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Earth Tea

If there are things you have not done, actions
neglected through the hours, years,
remembered only in sudden waking
moments before sleep - then this poem
is for you. There is a cave in the high foothills,
its mouth studded with half-embedded boulders
guarding walls that slope gently into darkness, a floor
empty but for centuries of pine needles underfoot.
If we have been waiting for the right time, then
the time is now. Brush aside the top layer to find a light,
clumpy substrate - ancient needles rotted and vague
with time. Dig below this, through to the flaky, crumbling
coolness, the matter that is older than yourself, that
blew in when the world was new. Finely textured,
colored like coffee, it is dirt, silence, it is the first
sleep of the night. Take only what is in your hand,
cupped, out into the open world. Infuse with water
heated on an electric range in a building in the city, and drink
to taste sharp earth again, a mineral sting between the teeth,
a memory - there was nothing you needed to do.

Vessel

She was brand new, still shaking
in my lap on the kitchen floor
while Mom put away the puppy food,
hung the leash up and said, Well,
we'll let her have a litter before she's spayed
so that she knows what she is, and I nodded
sagely, stroked the soft head,
felted ears, trying to feel how every warm
and heavy fact of her - the padded black under
of each paw, crescent shaped toenails -
was somehow not enough. And if she didn't know
what she was, what hope for me, who didn't
believe in the world, who secretly believed myself
made completely of a fine mist - and what, too,
of the paper plate and tissue elephant looking sadly
down upon us from the fridge? He was still
not an elephant, only glue and paper,
and hadn't we both waited
for the earth to reach up to us,
for the smell of rain or the course
of water down a window pane to tell us
what we were? The puppy, nose pressed
into the crook behind my knee, heaved
her hairless belly with each breath, as if
her life was bigger than her body yet,
and it was waiting for her, a pathway
to follow into the world, where she
would be a vessel, always empty
always full, part of everything,
like the smooth linoleum beneath us,
like the trees above the skylight,
moving in the rain.

Operating Instructions for the Propane Refrigerator

You are always up an hour or two already,
toasting one cinnamon raisin and one wheat slice,
mixing grapefruit in with the orange juice, then choosing
from among the various jellies while the wood stove in the corner
roars quietly against a cloudy day. Another chilly autumn.
I steal your slippers from the bedroom, perch on a hard chair,
and watch you move forward through ritual
toward midmorning, when a change in the quality of light
and a clutter of dishes mark your daily disappearance
on the long series of mysterious chores which consume you,
and in the face of which I retire to the heated bathroom
to dress and ponder my place in a day so predetermined
it seemed sometimes to have already happened.
That is, until last year, when I was thirty and you
seventy and like a change in the weather now grandiosely engrossed
in deferred maintenance, sandblasting outbuildings, felling
each and every sickly-looking tree within an acre of the front steps,
raccoon-proofing the foundations, and suddenly I am scribe,
record keeper of the daily cleaning, oiling, and adjusting of things:
the secrets of the hand pump as it extends below the floor of the cabin,
the back of the propane refrigerator where one might find the flue,
valve, the "Tee," the baffle, the right time for spring
start-up and winter shut-down as clear as the nail
above the screen door where the kindling axe should hang.
In an impressive act of fatalism you have begun to teach me
how to clean ice from the ancient, delicate freezer door,
to adjust its cooling with kettles of hot water, and we both know
that you will die and I will break things but are intent
now on recording every task. Like the way the leaves turn on birches
before the oaks, you fill the pot, then swing it slowly
back over the fire. You remove the glass chimney
from the lamp, wash it before placing it on unfolded newspaper
on the table on the porch where light is good,
and next to it, each part in order of disassembly: the wick,
the correct manner for trimming it, and me scribbling madly,
as I try to watch your hands.

Where the Dead Live

     For Grandma, in lieu of a rock

Your house is sold, your pears
harvested by someone else, and so we are
already like the broken tree,
scarring in around the edges of a lost limb.
Still, no one's claimed the bed
and matching dresser, or sorted
through photos, and a crack remains
in the doorway that is closing between us.
Your last gifts to me have been these glimpses
out to where the dead live in the world.
First, that windowless hotel room
in Mexico: coming through the muggy
late-morning haze, you brought Lake Michigan,
somehow, and the soft grass of Cedar Point
spread out at your feet while I laughed
and cried under the forty-watt bulb.
Were you a vision? I was alone
and not alone, and after that
saw the dead occasionally in Berkeley
backyards or on my way home
from the train station. But nothing
like last month, hiking past the pine
and cliff-rose at the rim of the canyon.
I took switchback after switchback, descended
into silence, red dust, vertical walls. Clouds eclipsed
light, transforming color across miles
of valley and mesa. They parted,
then moved on, coming together again
above another vast canyon and I saw
how a soul could be born and leave
and return to this place life after life, sleeping
in the cracks and smooth water holes
that follow the lines of fissures
along cliff faces; dropping past chasms
through dust motes and sunlight
down to the final narrowing,
where a river, curled into the round bottom
of its own making, shoulders its way
further into deep rock. Grandma, I have
seen it now, how the end of things is an illusion
seen only by living eyes.