Category: poetry

Crosswalk

Witness, waiting.

The tracks uncross, uncoupling the stars in our eyes. It is late and the light won’t train toward the alley by the liquor store on Broadway. Saturday night leaks greasy blues against neon signs for lotto prizes and fast-food payday loans. The discount tire guy waves and falls, to be raised again, a blow-up Lazarus. Alive. 

The buzz of broken streetlights reminds that everyone is hanging as you are, by the thread to which we’ve tied some whispered prayer. Give us this day, our daily bread––no, never mind, take it back. Regrets fur like smoke at the crosswalk, teasing, Go. Not Yet. Hurry. You’ll miss it again.

My eyes hurt. Show me one thing blooming. Here they are, cellophane-wrapped with other plastic-plated symbols of significance, ready for purchase, bright tokens. Pang of grief, but you work with what you have. The hungry eye learns to make do. The gas station oasis lit to magnify the lines on the faces in line, we avert our eyes in respect for one another’s naked needs. 

If not this day again, give me something. I pay to spill back onto Broadway. Beneath the glow of a No Vacancy sign, I wait to cross, sated now, the stems in hand. There are others on foot, and we stand at the banks. Not yet, don’t go. You can feel something hold us by the words we still won’t speak, nudging toward the next chance to give it all away.

Records in Wartime

Sounding the skies.

The ringing went on. It dropped from the sky, filled our boots. When it stopped, the hillside hissed. We bleated against it to distract ourselves back to our shackles, our shovels back to work. What were we digging? But forgetting was the point, don’t mention it, intentions slipped in easy drifts we ripped new jokes from last year’s clothes, we could see no cause to wear their kind again. Night came and the ringing returned to us until.

We took off our boots and left them to catch what we could no longer hear. No, we whispered. This is not the war. We watched the skies. It was not time.

Translations

Between worlds.

To move between the domestic and the otherworldly need not be some hero’s leap across some chasm, triumphant. We drifted back and forth, more gaze than choice. In this way, our tears translated to the pools of mermaid songs at bath time. Come, littles. Now the scalp, now the towels at our tails. Daylight done, lights out, out! The mystery had to do with its return in the morning, and we whispered, Tomorrow. Of the light and the pinecones, rabbits, and blue jays. They would. We would be there. We hoped tomorrow to put acorns in a pile, that the squirrels would see them and approve. That they would see us and know. We called our good nights to the moon. It was changing and we meant to see how. It pulled our gaze like tides, and we were out again.

First Lessons

In patience.

The terms were clear, however coded. With a blanket of leaves wet beneath us, our mother sang our waiting still––with the marten nearby, and the woodrat.

And in the blanket of leaves wet beneath us when they moved the call was clear––hers and the owl’s. With the martens nearby, the woodrat knew, as we did, to resist the ways some others moved. 

The call was clear and liquid in the moonlight, and the others moving would blame the daughters for waiting in the leaves, as we did––to resist speaking, until it was time.

Bloom

Budding notes.

Who is the creature in this jungle of words, coiling from crown to neck, vining spirals across the chest, tight against breath, against pivot of hips and swing of the leg into step? Bound like this, there is nothing to do but wait, bouncing toes until they rest, splayed flat in damp earth until whatever holds me here starts pulling. If this were a poem, it would end the way other things end, with flowers. 

The Science of Keeping

What holds, what resists.

Anyone can be an expert, when keeping is the point. All it takes is rejection of a sense of the disaster of being full up, and a guiding hand to fear how the space of its reach might indicate some lack––of anything but the capacity to Figure it Out. 

By the science of keeping, one can make lists and keep intentions. Retention’s methods always have some Master eager to Proclaim the next Solution to loss. To capture a place, there are itineraries, photos, souvenirs, but none so lasting as a scar.

The body, in the end, can only hold a record of its wounds. It returns the bones and teeth to the earth or the next collector. In the end, it can only offer what flies from it, which is a concept the experts have yet to explain.

***

Inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art. Playing with the negative image.

Working With Silence

With Jorie Graham.

Recognize this astonishment, this awe, this resistance to the hurry of speech. Its pressure signals the weight of what language battles. Here is the rupture, the interrupter; partner; opponent; interrogator; monument. Watch it.

To meet it on its own terms is to welcome some erosion. Each confrontation will put an end to the original witness, the one who meant to do the looking, and wrest from her womb a new creature, sharply aware of being watched.

When the word fists stop swinging, held behind the back, and the shouting mouth surrenders to its hold, what emerges? Here are the boundaries between flesh and time, sealed and open, the words we speak and those unspeaking us.

***

The above are notes while reading Jorie Graham’s essay “Some Notes on Silence” in By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (2000), edited by Molly McQuade. The italicized phrases are Graham’s.

Ends Meeting

Notes from an underground.

The border of a wound is sewn to the opposite border until the gap between them recovers its missing substance, the dormant body waiting underground as others come and go, tending. 

They sing as they come and go, tending. They check the dressings, the heart’s drum. They find a song. They avoid demands for answers to the old questions. They are too busy with slow singing. The dormant body has new questions. When it comes, the old ones will no longer matter. They call them forth, the body and its questions. 

What happens in this shelter is mostly waiting and song. The dormant bodies will not come until they are called. They will not approach the old borders with their new questions until they have swelled beyond the lines that held them, and when this happens, they will sing a response.

What the Poem Taught

How not to lose the life of life.

It is autumn, she said. And we are going to die. And we have all this choosing to do, with great stakes. And yet, simultaneously: this beloved, ill; this new child, this sudden bird, this love. How often we keep our thinking separate from what we know. For a simple reason: simultaneous submersion within all sensibilities is unbearable.

So, how to know anything? How to keep the life of life in life? Try not knowing. Try reading below the threshold of interpretation. Try burying the head, leaving only the ear. It is possible to transcend personality and arrive. At a shared physical understanding. These songs were always here to pull us into them and we.

***

The italicized phrase comes from Jorie Graham, whose work inspires this piece.

Exit mobile version
%%footer%%