The Crab King
For Patricia Owens, Mary Frances Vogler, Stanley Finch

The July fourth weekend in 1999 was spent with some friends on the Neuse River in New Bern. I spent most of my time crabbing with turkey necks and pig tails. One particularly good day our large stainless steel bucket burgeoned with my bounty. However, we decided to go into town first, leaving the bucket in the kitchen. We came home and some of the gang started playing cards in the dining room, while my dog Dewitt [named after my grandfather] and I lay on the couch reading in view of the kitchen door. Suddenly Dewitt ran over to the kitchen door and began lunging back and forth from one side of the door to the other. Then we saw it. The largest crab had escaped from the bucket while we were gone and like a target at the fair was scuttling from one side of the door to the other, appearing and disappearing, then reappearing, driving our Lab, Dewitt, crazy! We finally netted the crab, crowned him Crab King, and took him back to the river as a reward for his escape. However, the next day he was the first crab snared. I found myself in a quandary then. Was he caught again because the sea was giving him up to us – the elemental sacrifice to the hunter and fishers? I wanted to create a hymn to that moment, and to the primordial exchange that has gone on throughout history. Thus, this poem, “The Crab King,” was born.

It’s not greed
that demands I should catch you,
but the Goddess
who decrees
that we should eat,
that each of us
at one time, or another, under the silver sun
will give up the self so
another might live.

You out-foxed me again and again –
sleazy pig tails
sullying the water
with their salts,
one feather floating above you
offered as a barge.

What can I give you as fair exchange?

Eye for eye?
Tooth for tooth? Or
simply praise-song in these words
which sacrifice, too,
sayeth the Lord,
as my body continues browning under summer’s lamp,
and the light goes out in you,
entering me
with atoning claws?

My promise? To live!
Live!
No longer crawling along the dirty-sanded bottom,
but up in the light,

where the skin peels.
Where the spirit has a house.

A New Usefulness

Once, knowing fullness, the jar stored corn, tomatoes, pickles, and, for a short time, a bouquet of white daisies and pink cornflowers. But that is all past. It is always dark here, and some old images refuse to come forth. The jar does not hear the wind, nor feel boiling waters. However, there is breathing, or something like breathing, awakening it each morning when a few flecks of light enter the darkness.
The jar wonders if this breathing is the world or the absence of it; or if the world still exists, really, and if not, whether the cellar floats, uprooted in space.
Without sunlight, the jar becomes dark, tanned by dust and blackened by the cellar’s loneliness. In the beginning it could see its reflection from all sides. Now, it sees only spiders and minute fields of damp earth settling on it. It looks empty, but it senses an accumulation of invisible beings, spirit-shapes that curl and multiply within the womb of its cold roundness.
Something about this jar betrays a significance. It’s possible that its shape, though pressed, repeats desire from the hand of the forge presser, for repetition is the mirror of need, and molten glass strives for perfection and finishing. Perhaps it holds some secret yet greater than molecules or amoeba. Esoteric knowledge lives in strange vessels, oftentimes common. The jar knows from experience, for example, secrets are carried in the bosom of the beet, and praise in the melon’s seed. Now, the absinthe of storing is in the basics of living: a coating of damp dust, a spider’s silvered weavings, a light, golden viscosity.
Here, things are heavy, yet always transforming. The jar’s metamorphosis has begun, mineral-encrusted, making for a new life where being held by emptiness fulfills all needs. “My, my,” it thinks, “a new and solitary usefulness.”

The Seeker
For Anna Hayes

How long I have been without an answer.

For now,
I am without one

needing a new acoustic,
much time
keeping silent.

The deer leap through tall grass:
landlocked dolphins.
The golden empire of the grass.
The deer’s telegraphic warning.

As Rilke said:
perhaps “mere being
can become an event
for us”
so that
we do not have to move toward it

but through it

(as the deer).

Like the others, I am full
as pomegranates
lavishing my rich clay
upon the tongue.

Such good odor and miracles
bright as flowered bed covers
must await us.

But where
the purest air?

With closed eyes we can feel
the clouds.
We are all waters,
all unfoldment and melody,
stars
revolving in frigid air.

Rilke again:

“We simply don’t know
what need destroys in a heart,

what it erects.”