Grace

GRACE
By Jake Adam York

Because my grandmother made me
the breakfast her mother made her,
when I crack the eggs, pat the butter
on the toast, and remember the bacon
to cast iron, to fork, to plate, to tongue,
my great grandmother moves my hands
to whisk, to spatula, to biscuit ring,
and I move her hands too, making
her mess, so the syllable of batter
I’ll find tomorrow beneath the fridge
and the strew of salt and oil are all
memorials, like the pan-fried chicken
that whistles in the grease in the voice
of my best friend’s grandmother
like a midnight mockingbird,
and the smoke from the grill
is the smell of my father coming home
from the furnace and the tang
of vinegar and char is the smell
of Birmingham, the smell
of coming home, of history, redolent
as the salt of black-and-white film
when I unwrap the sandwich
from the wax-paper the wax-paper
crackling like the cold grass
along the Selma to Montgomery road,
like the foil that held
Medgar’s last meal, a square of tin
that is just the ghost of that barbecue
I can imagine to my tongue
when I stand at the pit with my brother
and think of all the hands and mouths
and breaths of air that sharpened
this flavor and handed it down to us,
I feel all those hands inside
my hands when it’s time to spread
the table linen or lift a coffin rail
and when the smoke billows from the pit
I think of my uncle, I think of my uncle
rising, not falling, when I raise
the buttermilk and the cornmeal to the light
before giving them to the skillet
and sometimes I say the recipe
to the air and sometimes I say his name
or her name or her name
and sometimes I just set the table
because meals are memorials
that teach us how to move,
history moves in us as we raise
our voices and then our glasses
to pour a little out for those
who poured out everything for us,
we pour ourselves for them,
so they can eat again.

I thought about this poem today during a late
afternoon walk cold windy sun on the down
low, missing my son who is gone now wanting
for his safety the whole long time. I hope the
"queen under the hill" will watch over him, bring
him home to this place.

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

By Robert Duncan

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, 
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart, 
an eternal pasture folded in all thought 
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light 
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am 
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved 
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words 
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing 
east against the source of the sun 
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game 
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow 
as if it were a given property of the mind 
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.

Laurie Anderson on the Making of "Homeland"

there

Where I wish I was, where I was, where I did
swim like a selkie I shed it all and
the Atlantic was all there was that
was more than enough

they say it's your

My Skeleton

by Jane Hirshfield

 

 

My skeleton,
you who once ached
with your own growing larger

are now,
each year
imperceptibly smaller,
lighter,
absorbed by your own
concentration.

When I danced,
you danced.
When you broke,
I.

And so it was lying down,
walking,
climbing the tiring stairs.
Your jaws. My bread.

Someday you,
what is left of you,
will be flensed of this marriage.

Angular wristbone,
cracked harp of ribcage,
blunt of heel,
opened bowl of the skull,
twin platters of pelvis--
each of you will leave me behind,
at last serene.

What did I know of your days,
your nights,
I who held you all my life
inside my hands
and thought they were empty?

You who held me all my life
inside your hands
as a new mother holds
her own unblanketed child,
not thinking at all. 

  

yes

I found one small stone and placed it in my pocket to take
home. That is all. There's not much time or room on the shelf
these days. For shells or bones. More space for the too-many
photographs. And the lie is alluring. Take another and remember.
How seductive. How shiny. A scroll of them to unwind but
the years diminish. A photograph can be visual clutter.
But recently I want them more than beach stones.  Happy birthday.

Georgia tree

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.-Georgia O'Keefe

looking

I spent last weekend looking. At my son.
At the wave action of creek water over
a rock and how the light and shadows
created a kind of pointilist Chuck Closian
painting on the surface. At huge mid
western type corn fields sprawling
across New York plains. At my son's
friends huddled around the firepit, their
faces lit and young. I spent the time
wanting to take a photograph of all of it
as if this could be a record of something
or a practice that could hold back danger.
To burn or carve a poem that captures
these days, that makes something of them
so they're not lost or forgotten or taken away.

October

Birthday month is here. To mark it I hope to post
every day, though I don't know that anyone visits,
which is alright.
The photos are from upstate -- fall near the Thousand Islands
and Lake Ontario where my son the soldier is.
In a month he goes overseas, deploys,
goes down range, in military jargon. He is a warrior.
I know this, have known it, honor it. He learns
by doing, always in the thick of it. The doing
he's going to be doing will be dangerous.
This is what he wants and I get it.
I've been writing about this for a few years.
Pages of poems that circle around being
the mother of a warrior. Maybe I'll post some
poems during the month. To illustrate
the intricate delicacy of mothering a warrior.
Of someone who may indeed kill or be killed.
I've been building a house with the carbon
from ancient oracle bones for a few years.
A book, a manuscript, a myth. I don't know
that anyone is interested in this. War weary
war weary is the mantra. So to depict
the warrior's family, which is what
I set out to do in making the house,
this book. You out there may not be a mother
or parent or warrior.

Here is a landay -- a form of folk poetry
from Afghanistan, made by Pashtun women.
An oral and anonymous tradition.

I call. You're stone.
One day you'll look and find I'm gone.