Prizewinners
$5,000
Shannon Amidon of Hilo, Hawaii for Later they call the movers; Rueda after Keaukaha Beach; The Door to the Moon
Brian Brodeur of Fairfax, Virginia for On the Porch of P.X Rutz’s Log Cabin Ten Miles Northwest of Boulder, MT; Finding the Handwriting of a Woman I Loved in a Paperback She Left Behind Years Ago; Photograph of Jack Spicer holding a Life-Sized Plaster Bust of Jack Spicer
Brieghan Gardner of Nottingham, New Hampshire for Tornadoes; Anniversary Poem; The House in the Orchard, the Orchard in the House
K. A. Hays of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania for Of the Body Taken In
Jennifer Key of Dallas, Texas for Anniversary; Fin de Siècle; We Are Easily Reduced
David Krump of La Crosse, Wisconsin for On the Invisible City; These Have Mercy/Have Not; Striking Wings of Swallows
Dawn Lonsinger of Salt Lake City, Utah for The Sewing Birds; Susan of the Fields
Susan L. Miller of Brooklyn, New York for Leaving Cape Cod; High Seas; Undertow
Miller Oberman of Brooklyn, New York for Storm of Horses; Dunx
Rachel Richardson of Greensboro, North Carolina for Girl Gathering Mussels; Fable
Ali Shapiro of Seattle, Washington for Hull; Symptoms; Water Resistance
Jennifer K. Sweeney of Kalamazoo, Michigan for Study of Family with Buckets; Inviting the Child
Sarah Sweeney of Jamaica Plain, Michigan for Lineage; Looking at Cows; Carolina Eclogue
$2,500
Lauren K. Alleyne of Geneva, New York for When the angels come; Letter to the outside; Love in A Major
Scott Cameron of Rexburg, Idaho for In a Jail in Genoa; The Songs We Keep meaning To Sing
Victoria Chang of Irvine, California for Dear P., VI; Dear P., XX
Catherine Chung of New York, New York for In Wyoming
Weston Cutter of Orange City, Iowa for Pumpernickel; And So Perhaps (After CL); Spring Prayer
Julie Dunlop of Albuquerque, New Mexico for Watching a Hindi Film Understanding Nothing
Henrietta Goodman of Missoula, Montana for Where Sadness Comes From; Clay Pigeons; The Wind I Mean
Kimi Cunningham Grant of State College, Pennsylvania for Pole Beans; Like the Hermit Thrush; Pastoral
Nicholas Gulig of Iowa City, Iowa for Chicken Coop; Married Land; Departure, the Way a Sound Arrives
Alison Pelegrin of Covington, Louisiana for Mid City Tours; Something in the Water; Stupid Praise
Anna Lena Phillips of Durham, North Carolina for Early Blackberries; Mapping; Crosses
Joshua Rivkin of San Francisco, California for The Wind; Frankenstein’s Dog; Migrant
Chad Sweeney of Kalamazoo, Michigan for Practicing to be Blind; The Second Sky over Brooklyn
Natalie Haney Tilghman of Chicago, Illinois for Uprooted
Christine Tobin of Greensboro, North Carolina for Vedran Smailovic Plays the Cello in Sarajevo
Rhett Iseman Trull of Greensboro, North Carolina for Cowboys Ride With One Hand on Their Holsters
$1,000
Corinne Adams of Edinburgh, Scotland for A Long Walk to Nishi-Kokubunji; Ice-Cream melts More Quickly in Siem Reap; Hitchhike to Hiroshima –
Jenn Blair of Winterville, Georgia for Ink; A Map is Useful,; Prison Spoon
Paula Bohince of Plum, Pennsylvania for Learning to Knit; Sunday Room; The Kind Faces of Poets
Traci Brimhall of Valrico, Florida for Kingdom Come; Nocturne with Oil Riggs and Jasmine; What We Have Lost
Danielle Cadena Deulen of Salt Lake City, Utah for Tomato; Threshold
M. Ayodele Heath of Atlanta, Georgia for South Africa: 25 Exposures
Sadiqa Khan of Kingston, Ontario, Canada for Amie; Arrival
L.S. McKee of San Francisco, California for Dear Robert, An Unwritten Postcard with the Manneken Pis; Baby Ava; Apocalypse Garden
Matthew Nienow of Bellevue, Washington for How the Summer Dries; Inukshuk; An Old Curiosity
Nikoletta Nousiopoulos of Falmouth, Massachusetts for wild poppies; grief litany; motherland
Idra Novey of New York, New York for Fist and After; Memorias do Cárcere; Meanwhile the Watermelon Seed
Jennifer Perrine of Des Moines, Iowa for Mother, Self-Portrait, 2006; The Power of the Gopher Overtakes Me
Leah Makuch Plath of Holyoke, Massachusetts for Moon Phases: For my Mother as She Turns Sixty
Ursula Sagar of London, England for Do not go down to the woods today
L.J. Sysko of Wilmington, Delaware for Epithalamium
Honorable Mention
Charles Byrne of Urbana, Illinois for Sonnet for K; Tornado; Winter
Dan Disney of Parkville, Melbourne, Australia for On Regarding Kant’s Statue; Toward a Unifying Theory of Non-Coincidence; Floortalk in front of Bellotto’s ‘Ruins of the Forum, Rome’
Hillary Faith of Clayton, North Carolina for With Teeth; Breakaway; Finally, Daddy
Rebecca Morgan Frank of Cincinnati, Ohio for Upon Seeing a Life Magazine Photograph of my Grandfather’s Release from a Civilian Prison Camp in Manila, World War II; Liberation of Santo Tomas Civilian Internment Camp, Manila, 1945; Eva Curie’s Madame Curie
Scott Gallaway of Bowling Green, Ohio for Special Electric; My Daughter’s Dream; Stucco and Primary Sclerosing Cholangiti
Chrissy Kolaya of Morris, Minnesota for Night in a Prairie Town; Factors That Control Weathering; There They Stood Exactly As They Were Created
Jen Lambert of Elkhorn, Nebraska for Dormancy; Casting Off
Sandra Lim of Chicago, Illinois for Autumn; Moon; Unopened Letters
Helena Milne of Johannesburg, South Africa for words; baby
E.K.Mortenson of Stamford, Connecticut for There, Then Not; Surgeon’s Hands; Matthew 14: 25-33
S.P.Nelson of San Diego, California for Compulsion; Christmas in July; Long Island Childhood
Gregory W. Randall of Santa Rosa, California for Grace Notes; Swim lessons; Tableaux
Christina Stoddard of Nashville, Tennessee for Arrival in Bellevue; Could You Be Happy
Joey Taouk of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia for Language; Tree; The Rooster
Penelope A. Thoms of Lovettsville, Virginia for Market Day; 32 Degrees; There Are No Children Here
You say avocado, mango, Hamakua.
Then open window trade winds.
Whale song. Ocean song. You
say endless
blue Pacific. Coastline. Breathe them to my ear. Twirl
the
invitations down my sleep-sticky canal.
My
throat opens to its own vibrations.
A hoarse
Cat-a-hou-la,
a swallow, then whisper: muscadine,
awake, tupelo, Spanish moss, cottonmouth
and
finally, moccasin.
You say but poison!
Well then, volcanoes! That
from me.
And
more, red dirt, levee. Shell road. Riverboat. Thunder.
You Pele. Hibiscus.
I hydrangea. I say Darling, hurricane, cotton bolls, firefly.
But tropical, you reason.
I offer
only rigid
spine.
You say regret, press your
palm to my navel
and you
have me. You know surrender
when you
feel it.
We three are salty from one thing or another:
sex, sweat, the sea. When I find them asleep,
my husband and our boy, awash in
mottled
sunlight, cooled by late afternoon
trades,
I pour another glass. Why not? Even my hair
is splashed clean, and my muscles are limber
from loving. When my damp skin
misses
their touch, I check again and
measure their steady
breath. I pray over them like a chieftess. The grape
is sweet butter on my tongue. My
prayer whips
the air in my mouth into clouds. My
lips blow
the clouds across their dreaming
brows: gardenia,
rain. One stirs, then the other.
They make room
for a small river between them. I
become the river.
They are the drowsing shores.
Soon the tropic moon
offers herself to us. To welcome her
we invite songs
from coqui frogs,
and her milky light floats down
that urgent music.
A blessing. In gratitude I shift
my hips and schooling menpachi glitter my center.
Ten thousand shiny eggs wait to be born.
Though he does not know magnolia
he knows the door to the moon: the
tall
blank opening through which giants
glide.
He’s watched all evening. He is certain
though he is nearly new, born less
than sixteen
moons past. But he knows the moon.
He’s seen it many times. Tonight’s crescent shines
whiter to him than any clean bones.
He doesn’t know bones though, or sorrow,
unless it is this want in the midst of
confusion.
He doesn’t know loneliness, though he lives
on the farthest rock of the most
isolated
island chain in the world. He feels
a kinship with the yellow
ripening star
fruit outside
his screenless window. Ghosts
of honeycatchers
in orchid tree blooms.
He has plumeria. Bougainvillea. Pacific sweetness
in his breath. He has whales and
their black
flukes just as he had them last
winter. Just
as he swam down his first slippery
canal
they too came home. Just as they
have
the moon it belongs to him. As they
turn
and breach toward her light he also
turns.
But tonight they have the vaulted
sky and he the shut door. If only
he could will it open and rush
into her radiance he knows he would
be happy.
When it closes again behind a nameless form,
he cannot bear the finality, the
heavy wooden
No. For
this he has a father.
So the child points to the door, wordless,
urgent. He need not work so hard.
In one wingless swoop the stronger lifts
the other, softly, as not to
disturb his desire.
In an instant they are through. The dark
licks their faces until they are all
eyes. Last
second’s limitations are erased. Open
once
was all he’d asked, all he’d ever
need.
Riding
some surge of air, three turkey vultures
glide a
mile or so down the valley, circling
in an
ascending helix—four, then five, then six.
They
drift so close to the porch we can see
their
perforated nostrils, their demon faces
turning
to scan a clearing on the ridge.
Sometimes
a prairie dog dies in the open
or a
free-range Holstein calf wanders too far.
Mostly,
it’s voles and field mice, other birds.
Last
night, we hauled water up High Ore Road
and found
a disembodied mule-deer leg
stripped
of fur and flesh, canid tooth marks
scored
along the bone, its hoof gnawed off.
We paused
in the drought grass, nodded at each other
and
walked in silence with our sloshing jugs.
Now, as
the sun glints off the corrugated outhouse,
Paul
tells me his grandfather, Elmer Gustav,
the
hermit of the family, came here to die.
The week
his test results confirmed brain cancer,
he parked
on I-15, hiked up in snowshoes,
collapsed
in chest-high drifts and went to sleep
on this
same spot where we sit drinking coffee.
