Jorie Graham

is by admitting
or opening away.
This is the simplest form
of current: Blue
...

I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room half-way through
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty.,
...

In this blue light
I can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
...

Today, because I couldn't find the shortcut through,
I had to walk this town's entire inner
perimeter to find
where the medieval walls break open
...

Up ahead, I know, he felt it stirring in himself already, the glance,
the darting thing in the pile of rocks,

already in him, there, shiny in the rubble, hissing Did you want to remain
...

The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
...

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
...

                                   
        Spring
Up, up you go, you must be introduced.
...

Shall I move the flowers again?
Shall I put them further to the left
into the light?
Win that fix it, will that arrange the
...

It has a hole in it. Not only where I

concentrate.
...

All this was written on the next day's list.
On which the busyness unfurled its cursive roots,
pale but effective,
and the long stem of the necessary, the sum of events,
...

The man held his hands to his heart as
he danced.
He slacked and swirled.
The doorways of the little city
...

In the fairy tale the sky
makes of itself a coat
because it needs you
to put it
...

& sea swell, hiss of incomprehensible flat: distance: blue long-fingered ocean and its
nothing else: nothing in the above visible except
water: water and
always the white self-destroying bloom of wavebreak &, upclose
roil, &
here, on what's left of land,
ticking of stays against empty flagpoles, low tide, free day, nothing
being
memorialized here today — memories float, yes,
over the place but not memories any of us now among the living
possess — open your
hands — let go the scrap metal with the laughter — let go the
upstairs neighbor you did not
protect — they took him
away — let go how frightened you knew he was all
along while you went on with your
day — your day overflowing with time and
place — they came and got him — there are manners for every kind of
event — he stopped reading and looked up
when they came in — didn't anyone tell you
you would never feel at home — that there is a form of slavery in everything — and when was it
in your admittedly short
life you
were permitted to believe that this lasted
forever — remove your hands
from your pockets — take out that laundry list, that receipt for
everything you
pawned last night — decide whom to blame —
stick to your
story — exclude expectation of heavenly
reward — exclude
the milk of
human kindness — poisoned from the start — yes — who ever expected that
to be the mistake — with all the murderers and miracle workers — with the hovering
spidery
fairy tales — kites, angels, missiles, evening
papers, yellow stars — clouds — those were houses that are his eyes — those were lives that
are his
eyes — those are families, those are privacies, those are details — those are reparation
agreements, summary
judgments, those are multiplications
on the face of the earth that are — those are the forests, the coal seams, the
carbon sinks that are his —
as they turn into carbon sources — his —
and the festering wounds that are — and the granary that burned — and the quick blow
administered to make it
painless, so-
called — his eyes his yes his blows his seed's first
insertion into this our only soil —
& the flower, the cut
flower in my
bouquet here,
made from the walk we took this morning, aimless, as if free,
where you asked me to
marry you, & the loaf of
barley, millet and wheat I was able,
as a matter of course, to bring to the table, fresh-
baked,
in life.
...

