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Coconut Milk, 2015

It is the fish that bring them first. Cod in such numbers as to seem endless. Cod to fill the nets and bellies of hungry Europeans with the tender white flesh. Cod, it seems to them, without end. They fill the ships, salting the fish down in barrels, til the hull is full, and head back home. This wet cod-fishing goes on for years, far out in the Banks, with only an occasional stop on land. We dry our fish in the sun cure it in smoke-houses and sure enough, the foreigners hear about it. Soon they need a land base to dry the cod which weighs less than when wet tastes better, too it is these dreams of cod that first bring the French to land dreams of cod the gold of the sea that will fill their bellies and their pockets

A strong song tows us, long earsick. Blind, we follow rain slant, spray flick to fields we do not know. Night, float us. Offshore wind, shout, ask the sea what’s lost, what’s left, what horn sunk, what crown adrift. Where we are who knows of kings who sup while day fails? Who, swinging his axe to fell kings, guesses where we go?

Always the evening noises, the footsteps on the stairs, the day that rises in the throat. A turn of the key will expel the world. Against the extinct forest of furniture, the channeled bloodstream translates the dream into this small life. In the end we shrink until finally we can no longer inhabit the gestures of our childhood. A nail in a board: the remains of a fence; blurred memory of the mountain that raised the tree, that brooded over its ore. Modest against a hedge, a spade dreams its beautiful death. “Simple and calm,” nourished on weeds and wind, the image moves, distilling its own memory. Far off, we disappear into the ochre and the gold, the mud-brown and the primordial green. The slightest evidence of life. In the courtyard's silence, the barking of that dog. A shutter, merely, that's banging. Those books stacked in one corner of the room. Everything that, ordinarily, follows its automated course. And there, all at once: the happiness that spreads its billion pinpricks through the body. Evening's voice unreels its argument. Five floors below, the courtyard and its echoes. The barking still, and overhead the footsteps of regret in the maids' rooms. I'll try to have given each thing my word before giving in to sleep. The room breathes deeply the music of a quartet. It's that grave well-being, unexpectedly, you know? Nobody. You may speak. I'm not there. A gesture: the garden diffuses the pale green taste of currants. One remains quiet as long as possible. Another gesture: the sun rips open the scent of the lindens. Childhood leaps over the wall. The miracle would be having something to say. Maybe we could have inhabited that smile, over there, at the other end of the room; or else we could have met at the improbable dawn of memory. Maybe we could have fallen asleep in the twilight of this autumn when the brain is nothing more than oak and leather. But we have only this thin life to place beneath the axe. The crows in the plowed field, black against the field's ochre, gleaming and black amid the smell of moist earth, a smell mixed with the brush and bark and roots that the wind returns as someone somewhere burns them. And then that pile of words that rots with helplessness. In the forest, the sound, dry and brief, of a pebble in a streambed, fallen after patient millennia into the earth's darkness. Just a dry sound and its echo, quickly engulfed by birdcalls. And later, on the path, drops of blood from the trees. A farmer carriers his tools slowly toward the shed. In the atmospheric silence, a woodpecker registers the sound of its life's work. That's all. Some animals, a pile of wood, and the smell of rain, which always calls to mind something that can't quite be reconstructed. Acrid smoke; and then that crackling of the woods in the clearing. A few centimeters above the cut weeds, the tenuous vapor of memory. Between eyelashes, amid the colors of the woods, the colors of weeds, and earth, that sky, that patch of sky, that sky. The courtyard, the wood bench, the sputtering of the fishpond, the smell of humus, the smell of mushroom. Five notes in the rain sketch the presence of a bird. The village, the morning, belong to the birds. Images flow freely through the alleys. Silence full of events: the eyes prey on a shadow. A gull's passing reshapes all the shores of the world. Birdcalls cut through the fog, wet grass: morning. The rectangle of a wall says: “blank,” nothing else. On the horizon, very nearby, a woman dressed in black glides silently across her wide open destiny. Between branches, near the sun, the moon, which opens the night to the night. I sink, gently, and disappear. On the surface, alone, the cry of an owl keeps watch. The stairs, the brass doorknob, the smell of dark corners. The iron bed, the red bedspread. Slow breathing. That song that waits for nothing but our melody. We are of the morning, of the gently sloping hour that comes slowly down from the sun. The old clothes in the corner are tinged with the morning's color, which will have to be worn. The lark's song widens the silence. Deep in the forest, the cuckoo, the woodpecker, the chiaroscuro of ancient musics. Heavy wagons clench their signal-lights toward the heights of the opaque sky. I moved with closed words across the homeland that sleeps me. From this far country, where you respond to me without my hearing a word of yours, without perhaps my words ever reaching you, from this country where perhaps we understand each other, I overhear the most contradictory noises, which veil and deny your voice, and which would like to make me believe that I'm speaking alone.