Paul says
he and his father and his uncles
gathered
here after the funeral in Butte
to hunt
elk, trout-fish, play Euchre for quarters,
and take
turns telling stories about the farm
in
Northfield, Minnesota, where they all were born.
Paul goes
inside, returns with a dusty tacklebox,
and shows
me photographs of the cabin
before he
replaced the roof, faint black-and-whites
of men in
camouflage, men holding rifles
and
posing as they copped shit-eating grins
beside
the corpses of bucks strung up from trees.
Given the
chance, I would’ve joined these men,
waking at
dawn to stalk the frozen trails,
to see
the steaming nostrils of a five-point elk
standing
downwind, his big head bent
to sprigs
of grass poking through fresh snow.
Isn’t it
a kind of tribute, shooting him
and
eating his flesh, letting his death nourish me
and
stuffing his skull with sawdust for all to see?
Paul caps
the tacklebox and goes back inside.
Combing
the slopes, the turkey vultures widen
their
search, hissing, their only call.
And
because I want these birds to notice me
as I
notice them, I peel off the gauze taped to my wrist
to reveal
the gash I sustained before breakfast
when I
hacked and dragged branches of lodgepole pine.
I rise
and wave my arm at them, my offering,
and lick
my blood, tasting the salt and iron,
to taunt
them and to know what they hunger for.
It
must’ve been our last summer together
when we
drank beers on the roof of our two-bedroom
and took
the first commuter train
to the
Greater Boston Family Planning Center.
The green
fluorescents made our faces flicker.
Slumped
in a chair, she leaned on my chest and said
“I’m
going,” and fainted, grinding her teeth.
I didn’t
know what to do so I stroked her shoulder
as a
nurse cracked a capsule of smelling salts.
Next day,
the forecast called for rain.
We drove
north up 1A to Plum Island
and
walked the dunes marked Keep Off
Dunes
to flush
out piping plovers from the beach grass
because
she said she wanted to see
something
endangered before it disappeared.
We stayed
on the shore and watched the storm
drag in
off the Merrimac, and dropped to the sand
when
lightning struck the spit off Little Neck,
clinging
to each other as the squall drenched us,
the tide
frothing closer up the beach,
the
lighthouse staring seaward with its one good eye.
Hair
greased-back, half-hidden from the camera,
he
opens his mouth to kiss his own stone lips.
Did the
stone kiss back? Its cold weight seems
to lean
in
anticipation, acquiescing to the thumb stroking
its
ear, the familiar nose approaching, the living fist
squeezing
its nape to grip the base of its throat.
From
the look of strained affection on both faces,
anything
could’ve passed between the two.
Think
of those lines composed just before he died.
A
song, he wrote, Which
I shall never sing
Has
fallen asleep on my lips. Puckered or pursed,
neither
figure hints at what happened next,
how
long the two remained by the wainscoting,
waiting,
I imagine, for the other to speak.
The problem is that he sometimes
stands up for no good reason, while his
first grade teacher leans at the board explaining
the solar system, the silent “h” or butterfly
metamorphosis
and the rest of the class sits quietly
listening, or at least pretending,
until they are given some signal to stand.
But this one child, without
warning or excuse, without even knowing
he is about to do it, finds himself standing
in the middle of the room time and again,
struggling to explain as the teacher turns
to address the interruption.
She calls his parents
who call a psychiatrist whom the boy
tells that he sometimes feels
tornadoes in his legs.
He has no choice in the matter.
And we have all known
that sudden rush that seems to
spin up into the soles of the feet
out of the rolling earth itself,
spiraling through the knees and thighs
until it reaches the ribcage and one must either
stand or sing.
Most of us learn, of course, with age,
to control this urge. Otherwise,
board meetings and conference calls,
long speeches on the state of the economy could never
happen. But in the luster of those first years
before we grasp the myth
that these things matter,
most of us know for a little while
that the cords which hold us to the ground,
no more real than winds that bid us rise,
are tied with the kind of knot that vanishes
in the absence of what it was made to hold.
When we are old and especially
if you outlive me, remember
sitting here with me all these nights,
burning the ice storm’s endless offering.
All day I’ve been digging up, dividing,
replanting my grandmother’s bleeding hearts,
carried over years from garden to garden
ever since her real heart failed.
This is what we must do
with the sounds of each other’s voices,
the drifting imprint of a hundred spring nights
spent feeding these fires all blended together.
It’s not just that I’ve grown accustomed
to the shadow of your body in the chair beside me,
the way the shape of your name
fits my mouth.
But in the persistence
of such things, our whole life together
can become like a stone worn smooth and small by rain,
by repetition, so it fits in the palm of one hand.
So you can always carry it with you.
As usual, the roof is the first to go.
Then the cracks around the edges of windows
widen, imperceptibly, until wind and rain,
insects and dust move freely in and out.
The trees, too, change once left alone, grow
cluttered and tangled, and the fruit they produce
diminishes, warps and shrivels to the
unsightly apples of unkempt old age.
One tree pokes, over airy,
uncounted months, a gnarled limb
through a broken pane and into
the abandoned kitchen. There,
in smudged sunlight, a knobby, twisted,
sweetly pungent apple develops
and drops, gleaming gold,
onto the cracked blue counter.
This poem will be posted when the author provides it.
– For G.C.
Because when we embarked we stood beside
a cake tall as your average three year old
and I was too busy with the blade in my hand
and a blueprint of dismantling in my head,
determined to dissect iced trellises
of sugar and clip rose buds spun from butter,
to let your hand find its home along the hollows
a hip makes; at this embarkation I will be
less obsessed with the geometry of beauty
(my whole life I’ve tried to solve for y) ,
more meanderer than arrow, more meadow
than hedgerow, growing the way the tulips
you planted our first fall broke open, black
saucers full of evening for us to lap
in our unfolding origami of bedclothes –
that privacy that bloomed because of you.
Once and only briefly, on vacation to my parents’
azalea besotted second act in the low country,
my marriage ended under the whitewashed eaves
of a carriage house while the Saran-wrapped still life
of cocktail hour looked on – a checkerboard
of cheese and crackers, ice bucket silvered
with tributaries of condensation.
In the bath, a phalanx of tiny toiletries
awaited marching orders, but it was I who left.
Virginians, the new world had grown old,
and the family crest now flew under the banner
of Adams, our English Setter, his tail a streaming flag
and his all-knowing nose, blood rose, the needle
of a compass pointed dead South. He was
Virgil pointing us into fields foreign and flat,
sentinel of the air rent by rifle crack.
Mouth melting on the neck of fowl and buttered
biscuits, he took his bowl of water on the rocks.
My parents retired to the bar in the big house
to watch the Pocotaligo
River turn buttery gold
in the setting sun like a tide of Chardonnay
poured by a benevolent God in the beginning
or middle of our lives, while I waited
on a brick cobbled patio with the good sense
to crumble – patrician outcropping of oyster shell
at the edge of backfilled rice fields.
I was already on an island of my own making
and later still would be officially banned
as bearer of unhappiness as water-logged
as night’s indigo mantle of humidity and salt
and insect hum we wore and breathed and called the air.
(Ships sailing up the James long unloaded ballast
to rise to reach Richmond.)
Lord, can anyone rescue us from ourselves?
Come dark on the levees, gators climbed
out of centuries adrift in a brackish dusk,
slapped down scaled hides and slept like slabs
with one eye moving –
a yellow knifepoint
piercing the horizon. For an hour, two at most
that night I thought I belonged to no one
and to no place, blind to the way we become
our own memories’ afterthoughts:
The scrub pine and leaf slick of woods,
deer stand I climbed to read away the rain,
hay field in fall my red dog stitched behind her as she
went –
until it seemed I did not remember them,
but they, in the desolation of forgotten places,
brought me into being.
Long after I would be forgiven and would forgive,
myself (after all, only a person much loved
can feel that sorry for herself), the alligators,
primitive prophets of what would come to pass,
would outlast us, too, at our end
when we watch film after film of our lives,
our faithlessness in those who loved us most,
unscroll in a language we no longer
understand.
Months after hunting season, my father’s dog pulls them
from the scrubbed winter fields. Their stray bodies
borne back piecemeal – deer hock in front of the garage,
nub of horn in the barn, hoof on the back porch.
Fur scoured clean, they whiten in the underbrush
beyond the bristle of a nearby hill
and in clearings, where pockets of orchard grass
covet a chalked hip. She retrieves those
shot and left to die far past the creek’s quick song –
no easy distance for her to drag, bone by bone,
such animals back to us,
and she must climb the ridge where my horse threw me,
opened against the ground, face scraped clean,
perfectly blank, my mouth – a brilliant stain.
At the hospital, I felt the fact of my skeleton charted,
my brain stenciled on graph paper.
Yesterday, my father walked from the doctor’s office,
where we waited to hear the news,
took me in his arms,
and gathered me like splinters of his own body.
When we reach it by bicycle, how will we know?
What invisible confetti will fall to welcome us?
What will we eat in the invisible city?
Bread whose dimensions we must feel out?
Warm rice we can’t comprehend until we bump
our bottom lips and grain spills from
clumsy chopsticks?
In the invisible city, what will we see?
Drywall scraps in alleyways, a dandelion now and then?
Old carts piled with bodies? Brown mice moving
between invisible bricks and boards? Forget
the cart and the yellow bodies. Forget the mice
who know well the locations of
invisible butter churns
in which they will drown. What is there to mourn?
How does the invisible city characterize thistles?
Forget the invisible city.
We have nothing to give
it would accept, smiling, a hobo
with big teeth.
Forget the invisible city.
What has it done to our lives?
Has it made us cry?
Has it black feathers on sidewalk?
No fountains spouting through summer exist there.
No sailboats with busted hulls blocked up in dry-dock
hunch their humble magnificence on the
shore.
No stained oak staircases, no fans propped in windows.
No dully-armored rolly-polies at
war beneath stones.
No iron gates, no slouching porches, no radios at night.
Switchyard for the slow hearted
Blind trackage
and empty signal face
Passage toward darkness and
horizon
Developments that none can
measure
Brick and grease and out there and gear
Garden of whiskey in the
brakeman’s hands
Stack of creosote soaked
railroad ties
Late night track remover and
removal
And limit and limit and operator
of horn
Coupling and discard junction,
spume
And silence, halo casting
worried light on
The stalled car, the escaped
cow, the hobo
Wined in his glad sleep
Lithium grease and metal and
loose
Noises from the transom, freight
Car in which I will be born
In which I am born, in which
I murder, yield of labor and
failure
Tracts of land and tracks across
land
And traction, sunlight, empty
museum
Noisy
heart. Have mercy.