All this was written on the next day's list.
On which the busyness unfurled its cursive roots,
pale but effective,
and the long stern of the necessary, the sum of events,
built-up its tiniest cathedral ...
(Or is it the sum of what takes place?)
If I lean down, to whisper, to them,
down into their gravitational field, there where they head busily on
into the woods, laying the gifts out one by one, onto the path,
hoping to be on the air,
hoping to please the children—
(and some gifts overwrapped and some not wrapped at all)—if
I stir the wintered ground-leaves
up from the paths, nimbly, into a sheet of sun,
into an escape-route-width of sun, mildly gelatinous where wet, though
mostly crisp,
fluffing them up a bit, and up, as if to choke the singularity of sun
with this jubilation of manyness, all through and round these passers-by—
just leaves, nothing that can vaporize into a thought,
no, a burning-bush's worth of spidery, up-ratcheting, tender-cling leaves,
oh if—the list gripped hard by the left hand of one,
the busyness buried so deep into the puffed-up greenish mind of one,
the hurried mind hovering over its rankings,
the heart—there at the core of the drafting leaves—wet and warm at the
zero of
the bright mock-stairwaying-up of the posthumous leaves—the heart,
formulating its alleyways of discovery,
fussing about the integrity of the whole,
the heart trying to make time and place seem small,
sliding its slim tears into the deep wallet of each new event
on the list
then checking it off—oh the satisfaction—each check a small kiss,
an echo of the previous one, off off it goes the dry high-ceilinged
obligation,
checked-off by the fingertips, by the small gust called done that swipes
the unfinishable's gold hem aside, revealing
what might have been, peeling away what should ...
There are flowerpots at their feet.
There is fortune-telling in the air they breathe.
It filters in with its flashlight-beam, its holy-water-tinted air,
down into the open eyes, the lampblack open mouth.
Oh listen to these words I'm spitting out for you.
My distance from you makes them louder.
Are we all waiting for the phone to ring?
Who should it be? What fountain is expected to
thrash forth mysteries of morning joy? What quail-like giant tail of
promises, pleiades, psalters, plane-trees,
what parapets petalling-forth the invisible
into the world of things,
turning the list into its spatial form at last,
into its archival many-headed, many-legged colony....
Oh look at you.
What is it you hold back? What piece of time is it the list
won't cover? You down there, in the theater of
operations—you, throat of the world—so diacritical—
(are we all waiting for the phone to ring?)—
(what will you say? are you home? are you expected soon?)—
oh wanderer back from break, all your attention focused
—as if the thinking were an oar, this ship the last of some
original fleet, the captains gone but some of us
who saw the plan drawn out
still here—who saw the thinking clot-up in the bodies of the greater men,
who saw them sit in silence while the voices in the other room
lit up with passion, itchings, dreams of landings,
while the solitary ones,
heads in their hands, so still,
the idea barely forming
at the base of that stillness,
the idea like a homesickness starting just to fold and pleat and knot
itself
out of the manyness—the plan—before it's thought,
before it's a done deal or the name-you're-known-by—
the men of x, the outcomes of y—before—
the mind still gripped hard by the hands
that would hold the skull even stiller if they could,
that nothing distract, that nothing but the possible be let
to filter through—
the possible and then the finely filamented hope, the filigree,
without the distractions of wonder—
oh tiny golden spore just filtering in to touch the good idea,
which taking-form begins to twist,
coursing for bottom-footing, palpating for edge-hold, limit,
now finally about to
rise, about to go into the other room—and yet
not having done so yet, not yet—the
intake—before the credo, before the plan—
right at the homesickness—before this list you hold
in your exhausted hand. Oh put it down.
...

here. Have been for centuries. No, longer. Everything already has
been. It's not a reasonable place, this continuum between us, and yet
here again I put the olive trees in, turn the whole hill-sweeping grove down, its
mile-long headfuls of leaves upswept so the whole valley shivers its windy silvers,

watery ... A strange heat is upon us. Again. That was you thinking that. I suggested it.
Maybe the wind did. We both put in the horizon line now, the great loneliness, its
grip, chaos recessed but still there. After finitude you shall keep coming toward me
it whines, whitish with non-disappearance. We feel the same about this. The same

what? We feel is there more. That's the default. We want to live with the unknown in
front of us. Receding, always receding. A vanishing moving over it all. A sleepy
vacancy. It's the sky, yes, but also this thinking. As from the start, again, here I am,
a mind alone in the fields. The sheep riding and falling the slants of earth. The

sleepiness a no-good god come to assume we are halfwits, tending, sleepy, the
animals gurgling and trampling, thistle-choked, stinging. A dove on a stone. No sky
to speak of, the god lingers, it wants to retire, it thinks this is endgame, what
could we be — mist about to dry off, light about to wipe a wall for no reason, that

random. This must have been way BC. Or is it 1944. Surely in 2044 we shall be
standing in the field again, tending, waiting to surprise the god who thinks he knows
what he's made. Well no. He does not know. We might be a small cavity but it
guards a vast hungry — how bad does that hurt you, fancy maker — you have no idea

