Homeless


A man opens his hotel
door and walks naked in
front of me to the shower,
all grizzled and gnarled
from years in the bush,
thin legged with uncut
gray hair to his shoulders.
He's hung his towel on his
right fore-arm as if going
to a ballroom and the TV
sounds through his open
door with low cut quiz-
show voices, his bare
feet sponging the scarlet
gold-trecked and mildewed
carpet before he goes in-
to the bath and then he
is singing some tune out
of the old days in Cork
where he came from through
Canada to Alaska, his voice
smoked Irish in its almost
tenor with water trickling
over his shoulders like
a waterfall plunging down
moss and crevassed diorite
in some Alaska fiord, a tune
transposing into the hoarse
rise of 'Danny Boy' which
he falls into when he gets
to the end of his days all
gnarled and beaten through,
to the residency he's given
once a month in an hotel
where he keeps the TV on
all night and steps stately,
bone-thin naked, back to his
room four times a day after
bathing in anonymous water.

Buying Firewood


Buzz of a chain saw in
the wood yard as a grizzled
man and his son buck four

foot logs, man-high pile of
splits in the hollow between
melting, dirt-smudged snow

banks. He greets me with
a wave, a tired smile: fifty
years married and his wife

with cancer of the uterus,
going down to Portland
tomorrow to check on chemo

results. He draws up the bed
daily after she passes
urine, feces. How much

a human contract matters.
The filth of our bodies that
someone's willing to clean.

That someone would stay by
us in the purple lost day
of our dying. We stand on

his door step, his knowing
smile, the sheen that
masks the lacquered grief

that covers plain ordinary
pain. Yes, he has firewood.
Yes, he'll deliver this

afternoon, get his son
to vigil his wife. Yes,
his open eyes that see

everything. We're silent,
chain saw stopped, a finch
in the gnarled apple tree

in the yard with only
the run of its first half-
melody, then our last words

as we turn to what needs
doing, wood for next winter,
love for what we have now.

What Sunday Means


Say that your three teen-age
kids have survived the cracked
years of the twentieth American
Century, that you were right
in cutting loose your husband
of the last decade and getting
ordained and finding a tiny
congregation down-east in Maine,
say that in this moment you're
happy with your new love, that
you step in his steps on week-
old lake-ice where water still
pools as the ice creaks and
shimmers and you let that love
of yours lead on the Sunday
you have off because your kids
have flown three thousand miles
to their father in California
and a retired preacher is doing
the sermon, say you're happy
stepping where he's stepped
as he picks his way carefully
onto the frozen surface but,
when you step on the same crack
he's stepped on and it creaks,
your gasp is the harbinger
of that panic-cry over all
your hedged bets and everything
you can't control when the next
crack he steps on v-necks and
breaks so that his shoes and
pants sink and he's swinging
the oar he's carrying around
his head and down to the ice
in chest-high water and you're
on your stomach pulling that
oar and him back up, realizing
it's all luck, a blessing whose
grace slips towards you or
away because you can't be sure
early-winter ice will hold long
enough for you both to reach shore.

 Bringing A Fir Straight Down


A fan-tail of black floats
above the knoll and the Wood's
Boss puts on his orange muffler
helmet, clips climbing spikes
to his boots and tells me
he lives with ravens to clear
his mind, pulls his gloves
off to show me a walking stick
he'd carved 30 years ago in
the Smokies, says, Raven's
will is my will and our wills
are to survive, cradles it
in his hand before he lets me
feel the worn-in sweat and
shine of a carved raven's bill,
says, when he takes his long
walk-abouts in the woods from
'Hafen's Halla,' his camp,
they follow before, behind,
beside, gliding through air.
When he comes to the abutment
looking out on the lake's
exit river and points his
walking-stick over the precipice,
they cup-spread their wings
and tail-fans and land beside
him as now, when he reaches
the fir's base and starts
to climb, that black-circling
gyres smaller and smaller
until sweeping low it lands,
croaks, and looks up at the
orange-helmeted Wood's Boss
who has climbed with his
chain saw into the clear sky
to top the dead crowned tree.

Before Our Extinction


So what happened to the sequential
taking to flight of the loons
this autumn, this late November
when brown berries of mountain

ash turn red, turn outward in
migration to new life and loons
inward in the long straight take-
off of their lifting over winter

to Penobscot islands and the sea?
Not a sound on the lake where
before on still water they would
congregate in song preparing to fly.

They are not here and my fear they
will never return won't go away,
even when a sudden flock of geese
recall the angled run-off flight

of bones heavier than air long
since evolved, not from some hollow-
boned ancestor of the late Mesozoic,
but from a blood-drummed and solid-

boned lizard whose wind-whistle
of flight haunts the air: they are
not here, are not, and who will
remember them when we are gone?

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