Barn swallows slid through
open windows holding throats closed
against riverbank mud they ferried
on their tongues to suspend nests
from lime-washed rafters – adobe colonies
above the manger aisle and gutter.
They flew
sorties all spring as milking cows
entered the open barn twice each day, as heifers
and dry cows settled down on slow
hills
beneath pasture hickory, oak, ash.
Weeks went
like this.
Then, late July.
Parent swallows returned
from neighbor-fields of waist-high corn
recently doused
with concentrated atrazene.
The sky grew flatter.
All the grubs the
swallows gathered
were dead already or mad, flexing a pale blue
on wet field dirt. A hundred blind swallows
churned the farmyard sky to butter.
To a mute air-traffic controller, swallows called
for hours before they tired and struck
the barn’s exterior walls, like dull sickles on field
rocks.
Diving for open
windows
they would never find, the birds jammed their beaks
back through their scared brains.
Purblind,
one swallow at sundown
wildly needled north, pulled sharp through quilts of wind
by a malicious seamstress.
Season-fat barn cats feasted on the falling
from heaven for days.
Later,
a hayfork handle broke
the wasting nests. I knew no better.
Nests that
thin cracked easily. Fledglings fell
to manger cement.
Some fluttered bald wings,
spiraling down into the manure gutter
to drown.
In a
baseball glove beside the bed,
I kept six strong ones fed on zap flies
and diced nightcrawlers.
I chased the swallows
away all autumn. They
wouldn’t leave, stayed
into December,
when they fell from the spruce,
their eyes white as lake ice.
perhaps
it is the birds that buoy up the earth—
flit of
red, sudden perch, beautiful clamor, air
origamied
into a dark sheet of wings, a sheet
that
falls upon the small hurricane of our lives
softly.
The passerines dip and rise, are busy
stitching
together what we daily pull apart,
each
little nest of debris proof that we must prepare
ourselves
to cup what is about to be born, that we
are
always edging toward birth, that tenderness is
an act
of making. I walk quickly, with aim, but
my eyes
lift up beyond the tangle of branches,
through
the mesh of appointments that clings like ivy
to my
mind. I am over there, here and there,
taken
by the
mere stirring of space, how matter readjusts—
honey
crisps thud against damp earth, leaves impersonate
gusts of
wind, dresses of bunched cumulus cast
vast
shadows of surprise, and at the edges of it all—
the
birds gathering remainders, swallowing nectar
and
seeds, their songs stretched like ropes of fire
between
us.
You were
famous for your stitching, could hem pants without looking,
sew a
button in your sleep, conjure a wedding dress of tulle and satin
though
it seemed to me you were folding water, inventing light.
I was sure
that if I pared an apple down to its bony core you could darn it
back
together again. Once, you helped me sew the flag of
for my
history class, waves purling beneath a delicate sun, a golden seagull
flying
through a blood-red sky. You called all of us “sweetie,” taught me
that
everything is mendable, that the most intricate shapes have a learnable
pattern.
My mother tells me as children you loved to sleep outside
on the
small rectangle of roof above the kitchen, moonlight pulsing against
your
small faces, that you could hear your mother, my grandmother, scraping
her
spatula through batter, the smell of warm brown butter wafting into your
blankets,
that you
would write words with your fingers along each other’s spines, try to guess
what was
written—salamander, cookie, sister—and
that you were the motherly one,
made
sure the moon didn’t get too close, that no one was near the edge.
Later
you played hockey, ran through the fields like a deer let out of a cage.
When
your father left you were away at nursing school, learning how to insert IV
lines
delicately.
You washed the body of your patient; then you left, moved home, helped
to tend
to your three younger sisters. You were
always a devotee of empathy.
After
four miscarriages, a fetus formed and formed; you were, for the first time,
in love
with your insides. But at 27 weeks the doctors couldn’t stabilize your blood
sugar,
said you
might die, had to perform a C-section at once. Colleen was 1 pound ¾
of an
ounce. You made tiny outfits from patterns for baby doll clothes and held her
up
to the
light in one palm. You wrapped your hands around her as if gathering cloth
and
dreamed her wholeness. Now, she is
twenty-four and your kidney has failed you.
Your
thinned blood travels through tubes, a machine, and then back into your body
like a
red thread. Uncle Harry holds your hand and stares at the map of red ribbon
between
you. The openings in your arms, chest,
and abdomen have been exhausted.
Now your
leg looks like tattered jeans, and they plan to graft animal skin over it—a
patch
for
every fissure. When I was small I understood you had to take shots. I
understood
very
little. When we visit, you call me
“sweetie,” tell me how proud the whole family is
of my
poetry, say you dreamed of naked people running through fields, of ice covering
everything
like an afghan. I dream that you gather my hair in your swollen hands, begin
to
braid. I wake and begin the work of sewing: back-stitch words over calamity,
cinch
syllables at the heart, gather us under a sun–flooded sky.
On the ferry from Martha’s Vineyard, you were
handsome in your sun-hat, the brim
crushed over your forehead so the wind
wouldn’t steal it.
Light shattered on the water
so it looked like hammered silver, and the waves
buoyed the craft from stem to stern,
dunking and raising us like a seesaw. All our day
we had walked up and down the beach, pebbles
round and hard under our feet, the Sound cold,
and watched the sails of the sailboats ripple
against the bright horizon. We rode the lover’s seats
of the carousel, kissing even when the car passed
the dispenser for brass rings. Everyone else
leaped up, hooking a finger through two or three
before the flying horses glided on. In his vitrine,
the turbaned fortune-teller spun a crystal
and passed his rubber hands over tarot cards
so old they’d lost their color. The yellow ticket
he passed through the slot said It is easy to see,
hard to foresee. But it was the last hours of Sunday
by the time we were ready to leave, and nothing
was luckier than to read the same newspaper
and drink coffee, to touch hands shyly on the plank
that led into the ferry.
We had no need of signs,
no future divined in a horse’s glass eye, no kites
or cold Manhattans. We were riding into the sun.
for Jess Arndt
Your new tattoo, a narwhal, rides your arm
from wrist to elbow, blowing through his hole
a spume of charcoal mist.
I watch him rise
and fall, appear and disappear, trade pride
of place with the anchor on your bicep
as you slug beer from a mold-pressed mug.
The table’s marred with signs of narrative,
old scratches carved in truth-serum delirium:
ELSABET or WHEN YOU SEE JOAN
TELL HER ILL WAIT FOR HER.
I’m nursing
two fine bruises on my inner thigh, sore
and higher than the flesh surrounding them.
The afternoon’s gone grey, an almost-purple
mottled sky predicting storm. We’re warm inside,
but wet wool coats keep entering the bar,
umbrellas spattering rain on the tiled floor,
and I feel you turning seaward, as if a light
flashes intermittent to compel you.
Half-hook, half-boy, you drop into the deeps,
your element.
You’re hauling some white whale.
I smell the salt of sea-air in your ear
when I lean in to kiss you goodbye, trailing
my seaweed hair along your jaw. I’ve got
your compass tucked against my breast, my pea-coat
buttoned up against the wind, but we both know
I’m barely covering my mermaid tail. Til Monday, then,
and don’t forget to call me, Ishmael.
The water unsettles the sand beneath,
dragging pebbles and shells under the lips
of the ripples imprinted there. A tumble
of color, bone peach almond flesh charcoal
smoke buttercup stone, and the objects scatter,
rearranged in patterns like the tubercules
of a starfish. They
ray. They shape subtler
wearing away the edges of their neighbors,
all thrown down by the spume, forced and pushed,
though the water surrounds them both gentle
and powerful. Tough
rubbery bubbles
of seaweed lie drooling along the shore.
They catch flotsam in their tentacles, vegetal
jellyfish, organic nets.
A crust of mussels
draws lines below them, half-black, half-
pale blue silk, though they can cut you
if you walk on them.
And you, wayfarer,
searching with head lowered, quick eyes
latching on to every sea-glass shard and scallop,
how do you resist the pull, the water itself
turning the spiral inside a nautilus?
You have seen the movement underneath,
that gravitational nexus.
It is the call of the siren, not
a woman, but the sea itself singing. You know
how seduction happens: through the open eye.
Sunset, the barrels, the sky, everybody's trucks
have turned the color of melon flesh, the split-rail fence
around the ring and the clouds of kicked dust sift
pink sugars, orange sugars. Then a girl's horse bleats,
bucks, and she's down.
The others jump down,
run to the middle of the ring and the horses blaze off.
The red mare rears up but I hang on, she rears again,
wrenches in the air.
Shakes, hard, I'm down.
How they run.
Shaking their sugar.
Their bellies gather and swell like clouds at dusk.
I'm on my back on the gray clay, keeping very
still, watching their shapes rise and roll.
The ground rocks and shifts around my shoulders and
thighs.
Their thousands of pounds bang around my bones.
They beat the triple drum of thunder as their steel moons
strike down. It is
nothing but what it is. No place to go.
Let every wire of blood charge, electrify the skin.
Not a thing touches my body but sweet pink dust.
Before I knew him, Dunx jumped
the gate
into a field full of mares, put himself out to stud.
I wanted to ride him because the other kids couldn't,
bucked off and bitter before their asses touched leather.
That horse and I were bent the same green way.
When I settled on his back he stood still, trembling
puffing his breath out in furls of frost.
We ran through winter, over ice crystals growing in the
dirt,
the sun hung pale and tart as a lemon.
When summer came we galloped into the bottomlands
unresisting, speed-flat through the green season.
Cicadas and snakes, kudzu, ragweed and dandelion,
we stood in the cool mud of the creek panting,
necks lathered with salted cream.
The sun swung low and gold, fierce as a wolf's eye.
The creek glittered with mica and the bright skin of
frogs.
We slept in the same straw and ate from the worn
grain bin, sweet-feed, oats, corn, molasses.
I was never alone.
Even when I slept he was there,
true as silver, legs strong and supple as young branches,
stomping, blowing out his nostrils in the dream
where I went out the window and angled into the night
woods,
where the dark rushed, flooded with horses.
(Irish Folklore Commission, Inis Maan)
In
the foreground there’s a girl in braids
from
the back, her delicate part
slipping
crookedly down the skull.
After
tying up her hair, she has spent the morning
gathering
mussels with her brother,
the
sharp crescents snapping shut
at
their hands’ reach. She is watching
the
sea, which must be attended,
while
the photographer adjusts the focus,
time
and again, clicking behind her:
the
braids, her brother’s jigjag teeth,
his
throat lifted up for the untranslated
song.
Their hands raw and blue with cold,
which
will be understood in black and white
by
the way they hold them against their bodies
like
dead animals once loved but now
simply
heavy. Then, the baskets of meat
and
shell set down among the rocks. The salt-
stained
shoes. Cottages braced
against
the ragged moor. He has captured
just
the edge of her face
and
her mouth is closed, nothing to say
to
him, no name, simply “Girl,
gathering
mussels” for all of us later
to
stroke the exposure, to marvel at her hair.