what we turned our back on to come be in this field of earth and tend — yes tend —
these flocks of minutes, whispering till the timelessness in us is wrung dry and we
are heavied with endgame. Have I mentioned the soul. How we know you hustled
that in, staining all this flesh with it, rubbing and swirling it all over inside with

your god-cloth. Rinse. Repeat. Get this — here with this staff which soon I shall turn
into a pen again — brilliantly negligent, diligent, inside all this self truly formless — I
hear the laughter of the irrigation ditch I've made, I see the dry field blonde-up and
green, day smacks its lips, they are back, the inventors, they are going to do it

again, sprinkle-seed, joker rain coming to loosen it all. How many lives will we be
given, how many will we trade in for this — it comes in bushels, grams, inches, notes,
crows watch over it all as they always have, come back from the end of time to caw
it into its redo again. Cherish us. Will not stop. Nothing to show for it but doing. The

flock runs across as the dog chases and I walk slowly. I admire what I own what I am
and I think the night is nothing, the stars click their ascent, I feel it rise in me, the
word, I feel the skull beneath this skin, I feel the skin slick and shine and hide the
skull and it is from there that it rises now, I taste it before I say it, this song.
...

Dying, Dad wanted sunscreen. Nonstop. Frantic if withheld. Would say
screen, and we just did it. Knew he was dying. Was angry.
In last weeks wore red sleepmask over eyes day and night. Would
ride it up onto his forehead for brief intervals, then down, pulled by
hand that still worked. A bit. Sometimes shaking too much so just
cried eyes. Cried now now. Once cried out light — more like a hiss — was
there for that. Yanked it quick. Needed it so badly, the bandage, the

world is a short place, wanted the illustration of it gone, wanted to not
see out, wanted no out. But I am guessing. The vineyards down the slope,
each latent bud beginning to plump. In the distance, mountains. Beyond
sea. All of it distraction, but from what. A waste of what. The red
sleepmask. I should have burned it with the rest but kept it. The pane
made trees look painted on. Silky. Not good silky. In the next valley once,
hammering. Thought it human at first. The woodpeckers went on for

days. A carnival of searching for void. How full void is. Small tufts of
grass growing so that I can keep track. Taking root is not an easy way to
go about finding a place to stay. Maybe nothing would happen after
all. The hollowing-out now added to by crickets. Spiders making
roads in sky. I watch. Look at, then through. What is the empty
part? Where. Can find nothing that is empty. Seems I should, and soon, as
where would he go, or what would the indented place on the bed where

he had been be. Be full of. He was a settler in that flesh, that I could see.
Not far from breaking camp. Wrapping up the organs in their separate
parts — skin rolled away, eyes rolled elsewhere, the fingers tossed
aside — ash, ash — the whole like a dime toss, whom do I love, what part,
what's in the whom, what's in the late, is there actually a too late — 
because if there is I do not grasp it. Mask he calls, unable to get into
wheelchair any longer, stares for bit of time into the air out front, past

feet, out the glass door, to the olive tree and fig. Is there fire in the
distance. Squints once back up the ray of light, up, back its long road.
How far. Mask now. The cremation-decision driving its roots through us
all — roots spreading wildly beyond the shadows of the head. "Neighbors"
will continue to feed stump, book says, long after it is cut, will send it
sugars, phosphorous, nitrogen, all the surrounding trees will try, via
fungi, root hairs, send carbon, send enzymes, whole forest hears

stress signals, will mourn, like the elephant — "I've wrapped stumps in
black plastic when they've refused to die" says Leila, location Wellington,
posted 4 years ago on permagardening. But then guard down. Eyes gone.
A red cotton mask. An old TWA one. Elastic gone. Cries out if it slips off.
Wants blue blanket. Says blue. Angry. Who was not angry. Nothing
enough. Wants to see all daily tests. Read the bloodwork. Wants trans-
fusions which we withhold. Would open him to infection. Would buy no

