression lever on,
and lets the cut kiss the clean tympan paper
with an image. Around this image she sets quads,

tympan bales, and bits of makeready, and prepares
the stacked sheets to be fed from the feed board
into the maw of the Chandler & Price, known

to pressmen for a hundred fifty years as the
Hand Snapper. She reaches for the radio's knob.
Rachmaninoff? Damn. Oh, well, turn

wheel, pump treadle, lean forward, lean back,
click-click, click CLACK, work-and-turn,
deliver the finished sheets to the delivery board,

admire mountain, lean forward, lean back.
Rachmaninoff gives way to Mozart's glorious
forty-first symphony, and Jasper Mountain

gives way to night, and in the black window
a woman in her fifties, leaning forward,
leaning back, critically appraising the music,

the printing, and herself, click-click, click CLACK,
sour bones and a game leg but a job well done
and the Mozart's Mozart. Four hundred sheets

later, and well into Bruch, the wheel stops,
the chase is unclamped, the disk and rollers
washed up, and rags canned. The reflected

window-crone lifts a sheet of work
to the light, examines impression and matter.
Reaching to silence Bruch, she sees the stilling

silhouette of the rainbow windsock:
it waits for dawn; for fair and lofting wind.

c o u n t r y fo l k i n a u g u s t

Whenever we worked at the creekside shed
there was always something else to do
such times as we were stumped, or nails ran short,

or the sun reached round the fir and baked us down
from raftering, roofing, or the like. We leaned,
gossip-like, against the fresh framing

of the walls, sipping solar tea,
watching the edge of a cloud's long skirt
chase the neighbors' horses leisurely

across their pasture, down the camas swale
and up the other side, against the black contrast
of maple-shrouded hills. The horses liked

to amble to our corner, stand and watch.
We couldn't cure them of the shies,
though we might try with handfuls

of our green grass, or a few choice coaxing words.
They'd check us out: first one black blink from behind
the forehead blaze, and then another,

cocking their long heads round to see
our self-assured, predatory faces, eyes front,
gazing on them, horse-flesh accountants

by their reckoning. Their flanks
would shiver, and their forefeet stamp,
scoring the earth in a language built of weight.

Some movement would always spook them off:
a silvery chisel hefted, or water bottle sloshed,
spattering sun. They'd hammer up the swale;

lovingly we'd watch them go, coveting
our neighbors' lands and all that lived thereon,
as country folk in August always do.

learning to walk

It's not that she hasn't been doing this all along:
She'd walked to school as yellow lozenges, oozing screams,
fumed past her along hot asphalt. She'd splashed the creek,

anxious for a path, then built it herself, kenning
to use her father's axe without lost blood.
She'd walked from Springer Mountain north, chatting in

her offhand way with bears, a big cat and a ghost.
She'd walked the halls of academia and then the hills,
big ones, bringing seedling trees to snug up to

the raw stumps of firs machines had eaten.
She'd walked to a job for decades, block after block
of homes with eyes of black glass inching

past her tired, angry shoes. Now, late in life,
she keeps a small dog bereft by her parents'
breathing stopped. The dog has taught much:

when to stop and sniff; how to attend with one's
whole being the business of squirrels. Bound
by the leash, that necessary thing, they two as one

take in, absorb, imbibe, inhale, entaste
all the arriving and leaving of living things.

lettuce in winter

The potting room was a miserable dank
shed, trash-chocked, roofed in plastic, blackberries
ingrown amid bedlam. she dragged it all into

the light, sifting for tools or nails, then
consigning the rest to dump runs. With one son,
the quiet one, she roofed the room with scraps,

tucking, there, or here, oddly-sized old windows.
To the south, a sliding door turned on its side
served for greenhouse glass. A friend's offer

of a chimney to salvage solved the question of how
to floor. With her other son, the tall one, she
rented a long-legged ladder for picking bricks

from the air, frightened at every ragged breath.
They piled them by the plant-room door, and the girl,
last child, brimful of jokes and laughter, brought

bricks to her from the pile, which she set face up
in a herringbone pattern. They swept sand and mortar
into the cracks, and danced in the sunbeams then.

Now for a bench, new-painted green for the color
of wishing, and pots of all sizes, flats too,
with a tall can for watering. She hankered for lettuce

in winter, and sowed the flats in October. After
a month, wild geese and their musical throats gone south,
she noted her seedlings spindly and sad, so taking

hammer and two-by sixes, built a quick cold frame
with the other half of the always helpful sliding
door. By the sunny south wall in the duck pen she framed it,

and dibbled the seedlings within. They liked that,
but a darkness comes on in December; after a full
day, full week, one comes home exhausted, to eat,

to sleep, not to water gardens. One thing
only has saved the lettuce: the ducks do not like
coming in for the night. She goes into the dark

to disturb them; they rush about complaining;
the madwoman hops and chuckles. She locks them away
from coyotes, and turns, as in afterthought, to visit

her seedlings. By feel she gives them water, her hands
stretching toward summer in unseen leaves.