The
wind had pushed the water in
all
afternoon and so, though the sky
blew
clear, and the smell of leaves
carried
from residential streets, their car
moored
itself in the restaurant parking lot
while
they dallied between salads
and
main course, between first toast
and
second glass. They had decided
to
marry. Meanwhile the wind
made
the windows shake
and
flattened the sunset to the sea.
He
had no choice but to move his car,
and
then he had no choice
but
to roll up his pants
and
wade back to her, candle-lit
over
roast chicken. They finished their meal,
towels
wrapped around his ankles
(the
staff so kind, laughing, fetching
more
wine). Is this what it’s going
to
be like? they asked. An omen?
She
pulled off her heels and descended,
holding
his hand and her shoes
by
their straps. They trudged the empty avenue,
lit
golden, drowned, imagining
the
salt-corroded engine,
the
weight of ruined merchandise
to
be ferried out of the shops,
finned
creatures swimming
between
their numb calves—
and
lingering, anyway.
First I learned
to taste the water in the bilge: fresh
meant a leak from above, salt
from below. It was all
bad news, but I relished
the knowing how, the squinting
and lip-licking, the distance
of diagnosis. Now we’re slipping
under the pass, the bow unzipping
the wake, and I can taste
salt everywhere––here, pooled
in the shallow of your clavicle, here
in the forked delta of your palm.
Once, I climbed down
into the skeleton of a hull, and through
its raw teak ribs I saw light scrolling
across the black screen of water like credits
at the end of a movie starring
the reflections of stars. The next morning
the hull was swarming
with builders, glassing skin
onto the bones, shaping
the empty belly, a scene
I’d seen before—wolves, carcass—but in
reverse. If our bodies
are vessels I cannot
take you inside me. If our bodies
are water we cannot
go swimming. But still there is something
whispering back to the insistent
secret of current, a kind
of transaction, the water corroding
and holding us up, the ship-to-shore crackling
and calling, our wet footprints on the gunwales all
of course, yes, dissolving, but first
being there, and shimmering.
A woman we know gets sick
and suddenly I can’t look at your breasts,
the threat beneath each
perfect ounce of flesh. How can I take care
of what I can’t see? Too
much
of a
good thing and I think of you, of
salt, sweat, spit, the way this can’t
go on forever. This woman dies
and each part of you I take into my mouth
gets a goodbye kiss. Soon even breathlessness
will be terrible. A man we know says of his son,
I want
to tell him I’m immortal.
I love
him that much. I want to tell you
I can barely believe in our bodies,
that we’re made of water, that we trust
our skins, that we believe this dream
of insolubility, this promise: I won’t
swallow
you. What is there to love
but the symptoms, flushed
cheeks, glazed eyes, frantic
feverish heart? I drag red trails
over your shoulder blades, snag your lip
on my teeth, lay my fingers
in the spaces between your ribs and try
to remember that sobbing too is a system
functioning perfectly, that longing
is nothing without loss.
if the thru-hull fittings disintegrate,
if the hoses freeze and crack,
if dry rot softens the plywood,
if the float valves stick in the bilge,
if the fiberglass delaminates,
if the fly bridge collapses
under the weight of the rain, if our hearts
break, if our lungs won’t deflate, if this desire is more
than our bodies can take––oh set off
all the rescue flares at once, oh use the life raft
to give the dog a bath, oh do a salty
load of laundry, oh clean legions
of wounds, oh gargle, oh make
the voyage anyway.
Because they are five and not two,
they have a
purpose
as
specific as the beachgrass
planted across the eroded dune.
The twelve
year old boy carries a net
and
not a toy net, to strain the low tide
of its cockleshells and conch,
of
luminosities and ruin
that
exist only now
in this first naming.
Sea cucumber. Mermaid’s purse.
Minnows flecking their ankles, the family
is bent unmistakably toward seeing
across the
lit surface of shallows,
this
fleeting permission of ocean.
The buckets fill with brief treasures,
wave-smooth
stones for skipping,
all
manner of shell and searoot,
each skimmed and scanned
in raised
singularity.
Smallness begets smallness
as the nine year old boy’s eye catches
a glint of
filament,
salvaging microbes and minerals
from the rippled sandbars, regarding
each fragment
as a whole.
The
toddler girl holds an empty clam,
reminisces back to when she was two
and perhaps
her life has been as long
as any
of the adults’ on the deck with drinks.
The mother spots a marbled patina
and the boys sieve it up to the air—
two
rockcrabs seamed together in a compact link.
The mating is considered shyly, without shame,
a study of
armament and flesh—
this,
the one thing responsible
for their own presence.
They attend
to the world as equals,
for
none of them have ever stood
in this water before
with such
circles
gathering at their feet.
Every month I tried to make of my body a home.
I was an hourglass
made of shell, made of bone.
I lay under the Perseids and let the stars
hold up the night.
There was me and the idea of a child.
I saw for both of us—
tule elk silent among ferns,
the sunset lying pink over a field of Dakota corn.
In the museum, we walked through a hall of Buddhas.
Granite, terra cotta, bronze.
If I could have made you like that—
I would have held the hammer,
I would have opened the stone.
Just before they remove
my grandmother’s breast
my mother drives all night
to Alabama to see her.
The sky like oil.
The houses darkening.
The next day they embrace,
drink jug wine
from plastic cups,
do not speak
of the time lost between them.
My mother looks out
at the Gulf in December, still hot
and moist.
Her clothes stick to the air.
Her skin sags.
My grandmother hobbles
to the water;
my mother calls,
Now we
are both old, mama.
I know she sees it—evidence
they will both die
and die unresolved
with the other.
In dreams of my mother dying
I remember her screams,
her whale eyes,
the eyes that punished
and pardoned
my sass-back mouth
until we grew old enough
to be honest
in our dislike for each other.
Tonight in a dusty mirror
my mother feels her breasts,
her lips stained with wine.
The crickets wail
through the screen door.
The clear moon.
And elsewhere
in the mirror
I grope mine,
the same strange flesh,
the tender heaviness
we carry.
cocked towards the flies
buzzing at their coats.
Even in the heat
they were smiling, glad
to chew the parched grass
until night, and then what?
I had never seen a cow sleep,
their idle magic slumbering
in a moonlit field,
clouds of breath drifting
like balloons past
southern interstates
to the sun-stripped billboards
and then gone.
One trailed me at the fence,
let his tongue slip from his jaws
and tongue my wrist,
no less bitter that
he would die sooner than me,
that we could not save
each other, his saucer eyes
an endless world.
It was like looking again
at my father, searching
his old man face for nothing
but kindness and silence.
Even the night grew too hot
from the open window of your room
where you woke every hour, roasting
in sweat, twisting like a pig on a
spit.
You discovered your body then,
held yourself through summers
bringing blood, that bare thrill igniting
evenings you’d run away, picked up
by your father who smelled of sour
mash
and leather, saving you from
hitchhiking
into the next county, ten dollars to
your name.
You said the heat made you crazy,
the way animals turned wild, faced
the sky howling
through fences—they, like you,
never slept, but roamed as you did:
ferocious and hunting, the scent of your
fever
dripping from dogwood. Sometimes
now
you can smell the cut grass, the
honeysuckle
under greedy ropes of kudzu, remember
the hot hiss
of hamburger on the grill, or your
parents
not yet divorced, drunk on Sunday,
dancing to Aretha
played loud through an open backdoor
as you plodded home barefoot.
Sometimes there’s not enough distance,
even when you’re gone, that a
passing face
on some big city street is every
man
you ever fell into: tobacco breath
and going nowhere, mosquito-bitten
nude
across abandoned fields littered with
bottles
and dry as the drought that
threatened everything.
Sometimes it’s the mirror, the face
that so distinctly reminds you of
weather, soft clay,
the voices of girls you knew
with their haystack hair and
cracked, country lips.
The girls you’ll run into during trips home
cradling babies and beer in a 7-11,
girls who bring you back to restroom
stalls,
confiscated notes, the
backseats-of-cars gossip
and those deep, lascivious accents
you’ve struggled years to drop:
You’re
just like us, and don’t pretend you ain’t.
Let them bring wings.
Let the wings be poems
exquisite with the give
of each iamb. Let the music
be a harmonic of steel
pan and surf,
and
shaky soprano and the sweet
thud of flesh falling away.
Let my thousand selves sing.
Let me tug my loved ones' coats
and let them catch me
in the afternoon's solitary
star. Let the dead make way
with hallelujahs. In their rain voices,
let them whisper to me.
Let each lived moment of love
light a path from this world to the next.
O Gods, when you call me
in all the names I have worn
through with breathing,
let me answer with joy;
let me go up, let me go
dancing, ecstatic with flight.
It is magic
here, outside the rule of clocks and scurry. The vast baskets of mountains
overflow; the clouds clink like ice in a glass: I drink it all in, and it is enough. What a concept, contentment. Yesterday,
where the creek tipples at the base of the valley, I saw a dead goat—stiff,
ringed with flies, its face like a plate of leftovers. I wept, then I did not. I stood at the roadside until the wind
wafted up its benediction. From this place I gift you the unoccupied air; the
wobbly prancing of new calves; a sky so close the stars might be a chain-link
fence you run your hands along as you amble through the night; your live and
mutable body, its spark and spell and solitude. Take a minute, write back.
You wouldn’t recognize this body of mine
the odd animal it becomes
without you to answer its spark.
Here in the valley, I want nothing
but to heave the heaviness of my limbs
into the cocoon of my unmade bed
and burrow there, as if winter had come
and it was time, at last, for the long sleep.
Of course, when I think of sleep,
I think of the way our bodies tangle --
my sweat, your sweat; my toes curling
into the arch of your foot, the way
you always giggle even from the deepest of dreams.
I think of the way our dreaming tangles
with our waking-- you turning over
in sleep to tell me of your dream banquet,
or the dogs rushing along a nameless river
and me, dazed by the fact of your body
beside me, the breaths I’ve come to
measure happiness by. This
happiness itself, a flowering, a hive
of humming-- less a song, than
the memory of song from which comes all
singing. And how we sing, you and I,
our immelodic molecules dancing
their reckless abandon from lip to palm,
cheek to bellybutton, nose to nose -- choral,
harmonic, echoing even now, across this distance
their joyful yes!
In a jail
in
chanting
recipes for
and
poor Rustichello, his fellow prisoner,
is
still feverishly writing the empire
he
will never see except
in
the mingling of words and prison walls.