time. I'm wearing the sleepmask now. I'm trying it on. Rubberband soft
with age. Adding more age. American red. Red full of noise, of artificial
time. Feels like my face is painted on. A spirit. Upturned, ancient, without
expression. An old stream flows alongside. Glimmering tongues promise
the vanishing will be swift. It's a lie. The periphery disappears but I can
still feel it, our knowing what's coming a thicket we got lost in — till the
only thing is now — mask my spirit screams — mask now — vacancy

not coming fast enough — before we have to traverse the riddling
disappearances — extinction says the mask — go away now I do not want
to see you any longer — beauty you are too near — too near — I hear a
blackbird and the shoo of air where it lifts off — why won't you just
go, you circling winds leaves birds systems directions visibles invisibles
honeysuckle limbs and rose gaining self-song, motion, entering this
continuum — oh continuum do not lie to me with this delicate weight of

time, this floating of as ifs and further-ons and all your guides to
dreaming, abundance, the coming true of the true. No. From under here,
listening hard, light feels around me almost visible, doused with
benzene, and time goes away, and my eyes feel on them the small weight,
the minuscule no to things, which I can conjure, which I think I know by
heart, but no, I do not, I need the mask. And it feels like an
idea. We are in a cave now. It is a hundred million years ago. They will

bring the meds again now and the urine pot — he yells for it — but for now
under the mask it is a lowly spot, you can make dawn come
you can feel us inherit the earth, the jay shifts in the tree and you can
hear it. There is little. You hear the little. Hear the head snapped on the
stem. Hear the angel trapped in the stone. Hear pure chance which
sounds like a boy marching alongside an army wanting to enlist. The
year is 1490, 380, 1774, 10 BCE. You hear the outline in the tree — why — 

because it touches the other outlines. If I try to raise the mask the hand
he can barely use flutters angry bird wing at me. Would hit me with
finger wings but too broken. Maybe in Lee's army, maybe in Grant's. It
made no difference in the end. Maybe in Caesar's maybe in Christ's. The
trillions seem more clear than ever in the day behind the mask. The dark
gray of the fever feels every inch of the bark. Freckled, the pure
proclamations being made by the light. It is not day it is saying, bright as

quicklime, text of flames he can hear — no, not day — day sprawls under
to let us flow through over its parched back. Lies flat. Lie flat day he
thinks under the red mask. Spread yourself over us light, the dead at
Antietam yes his people, both sides, the cufflinks in the drawer he will
not see again — they were Lee's he would say — they were Grant's — I saw
the will of the Davis side — I did — he says, smell of gravel coming from
the path, day sitting now over us like a lioness. It is neither dark nor

light. As if you are the place where the branch was sawed off — that place
on the oak — and air silently touched your new raw end. You put it on,
you pull it down, and then effort, enlistment, singing, and you are given a
fine practitioner's absence, you are a purpose surrounded by chance, a
hole in chance. You can feel the clouds move over the sun from here. You
can hear the sun return and insect-hum spray up. You can lie still and feel
this is the ultimate price. You feel it getting paid. By you. It is you.
...

