bruorton

Because my kidneys were failing
and I didn’t have a donor yet I had
surgery on my left arm to prepare it for
dialysis. Because now the circulation
in that arm doesn’t work so well
I carry a little stress ball to squeeze
to try to keep it from retaining fluid.

Because all last week I kept forgetting
to carry it with me I made sure to
put it in my jacket pocket this
morning. Because I still had to brush
my teeth I laid my jacket down on
the table and went into the bathroom.

Because I left the door open and
because the table is visible in the
mirror at that angle and because
my cat loves investigating anything
left on the table I got to witness
him pawing at the soft ball he

discovered, a hidden toy just
for him, prancing in his delight.
Sometimes I lie awake hours feeling
that my life is an immovable weight
I must somehow endure another day
when, from out of nowhere, joy
overtakes me like a flood.

Last night I dreamed I was witness
to an exhibition of magic. True magic,
where a dead twig came back to life.
There were other demonstrations
too: a wooden dowel was turned
to chrome, by dipping it in a liquid;
when it dried, it rang when tapped
like a tuning fork. A mug of water
was turned to boiling milk –
an exothermic sorcery? –
which, when it cooled, could be
drunk. But I only had eyes for
the resurrection. I could not
have cared less about the incantation
spoken by the magician before he
bit down to rip the twig from its
dead branch with his teeth. Only how
the new leaves, tiny and hesitant,
pushed out from each old leaf scar.
Only the way its crackled skin
turned smooth, and lustrous.
The way the terminal bud grew
once more ruddy with purpose,
straining to find a way forward.

for Lizzie, who is leaving the country

Eruptions in Tonga bring us a rainy season,
we complain about the weather, and
the rivers threaten to overflow. You cannot
step into the same river twice, Heraclitus
opined; neither the river nor you can ever
be the same. There was a joke my father,
a retired philosophy prof, loved to repeat:
Heraclitus’ wife saying “Don’t be an ass—
of course you can, if you just walk downstream.”

Walking through this summer has felt
to me like a favorite childhood book you
never wanted to end, wishing you could
follow the characters on beyond the last
page into that other world, the one
where they go on just living happily
after all adventures are over, doing
the dishes and going about their days.

We reread our favorite books, but give
Heraclitus his due: it’s never quite the
same. We’re always a little older. We know
how it ends. That it ends. We pick up
on things we missed before. But I
suppose that means the book itself
is always new too, in a way.

I don’t mean to be writing a book
myself, here. I just went looking
for a way to say how much I’ll
miss you, how much it has
been raining inside me. The
way it threatens to overflow.

Not to worry. I do trust we’ll get to
pick up this book again at some
point. One day the page will turn
and there we’ll be, our own little Ratty
and Mole, messing about in boats.

We’ll be different, too; older, maybe
wiser. More aware of endings. I do
realize how much of the last few years
neither of us wants to repeat.

But I dare to say we built ourselves
a little haven, here amid the depression
and the heartbreak. A companionable joy.

Of any gift I could give, that’s the one I’m
sending with you. The one I’ll carry safe.

I’ll see you downstream. It’ll all be new.

In the news, the wars rage on.

The terrible and the duped

strive tirelessly to make the world

worse. The world, tired herself,

seems to be complying. But while

the stakes do seem to go nowhere

but up, history would suggest we
have always lived under this pall.

Meanwhile, our attention snags

like a bare foot on every jagged nail

of aggravation. This morning the coffee

spilled. The cat made a mess as you

rushed to get out the door. You hit

every stop light. One of those awful

starts that inevitably heralds, perhaps

manifests, an awful day to come.

It's a survival instinct, I suppose,

to focus on the worst things. But

what is survival, these days? Last

weekend I somehow forgot until

evening the medication I must take

every morning to stop my body

from destroying itself. Behold, a

tiny miracle: I am still here. This

morning I didn't notice until after

rinsing my contacts under the faucet

that I hadn't closed the sink drain

first. A terrible start to the day

that never manifested. And now,

walking across the yard, a raven

is making a hilarious ratcheting

noise with its throat, like those

wooden toys designed to simulate

a croaking toad. Juvenile robins,

summer's first brood to the pair

nesting in the old wreath on the

garage, are flitting about to test

their wings. After two solid weeks

of rain, the sun is only partially

obscured by clouds.