The East
seen through Italian eyes and translated
into
French as the two men dream fireworks and rice,
the
salt white skin of women with pepper-black hair,
papered
dragons, papered lanterns, and papered pagodas
dancing
around them red and gold with acrobats
and
acrobatic alphabets, where letters take the form
of
posts and lentils, pillars and trusses, spelling out
a
city of one thousand stone bridges, a
country of landscapes
gently
brushstroked in blossoming boughs on parchment.
They
believe as we must that just behind the stones
of
their confinement the
its
hills and valleys into an infinity of sand and shadow
that
the Mongol steppes with swaying grasses
are
thundering under the heavy hooves of
short-legged ponies, that mountains of impossible
precipices, jagged and rising, thin and sinuous as silk,
drop
daily into misty morning valleys where two
small
farmers walk beside the lone and twisted pine,
listening
to the low groan of water buffalo
and
the sound of grasses dry beside
water
lapping against the edges of the mind.
These are
the scenes we have seen in countless movies,
scratched
on the surface of Grandmother’s blue and white
porcelain.
The weeping willow. The giant goldfish circling
a
perfect pond. And we the weary armchair travelers
with
Polo’s recipes in hand are expansively trapped
with
the visions of prisons waiting for our minds to part on
uncharted
empires.
They say
the day William Blake’s wife lay dying
he sang
to her for hours, words unwritten,
words too
grossly beautiful to fit
the epic
musculature of his engravings
or even
his songs of sooty London.
He sang
to her the careful washing of cups,
the way
the front stairs spoke her coming,
the wren
that hopped along the garden wall.
And as
his wife lay feverish, he hymned
the
half-slept nights with fevered children,
the
return to bed, his hand brushing her cheek.
He sang
of wife and man burning beyond
The
brightness of the forests of the night.
Some day
before you or I lie dying,
I hope to
sing to you for hours—the songs
of walls
you’ve painted, the stretching
of fabric
over the couch’s antique frame,
the slow
heft of children up three flights
of
stairs. I hope my words will echo
your long
lullabies stretching across the dark,
the
slipping back to bed, our feet touching.
The
mighty wind raising us words and all
up beyond
the brightness of the burning night.
Each poem will be posted as the author provides it.
for Gail and Lisa
Every day the braying of cattle, the hum
and thud. Box elders dripping into our hair, our food,
wrapping the ground in a shroud of motion.
The tumbleweeds blowing by. The smell of sage.
This is how it was: every day the mountains, the sky
so wide I knew it held whatever I had lost—
what escaped me still, out there
beyond the land,
galloping away.
How the dying insects hovered in the air,
as if air could preserve even time
the way it bleached the rabbit's skeleton and left it
lying for us to find, its tiny bones arranged in perfect order.
How it held the dust, the buzzing yellow-jackets,
the mountains—as if the world could explain the world
if only we knew how to read it. Look, it said,
at what spreads itself against the earth, and is gone.
Earth movers stand at rest beside mounds
of earth, a hundred unsent
love letters, bonewhite moon ghosting
above abandoned machinery +
desolated highway, and Dr. Max is on
latenight AM radio talking about
training dogs, how it's arbitrary, language
is loose as topsoil, one could
just as easily say pumpernickel in place of lie
down, in place of come here: makes
no difference to the dog. I've been on
the road for a dozen hours, nearly
a day, one long enactment of almost:
a zero-sum game of betweens.
I'm in Kentucky, or still Illinois, or I'm
three hours from one coast
but driving demands measurement with
different string: a thousand miles
from one idea of home, several hundred
from another. I'm half a tank of gas
from just giving up,
lying down among corn
in moonlight
and waiting for day.
Dr. Max is going on and on, says most things
come down to repetition, cause
and effect, call and someone will-, seek
and ye shall-, etcetera. Home's
a shirt you've loved to pieces, worn good
holes in. The bulldozer at the hill's
rocky base means nothing if you know behind
the rock the hill's heart's still wet,
that a small stream is its core, that face
is one thing but what's inside is still
being made, riverfinger by riverfinger, like
how since I was six years old
I've never been able to fold my hands-
even over a steering wheel, 2am,
past a construction site, under a sky
littered with more stars than there are
names-without an empty cup in my chest
righting itself in longing
for some watery, incantatory amen.
Every letter I didn’t write to CL before
he died hangs from a tree in my dreams and I
keep chopping but never felling the thing
because what I’d meant to say—about
that squirrel I watched get runover then
get up and run away; about the brick wall
my neighbor built all summer which then fell
in fall, and how he rebuilt it winterlong,
seemed
even glad—it’s all still there, shaking in
some
wind through my mind’s branches, and so
perhaps memory as wind. Today I watched
a boy help his grandmother cross a street,
watched him cross back to the corner he’d just
left, watched them wave at each other in sun-
light, and then he crossed again and they
continued
on. And so perhaps distance as opened thing
which opens more, and so the letters I meant
to send mean as much now that CL’s dead as
those
I did write. And so perhaps sent mail and
almost
sent mail aren’t opposites but cousins,
distant.
And so perhaps what’s meant means no matter
what’s read. And so perhaps I’m no fool to
move
slow, avoid disturbing these addressed +
stamped
unfilled envelopes, lying here unsent in
sunlight.
Next door the cat's finally quiet, fed, the
mewing
supressed for another day and on the way out
into
another spring night I hear stereos from the
next
several apartments and a woman's voice
laughing,
no, crying, no, there's music where you least
expect:
I could've killed that cat yesterday, bawling
like
a fucking newborn while the water was boiling
and
the coffee still in separate stages, grounds
on one side/
water on the other, like stages of grief as
described
in a book for Dummies, first denial then
anger, it's
not ever how it feels but this is how I've
come
to April, thinking as always of an old name I
keep
remembering so I can forget it anew, she's
laughing
now, I think, a TV on in the background and
the windows in the church across the street
were all
removed and replaced over a month in winter +
one night after work was finished I crept up
and
licked each pane of glass where new window met
old wood, licked like to seal an envelope,
like to
secure the new view and if, instead of going
to see
a friend who may never ask me what I really
want,
I could stand in there now with the pipeorgan
quiet
and looming behind me + all I know of God
reverent in the curved, shining woodwork above
I'd ask not for song or silence but for a way
to know
each from each, real woman's voice from fake,
light
of two candles from one flickering bulb, feel
of sleep from feel of falling to sleep, the
name D__
from the word denial, go away from don't fade,
holy
from April, April from the word almost, etc., amen, etc.
but
what slips past the words.
Three
hours bangled and sparkling.
Sitar, flute, and drums.
Not so
much the bright colors, the silken shine,
the
gold on the wrists, the ankles, the ears,
the
throat, the nose—or even the candles
reflected
in the water, or the geometric designs
of
mosaics tiled on the floors—
but
the flash of the eyes, the quickly hidden smile,
the
clenched jaw, the furrowed brow,
the
texture of the touch the hand extends,
how
quickly or slowly two embrace or depart,
the
language of the sounds that swell,
deepen,
crash, turn, flutter
into
blossoms red as the dances
that
shake the screen with sequined swirls,
the
neck, shoulders, hips, legs, feet, arms
each
punctuating the explosion of saris
choreographed to spin and return
the
grief-worn heart to joy. The nuances
of
plot and script untranslated, swallowed
by
the subtitles not appearing, despite
repeated
attempts: menu, “on,” “play”—
and
still the mooring of an understood language
refuses
to appear, to offer any safe path
through
the drama of love and betrayal,
the
gate-locking of death, the layers
of
memory and dream falling into themselves,
the
many-armed deities, the painted feet and trees.
Your father hunting pheasant in the fields
behind the house, you and
your brother following,
sticks in your hands, one
of the barn cats
pouncing on mice in the stubbled furrows
like swells of a frozen ocean,
your father hunting grouse in the
you and your brother old enough for shotguns
slung
over your shoulders as you pass
between a cliff
stratified like a book and a
creek so full and fast
it’s almost a waterfall, an echo like
a machine in the rock,
you and your brother like wind in a
stand of leafless
birch, surprised how
little force it takes to push them over,
how tall they are—twenty feet? thirty?—and the sound
of their crashing, rootless, overlapping,
white poles
with blank scrolls of bark, black knots
of missing branches.
The pigeons are not clay except in color.
Even after a man yells pull
and the mesh
door of the cage flaps open, they
squat immobile,
dull gray and sculpted in the suburban
mist,
their signal to flush more
private than this place—
three miles past the
skeet range, doctors
in Filson coats
drinking cans of beer and peeling
hundreds off a roll. To
win, they drop the bird
in a circle chalked on the ground. Always,
here, he’s a boy among men, feathers warm
through his gloves, each
hole a bead of blood.
Always the men shooting, talking, the words
just widening clouds of breath, and
him outside
the ring, reserving judgment, waiting
for a sign.
There are knobs he turns and knobs he pulls
and knobs he pushes and knobs he
turns slowly
and knobs he turns quickly, a knob
that changes
the speed of the propeller and a metal
bar
on the floor he raises or lowers and
something else
that feels like the plane is stopping,
like we are not
so much flying as floating—
a bobber on a fish line, tugged by
current,
as though what’s controlling us is
above us,
not him in the seat beside me, one
hand
on my knee, the other on the yoke,
not him rolling a cigarette, tapping
ash
out the window, Sonic Youth on the
headsets,
as though this is a secret
we both know but can’t share—
I could call it crosswind, the rear of the plane
swishing like the tail of
a fish, or the tailwind
that makes us fast, the headwind like
a wall,
or the birds we have to watch for,
the towers
like needles over the flatlands of
or carb ice,
or just mild turbulence, not even
the kind that could shake us like a
ball
attached to a paddle by an
elastic string,
fling us against the
roof, the walls,
if we weren’t buckled in—
just that gentle
bobbing,
but it isn’t the wind I mean.
In this kitchen, the
window at my side,
The breeze coursing in,
the sound of your broom
Sweeping maples from the
porch, I’m snapping
Pole beans, recalling late
May, the danger of frost
Behind us, our fingers
pressing seeds to the dirt.
Mid-June, the plants three
inches high and quivering.
August, the last of the
cicadas singing and my bare arms
Among the leaves. And then to the kitchen.
The colander brimming. My father’s voice
On the phone: Blanche
them, three minutes,
Then cold water, then to a
cookie sheet to freeze
Overnight. So while we’re waiting on the beans,
Darling, feel the maples
bending above you,
See them lobbing their
sweet debris.
And tell me: Were we made
for anything less
Than this? Dirt caught in the skin’s small creases.
Pole beans lithe and cool
in the hands.
The months collapsing:
spring, summer, fall.