Dying only mother's hands continue
undying, blading into air,
impersonal, forced, curving it
down — drought incessant rain
revolution and the organs shutting
down but not these extremities,
here since I first opened my first
eyes first day and there they were,
delicate, pointing, will not back off,
cannot be remembered. Mother,
dying — mother not wanting to
die — mother scared awakening
each night thinking she's dead —
crying out — mother not
remembering who I am as I run
in — who am I — mother we must
take away the phone because who
will you call next — now saying I
dreamt I have to get this dress on, if
I get this dress on I will not die —
mother who cannot get the dress on
because of broken hip and broken
arm and tubes and coils and pan
and everywhere pain, wandering
delirium, in the fetid shadow-
world — geotrauma — trans-
natural — what is this message
you have been scribbling all your
life to me, what is this you drag
again today into non-being. Draw it.
The me who is not here. Who is the
ghost in this room. What am I that
is now drawn. Where are we
heading. Into what do you throw
me with your quick eye — up onto
me then down onto the blank of the
page. You rip the face
off. I see my elbow there where
now you bend it with the pen, you
fill it in, you slough it off me onto
more just-now making of more
future. You look back up, you take
my strangeness from me, you
machine me, you hatch me in. To
make what, mother, here in this
eternity this second this million
years where I watch as each thing is
seen and cancelled-out and re-
produced — multiplying aspects of
light in the morning air — the
fingers dipping frantic into the bag
of pens, pencils, then here they
are — the images — and the hands
move — they are making a
line now, it is our world,
it horizons, we ghost, we sleepwalk,
everything around us is leveled,
canceled, we background, we
are barely remains, we remain, but
for what, the fingers are deepening
curling, bringing it round, the mind
does not — I don't think — know this
but the fingers, oh, for all my life
scribbling open the unseen,
done with mere things, not
interested in appraisal, just
seizure — what is meant by
seizure — all energy, business-
serious, about direction, tracing
things that dissolve from thingness
into in-betweens — here firm lines,
here powdery lift off — hunger,
fear — the study begins — all is not
lost — the thought a few seconds
wide — the perusal having gone
from here to here, aggregates,
thicket, this spot could be where
we came in, or where we are saved,
could be a mistake, looks across
room through me, me not here
then, me trying to rise in the beam,
nothing I do will make it
happen, rock-face, work that
excludes everything that is not
itself, all urge in the process of
becoming all effect, how can I touch
that hand like snow moving, when
is it time again as here there is no
time, or time has been loaded but
not cocked, so is held in reserve, all
wound up, I was also made but not
like this, I look for reluctance,
expectation, but those are not the
temperatures — if only I could be in
the scene — my time is not
passing — whose is the time that is
passing — the hands rushing across
the paper, cloudy with a sun
outside also rushing scribbling —
wisdom turning itself away from
wisdom to be — what — a thing that
would gold-up but cannot, a patch
of blue outside suddenly like the
cessation of language when lips
cease to move — sun — self-
pronouncing — I want this to not be
my writing of it, want my hands not
to be here also, mingling with hers
who will not take my hand ever into
hers, no matter how late we are, no
matter that we have to run so fast
through all these people and I need
the hand, somewhere a radiant
clearing, are we heading for it, head
down towards the wide page, hand
full of high feeling, cannot tell if it
takes or gives, cannot tell what it is
that is generating the line, it comes
from the long fingers but is not
them, all is being spent, the feeling
that all — all that we need or have —
would be spent for this next thing
this capture, actually loud though
all you can hear is the small
scratching, and I feel dusk
approaching though it is still early
afternoon, just slipping,
no one here to see this but me, told
loud in silence by arcs, contours,
swell of wind, billowing, fluent —
ink chalk charcoal — sweeps, spirals,
the river that goes
nowhere, that has survived the
astonishments and will never
venture close to that heat again, is
cool here, looking up at what,
looking back down, how is it
possible the world still exists, as it
begins to take form there, in the not
being, there is once then there is the
big vocabulary, loosed, like
a jay's song thrown down when the
bird goes away, cold mornings,
hauling dawn away with it, leaving
grackle and crow in sun — they have
known what to find in the unmade
undrawn unseen unmarked and
dragged it into here — that it be
visible.
...

Late in the season the world digs in, the fat blossoms
hold still for just a moment longer.
Nothing looks satisfied,
but there is no real reason to move on much further:
this isn't a bad place;
why not pretend

we wished for it?
The bushes have learned to live with their haunches.
The hydrangea is resigned
to its pale and inconclusive utterances.
Towards the end of the season
it is not bad

to have the body. To have experienced joy
as the mere lifting of hunger
is not to have known it
less. The tobacco leaves
don't mind being removed
to the long racks—all uses are astounding

to the used.
There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—
noon, for instance, or all the single victories
of gravity, or the kudzu vine,
most delicate of manias,
which has pressed its luck

this far this season.
It shines a gloating green.
Its edges darken with impatience, a kind of wind.
Nothing again will ever be this easy, lives
being snatched up like dropped stitches, the dry stalks of daylilies
marking a stillness we can't keep.
...

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change—
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
...