Trees have assembled
an exquisite mosaic
at the beaver dam.

That tree was part of me, or I was part of it.

I'm not quite sure. Four feet thick at the base,

with grooves in its bark I could wedge my hand into,

it was a mainstay of my early years. Its climbs,

its views, as intimately known as family. The games

I played, dancing in and out of its dappling shade

with a certainty that never countenanced

the storm-wracked day it fell upon our home,

shattering the ridgepole, chimney, windows.

Were it not for the house's rugged post-and-beam

construction I'd have been part of it for good;

the main trunk crashing to rest mere feet above my head.

After the rain, we opened the door to find its canopy

snapped off into the yard at the far end from the jagged

stump: the lawn, become an upside-down jungle.

The next day, gazing up into the blue cavity

where it had stood, I saw a bird circling, bewildered.

It is that bird I think of now, when she says

she's not feeling much of anything exactly,

the week after her husband of six years moved out.

She's sitting on a stool at her kitchen bar,

turning her water glass in circles, counter-clockwise,

and achingly it comes to me that nothing I can give

could fill the breach she's standing under.

But once upon a time,
some anonymous worker

knocked an oak peg
through a hemlock tenon,
anchoring it in its mortise socket.
A momentary, forgettable gesture,
that allowed me to walk out

into the sudden jungle of the world.

I woke with a poetic thought
simple, spare,
three lines at most.

In the manner of dreams
it evaporated
by the time I was upright.

Several times I tried to reclaim it
but all day my page remained blank
until driving home

I saw the full moon rise
pale, translucent,
in an empty winter sky.

We buried him in the high meadow

where he always loved to race ahead

and hide in the tall grass, then pretend

to ambush us when we came along.

We left no marker, with only the edges

of displaced sod to show the grave

which will disappear by next spring—

so that, not knowing where precisely,

this whole field will be his resting place.

Or, at a greater remove, this whole mountain

where once he ranged up and down

with us in all seasons, whether in the dark

and moody hemlock woods, by the stream

as we foraged in autumn for chanterelles,

or up the steep eroded slope, to the hidden

orchard at the top, planted generations ago,

giving still an ambrosia perfume every spring.

But this seems the right place for him

to rest; nothing more is needed.

For a gravestone, simply the sun slanting

on the distant pines. For an epitaph,

the thrush and chickadee calling

from the great and spreading ash.

A sub-zero trudge two miles before dawn,
my knee stiff, aching, I stop cold
on the bridge. A riveting cacophony
rises up from below,
a susurration and hum:
ice battering ice in a fast channel.
Downstream, somewhere
far out in the gloom where
this river flows into the larger
comes an ominous snap,
a seismic shift amid
intractable glacial shelves.
There is only the slightest
smudge of light in the east,
nothing you can hold on to.
Yet high above the freezing fog
an invisible crow announces,
raucous and undaunted,
the rebirth of the world.

I only wanted to remind myself

that I have heard the quiet voice.

The wind high in the pines on a hill

as the first blanketing snow falls steady, steady.

The muffled, gurgling brook

amidst the frozen woods.

The clarion call of the pioneering blackbird,

returning to stake his claim while there is

still ice on the marsh.

Perhaps you have heard it too,

that unexpected divine voice that

speaks straight to your innermost heart,

on which all the rest of your life
is only commentary.

Under the thin ice, black bubbles swell
and melt and writhe, living Rorschach blobs
flitting hypnotically away in the water's rush.
Downstream, where the banks widen,
stiff lacy collars surround each rock,
arctic islands in a frigid stream.

Yet further on, where logs jammed
with dead leaves form a small cascade,
the spray has coated the moss and twigs
with an exquisite glistening armor in bulging
mineral lumps below, hung over by
a hundred crystalline Damocles' swords.

How profligate! And to think that there are miles yet,
upstream and down, of such unmatched wonders
that no one will pause to marvel at today,
or any other. And tomorrow they will be gone,
transformed from one impossibility to another:
a universe of unrelenting extravagance.

Saturday mornings with K

are blueberry pancakes,

always. Or waffles, on

occasion. But either way,

a sacred time together.