After an Iroquois Legend
Like the
hermit thrush—who, brown, speckle-throated,
dull,
grew tired of being ordinary
and
cheated his way to the Spirit World
to seize
the most beautiful of songs, and who,
upon
reaching that hole in the sky
that led
to all things beautiful,
had only
one moment of radiance,
pure
song, before that slow, terrible descent
back to
the sureness of earth,
and who
fled straight to the wood’s shadows,
to settle
among the thickets and mountain laurel
out of
shame for his treachery— we understand
the cruel
weight of sin, its multitude of costs.
But like
the hermit thrush, who, still shy, sings
from the
thick quarters of saplings, from where
it cannot
be seen, at times we just can’t keep ourselves
from
crooning, jubilant, even with our various treasons,
even from
dark and lonesome spaces,
our
voices sweet and matchless,
insisting,
over and again: we can be forgiven.
My first
spring in a real city I see the worn blue hills
Of my
youth as never before, as my father sees them,
Has
always seen them. With a sense of need,
A pull at
the chest almost like heaviness
But more
like thirst, and I remember
Those
evenings on your family’s farm, when dusk
Pressed
in and you and I chased the Holsteins out to pasture,
Watched
them scatter toward the spires
Of
hemlocks shaping the horizon.
We couldn’t
see then that our wants would take us
To
faraway places, that what lay beyond that ridge
Was not
an end but an invitation.
We only knew
how honest the everyday was:
The
rhythm of the herd, its milkings and feedings.
The early
rising. That the days would grow
shorter,
One by
one, and that nothing at all could be done about it.
We were
eleven. And still believed,
Like that
shepherd in Marlowe’s poem,
That a life
could be charted and promised;
Like our
fathers, kneeling, fists full of dirt,
That this
land could give us all we ever wanted.
Earlier this morning
the morning was a pollinated wind
dusting yellow through
the pine trees, the deep and
measured
thump of fence posts entering
the ground. Putting down my hammer
I thought of you, not far from
here
but too far, attempting in your
tiny room
to speak correctly of the weather.
How can I explain to you politely
there’s no way out for us. We’re
stuck
up until our knees, our eyelids.
I don’t have an explanation.
When it rains there are no excuses
and still the water falls on every
surface
evenly. It covers everything
I’ve planted. It sinks in
thoroughly,
like a cloud shadow, like rain.
When I place the water in my mouth
it’s not to call it closer, or to
name it safely
after my name. What is there to
say
that you and I have not imagined
growing past us in the upper dark?
I do not count upon arrivals.
At least for now the afternoon is
clearing.
The fence I’m building
will keep the foxes out, the wind
that either is or isn’t in us,
and failing utterance, reminds us
we are here.
With winter near and having come
this far together
already from a great and ruined
distance
through into an orchard
overrun, in the seeding state we
watched
as one the apples breaking
off the branches, the sunlight
catching separately
their mottled colors blazoned
although alone upon the barely
blemished surface
of the skin — and what was left of
us
in aftermath we knew
was caused, because we saw
and heard at once that surface
glaring fiercely, to press a
different sentence
past the outline of that light.
But when the wind in blind
indifference
took both our hands and bound
them,
our sight and sound completely
starved, we turned around and
carried
on our backs that fruit in leather
bags.
Years found us — and through the
fog that was
the water turning slowly
into air we crossed a silver
river
with the vagrant voices of the
others there
behind us ringing hungry
visions in our heads — and so it was
in a named and savage land we
settled having found
our bodies gathered terribly
around a fire, the unfinished
edges of that light
a limit, although we knew
by then and suffered fair to say
it for ourselves,
of death, in a white dress
dancing,
she dances slow — and the
air-locked emptiness fixed love
to rage within our minds, offered
freely into snow.
1.)
It’s almost three o’clock and I am
sitting
on the porch steps emptying
the gravel from my boots.
Summer like a lover.
Middlewestern.
And the farm dog panting in the
shadow
of an oak tree on the lawn.
In the middle of the afternoon I
shake
the soil out into the soil
and it’s the place I come from
when there are no more paths to
cut
into the garden through the
dandelions,
or stones to scatter
on the driveway. Dead weeds drying
darker in the heat. I cannot
describe the reason
there are letters we should have
sent and didn’t
and this is one of them. Strange
how we apologize in postcards
from an island
or that the photographs of cities
you have lived in
lined against the wall
can look you in the eye until you
close
completely. In a house where you
are wintered.
That late summer on the porch
steps
I understood September by its
reddening.
The fields had finished. The
garden
no longer capable of basil,
straw covered. I should have
called and told you that
it doesn’t matter much the weather
we are reaching in. This winter
if we can keep the sunlight on the
hoarfrost.
If it is possible. The branches of
the burr oak
brightened and bent down.
2.)
We could live like this: gleaning
barley
from the edges of a field
or waking up too early in a city
and falling back
asleep. We could gather fragments
in our hands, say the garden has
endured.
Let us. Promise
to be good. We’re finally feeling
older.
And this too is another way
to say your face is partially
shadowed
in the porch light. Where the
early fern
is curling. The quiet after church
bells
where it is possible
to listen. Look,
it’s the middle of the afternoon
and I have no idea at all
if we will make it. Even as it
rains
when I am walking
into a field that doesn’t need
the water. Or if the day is going out
and the axe I use
to split the pine in half is not
the axe my father left behind him
leaning on the wall.
By the time you get here
the furrows will have flooded
and I cannot remember
the feeling of having ever
scattered
in the first place, in the
violence of alone
that we are planting.
3.)
It’s almost midnight
and the city hasn’t darkened yet.
The wind is dripping. I’ve had to
kill
the basil. At the edges of the
yard
the window light turns black
against the fence line
and continues. Almost midnight
when the crickets finish
ticking. The kind of shadow
green you’d cover clover
to keep the weeds from feeling
grown.
In the piece of sky between the
pines
the sound a day dissolves is not a
quiet
I can accept without the map
I’ve made of how the beds were
ordered
to keep the groundwork strong.
Soon the whitetails will be
starving.
A cold October circling
the days it takes to leave a
home
when I have written down from
memory
the names of streets
I’d like to live
and a wooden walking bridge above
a river
in Wisconsin. There are no more
towns I want
to drive alone to. There are no
more towns.
It’s getting difficult to say it
before I go into my house
where the weather I cannot forget
is happening. Because we close
into our rooms
our rooms return us
to the window. We close again
and the garden grows into the
forest
and I am not afraid.
Marching
band in the street, flock
of
green parrots wild in the palm trees’ fruit,
and
only my son looks up, double honks
a
bird call on his plastic trumpet.
A tour
guide, his job to point,
my father
could have moved the crowd
to notice.
He befriended random people,
even at
red lights where he’d roll down
the
window to chit chat and give a peace sign
to jay
walkers who ignored him.
In the
hatchback on the way home
after a
day of city tours, his hand gestured
out of habit
to Bayou St. John, called
by the
Indians Tchoupic for its muddy water.
No such
thing as a day of rest—
we ghost
hunted after the good luck of rain,
listening
for whispers in cemeteries
and
elsewhere, and it’s true, the steam rising
from the
streets really does seem to call
your name.
Bring your daughter to work day,
this time
a plantation tour, he used
his hobo
charm on cooks
with
white skin and period dress.
They heaped
us with loaves of bread,
bounty
enough to share, and so
we took
the ground streets home—
Canal St.
to Carrollton, our escort
a drum
line of grit and dragged feet.
Verboten,
casual, Katrina-slash-this-is-the-writer’s-life poem,
another
rule breaker best abandoned. At sea.
Overboard in a wine bottle, in a milk jug float.
The words
swim down and I packrat them all.
Anything
else would feel like choosing between my sons
who
aren’t twins exactly, but enough alike
that
their lost teeth, first locks of hair morph
to
make a mumbo jumbo in my jewelry box.
I’d look
up from the writing of this poem
but
for the hex: voodoo doll on my desk
courtesy
of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure club.
The
greats have their subjects: love, sex, death.
I have
mine: hurricane Katrina, Mardi Gras,
time
passes me by with moonscape, owl, and merlot.
Editors
pass me by—Alison, it’s hard to get excited
about Katrina poems as there are so many.
So quick to write me off. They should give thanks.
I could
be the quack who sends a soul food
curtail
sonnet, or exercise bulimic sister-in-law haiku.
A poem a
day about my children their muddy feet
stuck
in boots, rattle of pocket treasures in the dryer.
My
darlings, who believe that sea glass could be
Poseidon’s
knuckle bones, a yarn I came up with
to
keep them busy while I draft my
Canterbury
Tales called “Something in the Water.”
Up at
five to sift the oyster flesh of my brain
for
pearls of words. Kids at the door, begging,
May we PLEASE have some breakfast!
Yesterday,
mind
ablaze, I wrote about this man with a mole
in
the center of his forehead that I took
for a
bullet hole—he even dragged a zombie leg—
and
thought it was a great way to spend my time.
One last
Katrina poem, the final praise for what I hated.
I quit.
No more a guard dog of damaged goods
chained
in the yard, drinking from tadpole puddles,
dragging
my doom and gloom down happy streets.
I swear.
No more damaged goods, watchdog groups,
or
Katrina’s white flags on the cemetery lawn.
No
dragging doom and gloom down happy streets
mistaking
blue tarps in shreds for battered prayer flags.
Katrina’s
white flags on the cemetery lawn
in
perfect lines marking the day and marking the dead—
consider
them prayer flags, like blue tarps in shreds
announcing our surrender to the waterline.
No more
Jazz funerals or second line umbrellas, ok?
No more
picking the scab, pressing in secret a bruise,
announcing our surrender to the waterline.
Katrina’s
footprint in the garage, let it fade.
Pick away
at it—sweep up the muck and move on.
The world
was just a dream of molded halls
and
welcome mats, Katrina’s footprint in the garage.
Ancient history to you, but always yesterday to me.
It was
just a dream—the hallway, its ghost of mold,
crisscrossed downed power lines, and makeshift boats.
Yesterday
feels like ancient history, the last page
in my
notebook. I write the lines and my hand shakes.
The last Katrina poem. Stupid praise for what I hated.
Years after I first mistook the elder trees
for poison ivy, my younger brother laughs
as I shrink back again from the jagged leaves.
Crossing the creek bed
on the log by the old road bridge: rusting nails
and the ones I called dragonflies at age five,
black wings, blue-green bodies shining like a thread.
Edge of the neighbor’s
land, we step from woods into brambles thick with
leaves we lift aside for the few ripe berries.
Soon I can’t see him but his singing travels—
“Blackberry picking,
blackberry picking”—voice turning baritone
over the thicket’s thorns and shed white flowers,
fruit no one else eats but the birds. He must set
out by his lonesome
every day in the late afternoon, humming,
to wade through canes that score his legs with scarlet—
what does he think about as evening comes down?
“Make way for the guide!”
We head uphill toward supper, him in the lead:
dimming woods where the creek keeps on eddying,
dark snaky water opaque now, damselflies
gone in the twilight.
