Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing. Marianne Boruch

      never an extra boat either.

      I heard things once, blurring out of sleep

      or some other elsewhere to

      none of us the same. The same what?

      After. As in, between and among now

      for a long time.

The Breathing

      Think back with a shovel, bend,

      do that.

      Who’s breathing through these tubes now?

      So this is how you

      plant trees in Scotland all afternoon.

      We take instruction. The translucence

      of it. Each plastic cylinder the exact shade of

      a stem tall and suddenly wide, slipped

      over sapling after sapling

      sunk into earth, tied, staked against wind.

      The mallet comes down.

      January. A wee walk, we’re told,

      to get here. Fields this old,

      the lives that lived. To ask anything

      is to lose the question —

      Hills plus sheep plus cold. Air like wet gauze

      but sun, a bright accident.

      Still: who’s breathing through these tubes now.

      I see plain enough, upright

      nether-vents, their cool green

      so many rows made

      in the making. Barely trees at all

      hidden, each incandescence.

      It’s the shovel, abrupt.

      It’s the fierce

      stopped, to fierce again

      the suck, the lift up

      to go deep

      a stunned thing.

      It must draw them, the dead.

      Both the violence and the ceasing must

      remind them.

      Because haven’t they come

      to lie here, their half-light just visible under

      old stalks and grass. Dusk, with its

      new dead and old dead…

      And true, isn’t it — that

      we’ve pleasured them. True that our

      hammering in breath

      is another breath.

      Not that I love you, the mouths they had

      through oak, willow now, birch

      will say —

a

      They wore out the a

      in the letterpress case only after

      a few thousand hits under the inked rollers,

      pulling the crank, turning

      the giant wheel.

      Must have been 1820. Thereabouts.

      Wanderer, glory-run of letters: thereabouts.

      Hunger took its due from

      the belly of the a.

      So? All kept reading it

      as a — those who could read — and anyway,

      a bite out of that apple proves

      our kind mortal. Rare good paper

      into page until most everything about the a

      was shot. Practically prayer, humility,

      a great foreboding not just

      bare-bones frugal.

      Simple aaaa from that a —

      first letter loved, to hear it ache and fill

      even at half-breath.

      Look, it’s standard. No one but

      a divine being or two makes perfect copy.

      Real case in point: my now-and-again body so

      poorly echoed off my mother, my father

      out of a broken skull simmering

      in a bog, BC probably, long before AD

      pretended anything in order. Earlier, our whole

      dark hole of a planet copied

      unto itself via earthquake, flood, star shard,

      raging molten ball in the middle, some

      big bang’s idea

      of a flawed, proper start.

      For a while there, the tiny a

      wounded. What it does.

      Doing, to herald

      every human sentence.

Aubade with Grass, Some Trees

      Water on the ground and whatever will stay put

      but I can’t see that well. Or far.

      What for, the deer out there. Not now. Not

      with the rain. But two of them yesterday.

      Even here, the sound of cars and their distance.

      No song is complete without

      some straying into the minor key but

      what does such happiness mean. And who said

      why first. And to whom, looking sideways

      at what. Grass. Some trees. The furious shrill

      of the legendary largest woodpecker

      you almost never spot. I don’t listen. I’m like

      before I was. A stone. Or fish.

      If a fish, how do I know the life in the pond

      any different than the life in me. Mindlessness

      is sweet. Oh this in-spite-of in the morning.

      Because they forget. In captivity, round and round

      the fishbowl radiant, willing.

In June

      I can’t help but

      think about the dead. Everywhere

      their flowers burn bright.

      Roses lift the trellis, lie

      about their thorns. Then the feather-like

      lavender I can sweep

      with my hand — that scent

      wakes anyone. Oldest question,

      oldest answer: so the dead

      go where? A shrug,

      a blank look. Or the stories

      we’ve heard and heard,

      nodded