This morning, as usual,

I end up with a spoonful

too many blueberries,

and since by this time

they are already thawed

I simply eat them,

the crisp strange tang

of their juice taking me

not to just any of the

times I have eaten

wild blueberries

in my life, but to the one

tiny patch that grew

near the marsh above

my family's house,

now swallowed up by

the encroachment of trees

and time, where I

and my brothers spent

so many afternoons

foraging together.

I awake hot, sweaty, mouth parched.

Sitting up carefully, I let my head swim

to shore. Is this fever? Is that nausea

I feel? It has been some while since I

last fell afoul of it. But this year,

this year.

I make my way to the bathroom,

mind in what passes for racing

in its thickened state. Is this it?

The one I've been isolated for

9 months to avoid, only to find

it incubated at last? I review who

I have interacted with, brought

cookies to, over the last few days,

who I have exposed. I consider

how it will feel to have accomplished

no more than I have up to now.

Disappointing, I decide, but beside

the point. I have loved the world

imperfectly, and been loved in return.

If this is to be it, it is enough.

I take my handful of nighttime pills,

and return to bed, thinking of St. Francis

asked in the garden what he'd do, if the end
of the world was coming at sundown:

"I would finish weeding my row."

I drift off, and wake again in the dark

a few hours later, still too hot, but

this time less disoriented. I rise again

and check: yes, we forgot to turn

the thermostat down before bed.

The moths are everywhere;

when you unfocus your eyes,

the woods are filled with their

dusty featherweight wings.

Their erratic spiraling seems

so aimless it's hard to imagine

how they ever reproduce,

and yet: here they still are.

They even have their own beauty,

if you catch a glimpse of one resting

briefly on a tree trunk: silver and beige

painted delicately on a fine cloth.

K. is on a boulder by the stream

waiting to see if she can spy a fish,

one of the tiny ones so far uphill.

The moths flit about her, ephemeral.

The boulder under her is on

its own journey, out of the epic

glacial past and into an entirely

unknowable future, so slowly

that around it, the lot of us—

the fish, the moths,

even the whole forest—

are all whirling aimlessly about.

I do not know what will happen

tomorrow. Yesterday is still

an aching tooth in my head.

Today is a mystery I have yet to solve.

And yet, here we still are.

The moths of late spring

are everywhere, after all,

once you begin looking.

How do you do it?

Time after time

rising in darkness

whether you have

light to shed

or only sympathy

for the night.

How do you keep

coming back

from the Shadow,

reinventing yourself,

unveiling another month

unlike every single one

to come before?

The full moon is the one

everyone notices, names,

sings love songs to.

But the world is

always being remade

without witnesses:

the infant unfurling

in the womb,

the seed cracking open

in the silent earth.

The true miracles happen
in the utmost dark,

every time. New moon.

New moon. New moon.

Late, late, mid-October and only now

the cold begins to come. White lines

trace the grain of boards on the porch

and the grass is hoary, a beard turned

abruptly grey.

Overhead the sky is cloudless, blue,

blue, and five crows wheel overhead,

harbingers of the dawn, inscribing

their aerial prophecy in looping words

I cannot read.

The rising sun, obscured behind a
steel seamed roof, gleams on the leading

edge of their wings, bright, bright, as if

new-sprung from the forge of heaven

and not yet quenched.

(published in Albatross #28, Fall 2018)

Can I tell you what going through my dead brother's papers is like?
Here is what going through my dead brother's papers is like:
A spiral-bound notebook, with pages upon pages of handwritten
lists from this PlayStation game, then that one,
magical equipment, power-ups, creatures, treasures, statistics.

And then, unexpectedly, the transcribed lyrics of two verses
from The Phantom of the Opera, one of his favorites.
Those who have seen your face, draw back in fear.
I am the mask you wear; it's me they hear.

Or again, a pile of notes for a fantasy role-playing adventure,
again handwritten, on half-page scrap paper. Wandering
monsters: twelve bugbears, armor class 7, 4 hit dice each.
Here is where the lizard men abducted the mayor's daughter,

and where the dragon's tracks lead, after it preyed upon
the abductors. Here is what the hoard is worth, enumerated
in detail, the ivory and silver cornucopia pin (2,500 gold pieces)
and the obsidian panther (5,000) which comes to life if given
the correct word of power. And suddenly, amidst them, a

forgotten list, entitled "What I Want for Myself." At the top
of the list, a girlfriend. Next on the list: world peace. It goes on
from there. "More time with family." "Self-respect."
"A decent, enjoyable job" has the word "enjoyable"

struck out, as an afterthought. Every glimpse
beyond the mask, a blow to the heart.
But he needs this refuge no longer, so it goes
slowly, page by page, into the bin, to overflowing.