He offers me his hand as I cross, then, one
big hand covering his bowl of berries, jumps
from high bank to low, lands solid, and no, he
doesn’t spill any.
Every spring my grandmother must have found them,
muted red, marching from deep in the forest
toward their pink house: trillium,
migrating as slowly as she spread her garden
back from her husband’s daylilies, rallying
sunlight, toward dense bamboo. Was she
surprised as I am to find them each year?
I follow their trail through bushy azalea
and privet shade. On either side, countless
snowdrops, and her favorites, the variegated
hostas. As she planted, she scribbled
each variety’s name and location
on typing paper, the flaps of old catalogues,
circles and chicken-scratch the family
hardly can read. Which map is the last one?
No one can tell. Still I’m walking her paths,
looking to one side, the other: invasive
ivy, pots half-full with rainwater, then,
by the hollowed live oak, a single stalk
with leaves the size of my hand, its petals
darker than old blood, deeper than new.
I kneel in the leaf mold and see, in sepals,
the pointed inner flower she saw
when she knelt with her trowel, leaned close
to let the petals cool her lips.
In her absence, the planted and wild
converge, stirring what lies between
her inscrutable circles: trillium,
returning, unstoppable red.
I.
Late September and the first sungold tomatoes
have come, bright orange and sweet as the packet
promised in June. Hybrids, I say, but worth the
compromise.
We’re filling and pouring, yellow plastic watering can
and rusty tin bucket. My love wants to know:
Why are the sungolds any better
than GMOs? I give it my best: the seasons
of tries
made over by hand, subtle adjustments for color,
taste; the number of feet each family of plants
requires to avoid cross-pollination; the hoped-for
surprise
of variation—how can this effort
not entice us? No, the hybrid won’t come back true;
pollen, incapable of faithfulness, is always
afield. Still, setting the best conditions, looking
for something fine, refines hope: the hybridizer’s intrusion
helps the story along. But he has gone stubborn
and cannot be convinced of romance.
Drops shake the nasturtiums’ yellow petals;
I want to crouch down among the sungolds, the volunteer
black-eyed Susans, hide in the verdure
compost has made, but I stay, interrupted, interrupting,
both of us furrowing our brows at the new zinnias.
II.
It’s true I’d been seduced: in high school biology
we read of Mendel crossing pea plants
for a glimpse of their methods, the flowers’ colors
shifting
in gradually discernible patterns. Who could remain
impassive,
objective? For dissection, everyone chose their own animal
from the catalogue—a mink, a squid—like ordering prizes
from the fundraiser book but these had once been alive,
the mammals
pre-skinned to disguise that fact. I appealed; while they
poked with razors,
I diagrammed corn stalks, cross-sections projected
onto the dirty classroom floor from slides, color-coded
cells
so spacious inside, it seemed they were offering up
all of their secrets, which they were not.
III.
That year a new cat, mottled calico, showed up in my
parents’ yard
and was coaxed to eat, me cooing ten feet away, then five,
before she made the barn loft hers and allowed me to feed
her
from the hole where the ladder came up. If I stood
on a middle rung with only head and shoulders
showing, she’d let me stroke her back, even purr,
her half-tail waving its curtal radius. No chance
she’d be spayed. When she had kittens, I recited
the crosses, reverent, as if I could speak them
to Mendel himself: one with a whole tail, one with half,
another with half, and one with none. The kittens were
skittish
and wilder than she was, climbing the skinny sweetgum
back of the barn to escape me. Two were given
to neighbors, one snatched by a hawk; the one left
had half a tail. The triumph of that.
IV.
In mid-summer, I could not guess
which of the tiny heirloom zinnias would be red,
magenta, orange, and which the paler colors
I like less—could not thin out even one.
The seeds pushed the potting soil aside
with their paired leaves, their hundreds, and he,
faithfully following instructions, planted them all
in the small space, close, too close. Now with the
sungolds
and the leggy, half-grown zinnias, we disagree, and which
is more important, stopping, or proving myself
stubborn as he is?—really, it’s all about knowing when to
stop
meddling, my mathematician, my logical. Romanced
by the changes (one with no tail, two with half a tail,
one with a whole, boring tail) we forget our own: having
shaped
these plants, we must tend them as we tend
each other, tentatively, give water, give room,
climb the steps to the house and open the door,
leave the garden to win the argument.
My grandfather in a field by the river
of sailboats flecked with silver.
Close your
eyes.
He turns my shoulders. Tell
me
when the
sound is the same in both ears.
This is what I never understood.
Wind sweeps every field, one kind of music
into another.
What have I forgotten
becomes what do I
love enough to miss.
My student asks, What happens to the
dog?
The novel never mentions him again
floating on the ice with the stranger
found by Walton’s ship headed north.
A boy in the front row, wiry as his glasses
hates movies when there are mistakes.
A girl in the front row, dyed black hair
over her eyes, says it doesn’t matter.
Others nod and mumble their agreement.
The dog disappears into the blizzard
of pages, his mangy fur, his ribs like teeth,
preserved in the silent, white cold.
My students want to hear what I think.
I don’t know. Maybe he’s taken in, fed scraps,
patted or kicked like any member of the crew.
Maybe they leave him.
The bell rings.
They gather their books
and wander into florescent hallways, still
fifteen, drifting, afraid of being left behind,
wanting at least to be named.
You don’t own this place, or any other.
You live in a house that is not yours, and work ground
that is not yours; believe
one day your real self will arrive, and open the barn door
of your heart,
push it all the way in, weathered wood and rusted hinges,
held wide.
Sparrows will live in the heat of the rafters, mice from
night fields will gather
under bales and below loose boards, rusted farm tools
will gleam new in moonlight.
So you hunker down, settle in the familiar shape of
yourself.
You wait. And work.
At day you clean trees of fruit, overalls of dirt and
sweat and dried blood
from where a knife once scored your hand and covered
small ravines of your palm like clay washed down in
rain.
You don’t own your blood, and still it keeps close.
You don’t own your hands, these trees, this day.
At first you thought you could leave. Another season is another chance
somewhere else.
Orange groves or pear orchards, figs or almonds, stone fruit
in the morning sun or melons like green rain clouds.
There was always a place where you were not known, where
the fruit
believed in your arrival, ripened. They blazed in the sun and you held
their heat in your hand, then let go.
Cherries and apples gleaned, crated, sent. Everyone gone. Now you delay,
like a window.
Like a field for the weather.
You,
the placeholder, the lesser, the rubbing against – what is
the soul but this?
Then you are afraid.
Afraid, your real self will arrive, and say here, Here I am,
the true one, and you’d be sent back, across a border, an
ocean, a river
where you’d be asked what
do you want here? why have you returned?
where
have you been?
You own no tongue to answer.
You’d enter a small country, an island dictatorship. Nothing left
to look for, you’d listen to the fan at the window,
the electric radio, and the shiny, tailfin cars passing
below.
You’d live another life.
You’d live another life.
But this does not happen.
After you walk through the bare fields, after you let the
bark of the trees
grate against your open palm, after you stand at the
window of the old house
looking at your reflection, or the field of reflection
you’re afraid there is no other self.
You’re stuck with what you have. You know it.
The door of the heart will not open in, to a barn or a
room
in which a person or animal can safely live or sleep or
dream or talk.
You know this because you want, and keep working.
The closed door of your heart will open out, to a field,
always a field, harrowed by feet
and water and wind, the turning of crops, and workers, and
days.
All night the snow falls—
bronze fire of leaf mulch whitens in the
gutter,
these tulip spears along the house
surprised to still be here, a rake
on the lawn erased. All night
the bare trees fill with snow,
a white foliage, thin along the brittle
branches, intricate spiderworks.
I think of a veil over the sleeping
angel of death,
face like an abandoned quarry.
At the Institute for the Blind,
the patients learn to live into what's coming.
Still sighted, for now, but with the awful
knowledge,
they wear patches to blot out the sun
and practice fording avenues,
gripping onto the robes of some invisible
guide.
They study the face bones of loved ones,
touch and memorize and cry,
then go silent beyond the crying.
I'm devoted to nothing like their devotion
to blindness.
The world will end, I’m afraid,
and there will be a last snow
for me, for you,
a final white bloom in the maples,
an astonished silence in the streets,
the streets we loved or ignored, no
need to revise the past now that it's over,
and though there is no angel of death,
and extinction, I think, is individual,
we practice for it at the center of our living
In the first sky over Brooklyn, the sky
whose shape holds to the shape of the city
inversely to buildings and ferryboats,
weather filling alleys and undercoats
of bridges, this low sky above the park grass
flutters with kites. Not amber leaves
of sugar maples, but kites flashing golden
when they turn—when the wind swells
and turns them toward us. And far above,
a higher air, white, of its own
atmosphere—
of a rarified white wind—a second sky
is deepened and defined by one red kite.
Of a simple design, a red diamond
kicks in the air, a line ripples and ties its
movements
to each of us—so the wind
that moves the red kite moves the eye!
The red kite must exist in that priest
who stops his bicycle on the path to look up—
and in those school girls lying on their
backs,
and in the worker resting beside his shovel.
This is what it means to be in Brooklyn!
Its bagel shops and Synagogues and
brownstones,
its bridges partitioning space. We are of it.
And it is nothing if not us. It is us.
Now the metallic peach of the last sun
underlights the belly of that airplane,
the swallows shake upwards from their trees—
and the red kite yanks suddenly free!
The kite’s owner runs after, I can’t gather the
Arabic
he is shouting—regardless, it’s ours now,
it’s everyone’s kite who sees it climb
red into the second sky over Brooklyn.
Italy, 1944
I.
The potatoes were
ready for harvest
when the Germans set
up a post office
in her house. She jumped every time
they stamped a
letter, imagining fire
falling from a sky
scarred scarlet.
Soldiers spoke the
language of breaking
dishes, shattering
glasses. They eyed
silverware, family
jewels, gold pins
in her hair. That day, the soldier with
no arm and sad eyes
made her change
his blood-stained
bandages, unwrap
a stinking wound,
the kind that never
really heals. Later,
Papa found her—
dirt fingerprints on
her arm, skirt up
around her waist
like she hadn’t
finished dressing—in
the field,
uprooted potatoes
bruised black.
II.
A good arrangement,
Papa said about
marrying the man,
who spoke Italian
with jagged edges. In
New York,
glass towers scratch
the sky and people
wouldn’t know what
happened
during the War. She
wanted to stay
on the mountain with
her family,
insieme, tending potatoes. But Papa
gifted her with
cuttings of his best
tubers, promising
potatoes can grow
roots almost
anywhere, endure
foreign soil,
survive in America.
He played half for belief and half
for beauty,
played the Adagio that survived
the bombing
of Dresden, notes blood soaked
long before
they filled the crater of a Balkan
storefront
where 22 people died waiting for
bread.
