Spirit Double

who is doing all this work on this old house?

painting & repairing & paying to have it repaired

a last-gasp house I’ll no doubt be pried out of 

when sense or mobility deserts me, yet this week

I search with an electronic tool for wall studs

pound finishing nails into baseboards my brother

ripped to the chosen width, I measure, saw, & sand

paint & repaint, all to better the appearance of

hide the faults of a hundred-year-old house

I trust will last decades longer than I will

no paint or boards or nails can slow my ruin

deepening fissures fill with tears from eyes

too slack to hold them, not grief but leakage

every night in dreams I play my younger self

When Leaves Turn

the cleft between two wooded slopes

becomes a crowded spill of colors

yellow & orange, yellow & ochre & red

intense & dense as a Bach fugue

notes falling & rising, voice by voice

a rippling wave where cause & effect 

dissolve & integrate, where utter love

pours from me to the leaves

where leaves cascade love at me

love for what the universe can do

One Being

                   — in memory of Hannah Arendt

the raccoon curls as if sleeping, nose tucked

toward a belly fat from summer feed

the lustrous black-ridged tail of a gray fox

skunk’s pungence, hawk’s wing

twigged legs of an antlered deer

these bloodied remnants soil the road

    as inescapable a part of ourselves

    as the snail’s shell is to its occupant

out of the raccoon’s eyes looks

a Palestinian child, a questioning gaze

as child & raccoon endure their mutual fate

curl & are curled as if sleeping

the two as one being, the raccoon no less

no more than the Palestinian child

    violence changes the world, but the most

    probable change is a more violent world

Barbarians

I can’t say I’ve paid a coyote

perilous trek to the Texas border

I can’t say I’m crossing the Mediterranean

small boat with ninety others

I can’t say I’ve been confined twenty years

tin shack in a barbed-wire camp

I can’t say I was driven from my homeland

colonial fiat favoring European Jews

I can’t say bombs level my city

rubble my building, maim my children

what I can say is I’m pretending to be safe

here in the global north

I can say I forgo meat, shun plastics

& won’t fight back

when barbarians — people just like me

burst through the gates

 

Mothers of . . . Daughters of . . .

my mother fed me stories

bite by bite with my daily rusk

word by word, hour by hour

a shield, a siege, a bow, an oar

I listened while she dangled treats

sang the runes, embraced

me in her shawl, wrapped me warm

through Mediterranean nights

long before I conned meaning

I prattled verses back to her

courtesy, feasting, kings & slaves

quarrels staged as sea voyages & killing

animals too, hunting dogs, birds & bats

sheep & swine & the hecatombs — 

not numbers, not graves, but oxen

raised for the altar, tributes to gods

once I understood, I added beats

a scar, a rooted bed, a loom like my mother’s

& I her midnight unraveler

proving what I must remember

those were days when I saw light

saw rather than felt the break of day

you strum the lyre, she said, you hear

you feel, you sing, you will never want

so I became one of the chosen 

daughters of the mothers’ line

our fingers webbed with weaving

we relate so the rest may see

Absent Life

snow brings proof of what’s rarely seen

though here all year — rabbits, bobcat, deer —

crisscrossing the yard from dusk to dawn

leading non-human lives out of sight

except for chewed flora, scat heaps

the disappearance of chicken bones

I toss out the back door, I count how many

toes there are, wonder at their unwatched

yet vital goings on, how they survive

despite us, how they hope we disappear

Royal Fare

wind tosses reddening sumac, stirs the pale green

milkweed pods — fat, & pointed at both ends

like fish bladders, like grapefruit pulp, but large

as giants’ thumbs & stubbled, like scrotums

vesicles of ripening germ — as days pass they darken

dry, & split open, spill & spread their bounty

porcelain-white fluff, each tuft bound to a small

brown seed that wind, or barring wind, bumptious I 

scatter across my yard to sprout in spring

leaf in summer, proffer monarchs a daily spread

Asters Like Lace

asters like lace tatted across my yard

lavender & white, pinheads of the not yet bloomed

raining, not raining, this cool gray day

loiters, late summer, not quite fall

I sit wrapped in an L L Bean wool blanket

not ready to latch the storms, light the boiler, admit

that summer’s winding down, winter’s drawing close

fifty to forty to frost, how what greens

flowers, seeds, so swiftly blackens

I rub stalks to scatter seed — mullein, bladderwort

hollyhock — may they settle deep, take hold

burst forth in next year’s cavalcade

No Shortcuts

Vermont's Rte 116 is washed out

detoured around, half blocked with barriers

bearing signs that say “road closed

local traffic only” — still, drivers who must

see for themselves [disbelieving louts]

speed past my pedal bike along a road

I never rode before this latest change

I study farms I’ve driven by — brand new

metal sheds, large machines, baled hay —

now the small marble house is up for sale

goldfinches bounce like grasshoppers

St John’s wort is burnt from green to copper

yellow flutters down from changing trees

great blue heron scouts the muddied fen

a local owner complains of “all the gas

she's wasted” to get to where she needs to

yet today, a sunny September Saturday

she too rides her bike, “it’s so much safer

“without all those pickups” — how many

drivers slowed to admire Dow Pond

before this season’s hundred-year rains?

how many knew the Muddy Branch ran

down the mountain into the pond through

a culvert under the 50-mile-per-hour road?

FEMA-funded town planners prophesy

thousand-year rains, but why repair? can’t

ours be the first state to see we’ve driven

so much farther than anyone should go?

The Stuck Window

propped open with a twelve-inch-long board

resists my attempts to raise it higher

in order to free the board

so I tap the bottom of the window with a rubber mallet

held in my left hand

the window rises half an inch

far enough for me to shift the board

though because I’m still holding the mallet

I’m not holding up the now unstuck window

so it slams down

onto the toppling board & onto my right hand

the flat side of the board & my right hand

lie wedged

between the bottom of the window & the windowsill

I drop the rubber mallet

try to pull away my hand — stuck

try to raise the window — stuck

I think about my phone

where I set it on the bed after checking the weather

rain, it said, from the north, it said

a good reason to close the north-facing window

now closed, or nearly so

again I try to raise the window

again I try to pull away my hand

I think about foxes & wolves

their paws stuck in man-made traps

how they chew off their paws

so I pull & pull, feel skin tear, pull

until my hand comes free

indented, numb

cold running water slows the bleeding

my hand throbs

my stiff fingers barely wiggle

I dry my hand, apply a bandage

I think for a long time about what it means to live alone