Maureen N. McLane

As a man may go to Costco, Buy the jumbo pak of diapers, double liters of Coke and Diet Coke and a sixpack and stock up on Doritos and Cheetos and Eveready batteries, so I perhaps Formless in the vast republic Grasp the metaphysical thing, commodity, crucially desired Hologram of national intent. Caught In the managed aisle the Jargon of experts washes o'er the perfectly stacked Special K, Cheerios, Wheaties, Apple Jacks, and Count Chocula Low on the shelves that toddlers might harry their Mothers for sweet breakfast treats. In Niger the children and livestock go hungry Once more but a fortified peanut butter paste Plumpy'nut promises to revive those babies Quickly who are not yet too far gone. Research has given us hope that all Shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well Till the moment it's not. It's not. Unto the lord Julian of Norwich poured forth her Voice. Into the desert the Tuareg Wander, their herds and children starved. Between ocean Expanses a people of plenty' chatter brawl and sometimes Yawn. Days so short it seems the earth is Zooming unto its longsought anonymous abyss.

cold birds still sing a bright sun chill air snow entombing precocious crocuses tricked by a spring now falsened ❏ cherry trees ... Good Friday ... —treatise: on the use of trees ❏ a flyblown carcass in the underbrush below the cypress in the cemetery : the dead above : the dead below ❏ like a Fantin-Latour the clutch of flowers in your hand and apple frothing the air ❏ the life you're not leading the blood you're not bleeding the knot you're not kneading the mouth you're not feeding the earth you're not seeding ❏ they're grooming the lawns for the graduates and the proud parents and meanwhile the yellowthroat sings unconcerned— cherries just gone by their faded blossoms thick against the insurgent leaves offer the very figure of spring melancholy o I missed when they were fully in bloom & the season & the time for the perfect spring haiku to hail another winter survived where among the redbud blooms exploding along the thin branches is my death written ❏ earth conspiring against me have a child to load the earth with vines with lives with signs songs & cries ❏ insistent crow cardinal whoop peepers booming open the night stabbing life into your heart the odious air reverberant ❏ that was no song but an alarm call ❏ the rhythmic thunk of the basketball thwacking the tarmac at the little park a block over . . . boys . . . calls . . . and the rain holding off— a May nor'easter deferring the fullest spring we might have had but leaving the lilacs to extend their delicate thrusting into the air the boys birds and blossoms share ❏ say that a heron perched immobile until alert the head turns ❏ the weather is far more violent here and present or so it seems days one's attention is open to the cloudthrottled air lit by a near-equinoctial sun—the nights too extend to a farther horizon the stars legible in this particular sky to those able and wishing to scry, too many years looking inward thinning the lexicon of the visible world its oracular reality sounding itself all along these maples that stone that garden fountain the mists rolling in over the mountains disguising the sky the world gone slate its greens drained as that fountain before the first frost the rain is passing and the lilacs the thunder the day but what have you held beheld beset as you are by yourself ❏ signing my best beset instead reveals itself the key an extra e lone vowel tiny howl I did not do what my hands did ❏ wavelap and lakeslap lick the ear; the air carries stripes in the low precincts of sky— a mower blares somewhere above A and shuts off a shock of silence into which the wave- slaps surge ❏ to enter the water in Mayan to die ❏ over there the gray gathering sheath meant rain but our private sun continues to sign- post a clear day at least for us. an earthquake in China means precisely what to me wondered Adam Smith— the world disappearing the instant my tooth aches: Sartre my skin some days extends as wide as the sea and the waves of the world roll through, equable terrible but I am living this narrow life and no other except yours I imagine some days we're graced or grazed by a shared bullet ❏ today no thrush silvered the air in the woods the wind blowing hard against the bike passing a stretch of field where tractors for miles around come to die the iron congregation rusting faithful as the grass, the cows at Saywards Farm seemed too confined why aren't they grazing in the field and why are their calves wired in— late last night after the sunset I did not see the lake took on that babyish blue I so love and I saw a sole balloon aloft lifting over Vergennes puffing by Camel's Hump and heading east— we have harnessed the air for our pleasure our leisure a rhyme with the weather clearing as if the skies cared or could ❏ radios and weathervanes conduct the air disperse manes ❏ mountains deforested by distance Hokusai shapes cut against the sky the clouds address just so and through the same air the radio pours its usual brew of cheer & death what wonder little schizo you reel so in the fractured world the sky bends to my way and to yours and to home sweet home ❏ my soul marching through the open fifths of its salvation shapenotes shaping me home ❏ not the sun but the sun in the river not the moon but the lake-swallowed moon the stars cracking open the black paved road where immortals strode

Recalcitrant elephants begin to attack. The angry young males of murdered mothers. Any Martian could see it how we did it The historian of   the future is amazed. So much feeling once in so many bodies. But maybe they were different didn’t think or feel that much