The song seemed a more reasonable
response than another
mortar, so wearing his good suit,
the one for performances
at the hall in the center of town
that no longer stood,
he sat on the market corner
blackened from a shell
only a day before--his formal
tails
brushing the rubble left of a
sidewalk--
and rubbed his hair-strung bow
across
polished maple wood and metal
tightened beneath calloused
fingers.
For 22 days he played
each death
amid glass, and concrete, and
twisted baking pans.
There was no statue, no grave
markers, no clutch of flowers laid,
no ceremony in a city bereft of
mosque, cathedral,
library, city hall, all equally
and utterly destroyed.
Albinoni’s G minor curled into the
square
and mourned for those that died
and those
that did not. For 22 days shelling continued
though nothing touched him,
and he played the beauty of life without fear,
in the graveyard of sidewalk on
Vase Miskina Street.
He played at an ordinary
door
in what used to be an ordinary
city. Words had lit bonfires
between people, so he played
without words: the slow stringing
in the low sweeping bell tones
that moved
toward a middle note, a capture of
movement,
the burn and stink of the place: a
daily Janazah Prayer
the only thing to do. A lower register beneath the ear,
in rubble and tatters, the dip of
his hand and chin,
the swell of chest rising with
notes, he moved inside the notes,
fingers carrying the weight, the
moment absorbed
in sound, a city six centuries old
carried into hell,
a cello,
the only instrument left.
He’s four and a half with no idea of the factory
in his future: the assembly line, glue
for the labels, and in the corner the bin
of startling
glass, bottles broken
before the end of the line. His job: emptying
its shiny blue shards back into the mixer
where flame will melt them, start them
over. He’ll go home with cuts
across his knuckles and now
and then a stray sharp
edge on his clothes that will scratch his
wife, high school sweetheart, who will leave one
day
for no good reason he can find, though soon
enough he’ll blame
conspiracy:
the they who must have told her
to take their daughter, too, so they might study
the unbroken mathematics
of her curls. Likewise,
because he is too close
to decoding its blue-vine message,
she will take their never-used china, finely
detailed
plates and bowls which he’ll replace
with his father’s baseball trophies. Never mind
visitors
frowning at their presence in a dining room.
Never mind that by then no one will remember
number three, heart of the diamond,
heart of all primes.
But right now he’s four and full
of Christmas dinner. His father’s got ten good
years
before the
stroke that ends his
game. His brothers and cousins, in front
of the tree, build Lincoln Log houses, none of
them
lost yet to war. And outside, alone
in his new boots and cowboy hat,
his dad having buckled around his hips
the double-pistol holster he begged Santa for
all year,
all he knows is trust and order, falling
to the ground, guns in the air,
shooting
the blue sky to pieces.
Every week I make the journey—
Up at dawn
through one crowded station
to the next, transfer again,
translate my still groggy
expression, my torpid steps.
From the station, winding through
old, tucked in neighborhoods,
houses, still struck, after two years
by the comforting smells of
grilled fish breakfasts
as they usher me down the street
in a wake of woken moments.
Through the forests;
my favourite
part,
a vacuum of birdsong,
a soft welcome for sore feet,
I fall through the cracks
to find rest there, transformed.
Ice, and rain, mud
or trees fiercely parade their colours,
or gently, spring snows of pink and
white;
I have trudged, traversed, tromped
through the respite
of all seasons, and all
earth-splendor of their cast.
The square field
backed by multi-story buildings
where cabbage flowers nestle
plump and neat and self-satisfied,
prevailing through every season,
preside over the other come-and-go
vegetables.
Down one rusted step, down two,
palms out, up near my ears,
guided by some fading apparition
of the forest;
as my parents might take my hands,
to steady me.
Up one flight of stone stairs, up four,
past bright-eyed orderlies,
bleary-eyed surgeons preparing for
another day of “oh please, just let me
fix this one, just this one, and this
one;
just let get home in time
to tuck in my kids.”
I sit and talk with my friend
about his memories of school
50 years ago, just after the war;
of school lunches, the poorness of
the students, toes numb and pink
from afternoons of skating in
homemade geta
ice skates and tabi.
We talk about films, solar systems,
and politics too, of course,
but these things seem so narrow
in meaning—
It is much better to reminisce of pounding
New Years mochi, of sliding down
a snowy mountain at twilight
that it took most of the school day
just to climb up—
And I feel the brush of
old worlds unchanged
and changing, and changed
and forgotten,
and they taste familiar
so I pull them under my skin
to keep them warm.
A jeans-and-blouse
girl buys two
local
dusty girls, raggle-taggle street girls,
an
ice-cream each—
(they’ve been
tugging
at
her shirt since she came round the corner).
They skip
beside her now
faces
malleable, expectant
(not to be
confused with hopeful)
as
she leads them to the ice-cream stand,
the
scalloped red awning and grimy white
cold-box,
long a source of wonder.
They
press small hands,
sharp
faces to the glass,
peering
at the frozen rainbows underneath.
The girl,
all brisk and business
pays
for their ice-creams and leaves
them
to the magic of choosing.
The
ice-cream vendor hands them
each
a cone, towering with the closest
thing
to snow they have ever seen—
pink,
white, sweet scoops in twos
(they got the flavours “generosity”
and
“kindness”).
With a
lilting sidewalk amble
that
belongs only to muddy hungry
street-smart little girls
they
make their way over to two older
cohorts,
who are selling postcards
to big
confused tourist-hearts;
stretching out sticky brown
and
pink and white hands,
they offer
their friends each
a
sugary lick of
generosity, kindness.
To bring:
violin,
red ukulele,
travelin
shoes,
fantasy novel
thermos of
coffee, and
whiskey for the
thermos of coffee,
(will leave out novel to make room,
if
necessary).
We
painted birds and good-luck charms
onto
our scruffy sneakers,
bound
for to carry us home,
(but perhaps not so much to keep us warm).
I promised I’d care for you,
my sparrow
friend.
But we
both were misjudged—
you
underestimated, and I
over-confident;
and
with what centripetal strength
you
bore me up—
In awe and vertigo I clung to you.
With strangers,
friends in cars, in trucks,
stumbling
towards our surprise Christmas-day
gifts
of music, a warm bed,
small
magics—
Of running
hand in hand, a step ahead of
the dusk
flickering-on of street lanterns,
breathless and laughing too loud in the still streets,
of the
taste of much speculated-upon snowflakes,
of thousand-year-old
flames and hot sweet dumplings.
Drifting,
dozing, dreaming
through
dazzling sun-towers
and
tarantella snow dances;
we
speak languages upon languages
baroque
and jumbled in our heads
into
a cacophony of golden ornaments—
and when
the holidays come again,
I hang them
on the empty places
that your
wing-strokes,
your bright piano notes, and
your voice
might still echo there.
dissolves
nothing.
But with it, you bind up
molecules
sing me a
world.
Love is many things.
But mainly you
bringing me your
days,
the small
details,
the odd
note
which is also
the right note.
The misspelled road sign,
the Braeburn apple whose body
is gnarled
as a green pepper,
the
jaw-less mailbox down your road,
full of
small mouths who mistook
hunger for
abandonment--
--rusted
metal for sky.
Your words tell of the pang
of being
infinite but dusty, unsprung
bound in,
flying off to
every country,
scattered and
amazed salt
bound up
again and again
into the one
sheaf
constrained and
quietly
rereading an old
book
in the
corner of a room.
After your letter is folded,
I tuck it in my pocket,
and watch
evening
settling down
the hills.
I think you know this place.
The
familiar disappointment.
Persistent
lump of gratefulness.
some. But it never forewarns of
impending
horse shoes nailed over stable doors,
or fans in upstairs windows set to
low—
and it refuses to number the red
velvet
lined offering plates stacked up in
church foyers
or count how many holes there are
in hornet’s
nests clung up under picnic shelters.
Knowing the correct exit helps,
but does not reveal
the ratio of egg to flour in her
biscuits
or the reason for the bruise on
her right arm.
Thin blue lines guide and don’t explain
how minnows navigate
the murk of
or why the Crazy Woman creek
splits away from it so fierce and
final,
weeping as she carts
the weight of her own songs away.
The name of the ridge
The elevation of the peak
The number in the town.
are not the knowledge
I need, or the reason
for the shadows that flicker
under Cottonwoods like candle flame.
These dotted lines say nothing
of longing
or light.
The way it grows. Spreads.
Here what quickens is pidgin
is promise, is indecipherable,
save for
an errant startling letter, a hot
itinerant
quickly tearing off its veil.
The map is unforgiving. It lets bitter roots
of mountains grow up, and carves
canyons
cars fall off. It mentions Cape
Disappointment,
but misses the slight sadness that
always seems
to settle like a thin film of dust
over houses
and driveways and ragged basketball
nets.
I spill chocolate cookie crumbs
on
searching for the ridge where evening
first settles, and clumsy tongued,
half-
hinged hymns pour in the open window
of a moment. The moment is a blur
that interrupts blindness. It
startles us, then
quickly vanishes even as it remains—a
bur
caught between blanket and back, the
irritant
that companions us whose bones
are brittle pressed leaves, stuck
between
bound books and unraveling sky.
Washed and washed
in the mouth of the murderer, perjurer, liar,
Mouth of the rapist and thief.
Washed and washed in the mouth
of the disappointed, mouth of loathing.
Mouth of venom, mouth of jeers.
Mouth full of silent reproach
and ground down prayer.
Mouth of peeling wallpaper dented hood, old coin.
Mouth of the last good summer and the son and the father.
Mouth of the brother and drunk.
Mouth of the confessor confider and priest.
Washed and washed in soap and water
Scratched on plate and spoon and counter
Thinned between the teeth of the man
who bit off his wife’s ear, molested his daughter,
strangled the baby. Mouth of confusion
Mouth of Christ. Washed and washed
in the soap and the spittle and the anger and hope.
That summer the world waited for the execution,
but the prisoner hadn’t healed yet. That summer
I read the gospels backwards waiting for God
to become mortal or at least return to a moment
when creation felt full of promise. That summer
my father held my hand as we crossed the icefields
and looked into a glacier’s deepening blue,
a blue hiding the bodies of mastodons, a blue
that grew lonely watching the world change,
a blue that existed on earth as it did in heaven,
a blue that insisted It
is better to be wild
than be
good. I felt a new cold and an old temptation
and put my hand in the fissure to feel the remains
of water older than time. Somewhere my father
watched the calving of an iceberg that plunged
into the sea. Somewhere a man muttered
the Lord’s prayer as a doctor tied off his arm
to make his vein stand
against his flesh. The news
reported it was almost over. I touched the vanishing
wilderness for the first time, grateful and unsaved.