Month: May 2012

And in the movie or in the book, when
the crane that was quietly wading
at the edge of the river suddenly lifts

into the evening sky until nothing is left
of its body save for a silver-white curl
thinner than the edge of a rose petal,

the attentive reader knows that this
is a trope, both shorthand and preparation
for what happens in the next scene or chapter:

the one where the family patriarch, gone
into the meadow to retrieve a ball tossed too
far by his grandson, crumples to the ground

in the fringed shadow of tall grasses;
or the one where the guests come across
their friend who never returned to join them

for after-dinner drinks, slumped in the garden
in a wicker chair— And the other tropes that
follow: dusk reflecting off a raindrop’s filmy

surface, everything caught in trembling,
minute accuracy: prismed lights from a nearby
window, orange haze against deepening

blue, white gauze of a scarf or handkerchief
the woman brings to her mouth or her cheek
to stifle a cry or staunch a sob— And over

and underneath it all, the water’s rhythms,
steady and unchanging; papery hulls of leaves
and blossoms, floating away on the current.

In response to small stone (96).

What could I say when you asked what made me startle in the night, what made me throw off the makeshift quilts you pieced together of touch, so I could sleep? In the old days, dreams were more than just dreams: they were portents, omens, doorways creaking open into the unknown-becoming-known. In the stories there are always doors. There is always someone saying Choose, and there is always someone either walking into the maw of a hungry beast ready to flay her alive, or into a garden hung with scent, fruit bending, glamorous as comets festooned to branches. Who is to say which choice brings sudden death, which one turns on a flood of unending light or sets the stars careening across the sky? A breeze unleashes a shower of petals and they fall upon the ground. And even the leaves— one side yellow, one side green— act like hinges: tell me what their veined surfaces say before the heart swings open and collects them for the afterward.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“Wakefulness the knife-edge under sleep’s sealed flap.”

And so she turns the light back on because she cannot sleep,
ransacks the shelves for a book. And in every poem
or story she reads, she reads not only how but that

substances survive— Nothing is ever lost, only comes back,
a sort of reincarnation: streets, houses, the garden where
she skinned her knees, scratched her forehead from a fall

among the dahlias and the roses. And then, the early
currency of loves and losses, bargains made; the season
when a whole cage full of parakeets they kept

on the porch, perished from disease… There’s more;
such inventory doesn’t cease: like tufted feathers
she finds by the lamp on the bedside table, the ones

that pierce through the close weave of the linens.

In response to small stone (94).

and beneath the surface, the creek teemed with sound—

its voice reddened and rose above the foam and haze.
It had no need to seek an ear to cup what brimmed

with something perhaps resembling joy, perhaps
a state for which there is no name. It is

what it is, then: this rust-stained water
rushing onward to wherever it is

the water ends; veins faint purple and
streaked on the flower’s weathered cheek.

In response to Return to Otter Creek Wilderness.