My father, ninety years ago,
at the age of – my guess – ten,
walked three miles through the forest
on his way to school

along the sedgy wetfoot shore
of the brimming eel-filled rush-fringed
peat-brown river,
leaving a trail of jittering blackflies,
his hands already broad and deft
at the ends of his fraying sleeves.

Along this path he noticed
everything: mushroom and scat, wildbloom,
snail and iris, clubmoss, fern and cone.

 

It must have been an endless
breathing in: between
the wish to know and the need to praise
there was no seam.

One day he saw a drenched log floating
heavily downstream,
and on it a butterfly, blue as eyes.
This was the moment (I later heard)
that shot him off on his tangent

into the abstruse world
of microscopes and numbers,
lapel pins, cars, and wanderings,

away from the ten square miles
of logged-out bushlots
he never named as poverty,
and the brown meandering river
he was always in some way after that
trying in vain to get back to.

Heart

Some people sell their blood. You sell your heart.

It was either that or the soul.

The hard part is getting the damn thing out.

A kind of twisting motion, like shucking an oyster,
your spine a wrist,

and then, hup! it’s in your mouth.
You turn yourself partially inside out
like a sea anemone coughing a pebble.

There’s a broken plop, the racket
of fish guts into a pail,

and there it is, a huge glistening deep-red clot

of the still-alive past, whole on the plate.

 

It gets passed around. It’s slithery. It gets dropped,
but also tasted. Too coarse, says one. Too salty.
Too sour, says another, making a face.
Each one is an instant gourmet,
and you stand listening to all this
in the corner, like a newly hired waiter,
your diffident, skillful hand on the wound hidden
deep in your shirt and chest,
shyly, heartless.