It was Christmastime, the balloons needed blowing, and so in the evening we sat together to blow balloons and tell jokes, and the cool air off the hills made me think of coffee, so I said, “Coffee would be nice,” and he said, “Yes, coffee would be nice,” and smiled as his thin fingers pulled the balloons from the plastic bags; so I went for coffee, and it takes a few minutes to make the coffee and I did not know if he wanted cow’s milk or condensed milk, and when I came out to ask him, he was gone, just like that, in the time it took me to think, cow’s milk or condensed; the balloons sat lightly on his still lap.

The guest who came in to the street people’s suppers last night, An elderly man with a lost smart little boy’s face and a look As if he might turn against you anytime soon, As if he’d just come into this world and he was extremely Wary about what the world was going to be, and he said, “If I ask you a question will you give me a truthful answer?” And I said, “That depends on what the question is,” Thinking the little elderly boy looked sophisticated and As if he’d in fact been a long time in the world And would get the tone right, and maybe he did, or maybe he didn’t; At any rate he went on to ask the question, “When I come into places like this and there are people holding Coffee cups to their lips and they look at me, Are they about to drink the coffee or not to drink the coffee?” He was balancing the world on the tip of his witty unknowing nose. I felt like I was falling down someplace else than anywhere there.

Two days into the flood they appear, moored against a roof eave or bobbing caught in the crowns of drowned trees. Like fancy life boats from an adventurer’s flag ship, brass plating and grips, walnut sheen, scroll work, they slip through the understory on this brief, bad river. What have they discovered and come back to account? Or is this the beginning of the marvelous voyage and they plan never to return?

When I take my scissors to your shirts, I am frightened: not that they will whimper But that they won’t understand the violence I mean. That kind of violence is the other side of love, Bright as a light-saber and permanent As the angel’s swords above Eden Barring that couple with a final X, That violence means a love strong as death. Once Sie ist mein leben, you said, meaning me And I took those words personally And knocked upon the door of my heart Until all its birds flooded to you, in a rush— Like the Iroquois, I tugged on our peace-pipe, I wrote your name in smoke. Then went home With my pockets rolling in shining glass beads, My pockets so rich with the coin of your country.

My change: a nickel caked with finger grime; two nicked quarters not long for this life, worth more for keeping dead eyes shut than bus fare; a dime, shining in sunshine like a new dime; grubby pennies, one stamped the year of my birth, no brighter than I from 40 years of wear. What purses, piggy banks, and window sills have these coins known, their presidential heads pinched into what beggar's chalky palm-- they circulate like tarnished red blood cells, all of us exchanging the merest film of our lives, and the lives of those long dead. And now my turn in the convenience store, I hand over my fist of change, still warm, to the bored, lip-pierced check-out girl, once more to be spun down cigarette machines, hurled in fountains, flipped for luck--these dirty charms chiming in the dark pockets of the world.

The smell, once water has rinsed it, is like a field of ripe grain, or the grain held in a truck, and if you climb the steel side, one foot lodged on the hubcap, the other on the wheel, and pull your body upward, your hands holding to tarp hooks, and lift toes onto the rim of the truck box, rest your ribs against the side, you will see beetles and grasshoppers among the hulled kernels. Water stirs and resurrects harvest dust: sun beating on abundance, the moist heat of grain collected in steel, hands plunging and lifting, the grain spilling back.