I didn't come out here to stare into the sun,
to try to find the right filter to make sense
of heavenly miracles. I wander through the crowd,
more comfortable (if I am honest) in smaller
settings, simply hoping to find a friend or two
with whom to share a moment standing
companionably outside on such a lovely day.
To lead them, perhaps, to one corner of the green,
neglected in the shade, and admire together
the flickering spaces between the leaves
that have turned all the ground around us
to a carpet of swaying crescents. We
look down at this mosaic spread across
the sidewalk and the lawn, while behind us
the multitude gazes up.

I do not know how to love this world
nearly how I should, but I know at least
that what I love is here, to learn. After the
Ascension, as the disciples stood in shock,
faces upturned, suddenly abandoned, we
are told two figures in white robes came
among them. "Why do you stand about here,
staring into heaven?" they asked. They might
as well have said directly, don't you know how
much there is to do? There are fields to work
in: hay fields, occupational fields. There are so
many kind words needed, so many hands
unheld. And there is so much to learn to love:
strange orbits of the moon, dancing shadows
on the earth, each other, ourselves.

Do you remember the the other night

walking home in the dark

because we'd thought the moon would be up

so we didn't bring a flashlight

the squnch squnch of fresh snow under our boots

but still warmed by the glow of neighbors
chatting around the table of wine and munchies
discussing the weather, kids, housing travails,

and despite the inevitable dark turn to politics
the lyrics still in our ears

If there's hope in this house I'm gonna find it

If there's hope in this house get me rope

I'm gonna ride it

while in the clear night the train is sounding

all the way down the valley from the next town over.

In the moonless black you say Taurus looks more like a fox

and I point out Castor and Pollux, the twins over Orion,

and our path home is apparently due north

because there is Polaris, beckoning us on.

1.
I pause to take up the chickens' feed
and dump their water as we are heading out
to the election night party.

It is a momentous night, and we are full
of a year's worth of waiting. Near the coop door

two currently molting hens, lacking nearly
half their feathers, have roosted close together.
For them this night is simply
a blessedly mild one,
after the recent cold snap.

We return home

in shock.

Whatever we expected

it wasn't this.

Thank God our state rep,

who strapped on a dust mask

to help clean out constituents'

flooded trailers after the hurricane

managed to win re-election

by 3 votes.

We can't begin to grasp the future
we are careening into

or even comprehend how

it happened.

Our kitten hears us enter,
after midnight, and sends up

a piteous mewing from his crate.

He comes out purring, tiny wedge tail up,

so grateful to be back with

the people he loves.

3.

Two days later my elderly cat wants

to take a longer walk than usual,

and though the dusk is deepening
fast this time of year

I indulge her. I've already put

the winter siding on the coop,

and put away my tools.

So we stroll together down a wooded bank,
then up the darkened lane beneath

dimly looming trees.

Somewhere, Hispanic children are being

taunted by their classmates. Someone

is scrawling "TRUMP" across a college's
Islamic prayer room door. A black woman

is told she will be raped and sent back

to Africa. Someone signing to a deaf

friend on FaceTime is told they are

retarded, not wanted in this country

anymore.

The leaves rustle and crunch under

my sneakers, her pads. We stop

for a moment at the intersection,
just listening to the darkness.
Then we double back up the

driveway, heading for
the distant lights of home.

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Among the Sharply Pointed Stars

June 2024

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Style: Ivory Alcea for Mobility by branchandroot
Resources: Mitsuba Aoi

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Entries tagged with poetry

Causation

Resurrection

End of the Summer

Survival Instincts

Autumn Haiku

Post and Beam

Three Lines

For Corva, the Hiking Cat

February, White River Junction

Clarion

The Stream in January, Beneath the Hemlocks

Wild Blueberries

Reassessment

The Moths of Late Spring

Oh Moon

First Frost

Overflowing

Eclipse

Neighbor's House Concert

Listening to the Darkness (election triptych, 2016)