It's not that I'm opposed to poison in my lips or pig in my soap— it's not that I'm opposed. It's not that I'm opposed to plastic bottles that won't decompose to malodorous phosphorus flows— it's not that I'm opposed to what you propose— surgery on your imperfect nose favelas blasted with hoses— it's not that I'm opposed to opposing the opposite of anonymous neighbors, the nosy stargazers who discover new celebrity planets about to crash into your car. It's not that I'm opposed that we drive when it's not very far to walk or bike not opposed you're opposed to the subway the stink of the general— train 4, 5, or 6–not opposed to the sex on Craigslist to your pets' special tricks to the organized slaughter of cows by the tenderest machines— not opposed to your dreams to their screams to our hopes not opposed to the hordes with their ropes knives and bombs set in desolate streets slums and thrumming towns not opposed to your proms and baptisms to ongoing Christian schisms most unopposed to fierce Muslims Jews Baha'is and Hindus posed in poses temples now oppose the Kama Sutra too ooh-la-la for the petit-bourgeois members of the BJP —not opposed to a big GDP to a loud ATV not opposed to anything I can see hear or touch to "enough or too much"— It's not that I'm opposed to whatever I should propose opposing, knowing knowing is thinning in the species' extra inning on a world slow spinning on an axis slightly tilting into folly so is it folly to suppose you could oppose proposing something to oppose

Like all children Mz N lived in archaic mythic zones and all the neighbors and kin played their parts to a T although they never were able to tell her the whole story. § The child Mz N sat on her bed and wondered: that tree outside her window shifted when her eye shifted. What to make of that? § Mz N and her siblings had a dog for some time. They went on vacation & when they came back no dog. They asked the parents: the dog? who replied: what dog? And some people wonder why others distrust the obvious. § One year Mz N began her great project of investigative touch. Like everything it came about through reading and happenstance. Mz N had a friend who said I do it and then I worry what if my roommate hears? What if? Mz N wondered went home and discovered a new octave. § Mz N sometimes thinks what N stands for: Nothing. One day she said nihilism in school & the teacher paused, chalk between her fingers like her longed-for cigarette. What's nīhilism another student said I thought it was neehilism. This was another example of Mz N bringing up topics that went Nowhere. § the blackest black is not so black it cannot take a blacker black so Mz N thinks the void would speak if void could speak or of color think Mz N is writing what she hopes will be a masterpiece:Mispronunciation: the definitive autobiography. She only includes the bloopers she remembers. She is very strict like that. What's vá-gi-na —hard g— she called to her parents age five when they'd plopped her on the sofa with a picture book to help her learn where babies. Some years later she told a story at dinner about being very angry with a persecuting teacher. I spoke she sd with great ve-hé-mence. Her father laughed a somewhat unkind laugh and asked her to repeat it. She did & once again he laughed. Mz N vehemently objects to the making fun of children who struggle every day to get their words and bodies aligned § one day after sex in a century of bad sex the other one asked Mz N did I leave you on the edge never having had an orgasm as far as she knew she sd quite definitively no how would she know such an edge are you sure the other persisted Mz N thought again she could say quite definitively oh yes here I am on the edge where you left me the edge of a certain abyss but this she knew was the answer to a question no one was asking § Mz N embarks one day upon a sonnet attracted by the knowledge that it's dead extinct like dinosaur dodo or bonnet long replaced by baseball caps on heads that centuries ago were piled with curls birds powder wires and such machinery 'twould blow the minds of tattooed boys and girls who cruise the streets of this new century Mz N concedes she's antiquarian old hat old news—"hoarder of ancient dirt" to quote the mouldy Scot John Pinkerton but from her dead-end path she won't divert the airplane made the train a living fossil relict herself she listens for its whistle § Wordsworth never took a plane but Mz N takes a plane with Wordsworth on her mind and other matters: love, fear, a wish to die. Wordsworth had a very sturdy mind and legs that took him far into the mountains, Scottish glens, German towns and yes across the Alps. Mz N has never seen the Alps nor Snowdon nor a mountain anywhere beyond the ancient Adirondacks Wordsworth too she thinks would like their worndown humps their pathless woods the rowboats by the shores of placid lakes ready for exploring. Young Wordsworth stole a rowboat rowed out on a lake one night and found himself appalled the mountain strode sublime after him and he trembled and his mind as Burke had said it would before sublimity near failed. There are passages in life in Wordsworth he called spots of time and Mz N has some spots she sometimes recollects. But now she's happy incredulous in love and in strange anguish wants to recollect nothing.If it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy she murmurs with the engine nearly exploding with the fragility and perverse strength of all that lives and moves and has its being in the air on the ground in the sea. Having reached a floating state of grace, surprised by joy she wants to die life can only get worse the mountain receding below them as they climb

it’s good not to drink it’s good not to piss in the sink & it’s good not to think the clarion ring of   a glass clinking with ice good to hear it fade into a past you can’t sing your dumb blues is over. admit it was always borrowed. you paid no dues you did no time but the time spent sodden. what you thought I think. your higher power’s drunk. god’s the biggest alky in the sky the clouds are whiskey sours passing by

and sex once a day a week a month a year goes by and one hyacinth only returns, frail blue against the militant grass that does cover all in the residential precinct of the New England town its roads long paved old Indian trails the steps they took toward us the first exchange for a fish two biscuits

it’s clear the wind won’t let up and a swim’s out — what you planned is scotched. forget the calls, errands at the mall — yr resolve’s superfluous as a clitoris. how miraculous the gratuitous — spandrels, cathedrals. on a sea of necessity let’s float wholly unnecessary & call that free