Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing. Marianne Boruch

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      medievals, high-wire beings not of this earth

      stretched, stunned to bone-limit, made possible again

      by what they cannot bear to see. Now. Which is

      lifetimes ago. I lose track of my transitions.

The Painting

      Two brush-stroked boats, so-so weather, more detail

      forward than aft, heavy

      on shaded bits as

      simple reflection, the mast dropping in water blurred.

      Blur it more, gloom it up, says the teacher.

      Use a rag and something stingy.

      To look and look, is all.

      Salt, fish air at dawn, turpentine. Or evening, that one.

      To remember the past as

      this painting remembers — beautiful, a little dull.

      And maybe it was.

      In fact, water can turn out demanding. Not staying put,

      too much at odds in that glitter.

      And people expect a quiet thing to hang on a wall

      to forget their own noise.

      That old guy bumming cigarettes for real

      looked the part of another century, the ancient fisherman

      contentedly mending nets in a time

      with time to retie knots. So we

      like to believe. And some would

      sketch him right in, work him over like an afterthought,

      historical. Better yet, to comment

      ironic or just short of it. With him, without,

      finally the worn reliable straightforward

      sea, harbor, dream. Also this

      for the record — three, not two boats. And those

      warehouses weren’t pink, didn’t

      watery-ache like the shadow they cast.

      To be an artist, the best part — you, you’re in

      and then it’s the same

      but you’re not the same. Smoke

      from a factory on the other side, a small one

      but billowing soot and ash anytime, a bad idea.

      Or a good one, meaning

      world. Which could threaten. Or end.

      Go for a larger, darker resonance. The teacher

      saying so says

      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 —

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