They wheeled me up to the recovery ward. There was a huge tree outside the window whose foliage dipped and bobbed as a squirrel moved round in it. The room was full of a brassy, beeping monitors. I learned quite quickly to identify the tone mine made when I fibrillated or missed a beat, and for a while observed as my thoughts wandered round; every time they touched on work my heart stuttered. Somewhere around dusk a trolley came round with tea, and two digestive biscuits. They crumbled in my mouth like a sacrament.
Stories
I close my eyes, and you are children again:
asleep then waking in one room to rooster
crow, sharing blankets made unruly
in the night. I have a photograph in which
all of you are reading, a long body pillow
spread across all of your laps, a book
open in each pair of hands: in one story,
the pancake has run away from the hungry
mouths gathered around the table; or is it
a cookie in the shape of a boy, which later
gets eaten up by the animal that volunteers
to ferry it across the river, to imagined
safety? I don’t remember this thing you
insist now: how it was I that taught you
no one can be trusted, not even the warm
closeness of your own gut breathing hard
from trying to run away, or to find a way.
What I remember is I tried to teach you
to listen, keep your eyes open, learn
how the flicker of any epiphany is slight
as a bird, and quicker of wing. Everything
is instruction, especially when the lesson
can’t be neatly laid out on paper. Industry
picks up the chairs overturned by the child,
mops up the porridge trails that dripped
from spoons and the rims of bowls.
One bed is lumpy; the other is hard.
All have linens that at some point have
to be washed. The fox eats the bread— or
the cookie. Or is that the one where the wolf
eats the girl? No, she is smarter, younger,
she knows how to redden her lips and cheeks. She
makes an ally of the huntsman. The wolf gets
the she-crone, the grandmother, the woman who now
lives all alone by herself. Nights she strikes a match
to the stove, to the kindling in the hearth. A flame
leaps up like a tongue, like a flicker of something
bright come back to roost. Where wood meets town,
a hungry girl holds out her hands to stop the river
of milk and porridge. Knee-deep in such thick bounty,
and she cannot remember the words to make it do her
bidding; she cannot remember enough to make it stop.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
G-Spot
Another attempt at a concrete or visual poem, this time in video form. The sound recording of an orchestra tuning up in a church is from Gelo Papas at the wonderful freesound.org, licensed attribution-only under the Creative Commons.
Letter to the Underneath
Dear milk and almond smells rising up from skin,
damp rope of hair I now can twist into a knot
from having grown it out since winter—
I look up at the clock and it is past
the midnight hour; still, I cannot sleep.
Books and bills, papers; a watercolor
set, as yet unused, on the desk. In these
late hours, I piece together disappointment
and hurt, remorse and tears; scenes
lashed with rushes of bronze wheat, fog
cloaking green hills, sawed-off limbs
of trees. Long ago now, in my childhood,
my mother kept needles and thread,
all her sewing notions, in an old
biscuit tin etched with lines: ocean
swell, frigate furling all its sails,
armored and fitted for some destination.
Where the billows rusted and darkened over,
I’d take a pin and scratch until parts
of the picture showed again— as if
to reassure myself there was something
that came before: canvas or sky; wing of water
bird, backdrop, color, history. Dear time
prior to this, you must still be there.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Snyder-Middleswarth Natural Area, 2012: life after death
The last time I visited the old-growth stand of eastern hemlocks at Snyder-Middleswarth Natural Area, in central Pennsylvania’s Bald Eagle State Forest, the hemlocks were succumbing to a wooly adelgid infestation, and I figured they’d all be dead in a few years. That was early June 2007. My hiking buddy Lucy and I felt we should go back five years later and see what was taking the hemlocks’ place.
Continue reading “Snyder-Middleswarth Natural Area, 2012: life after death”
Postcard, after a Storm
Pelting rain, lightning. Rough brew
of clouds mushrooming over the river.
Sleep disturbed by dreams of houses
dashed upon the rocks. I rearrange
the sadness lingering in the air:
green leaves, weak sunshine,
small grace in the morning.
In response to small stone (92).
Protest and survive
Marching with the students last Saturday was a high point in my life of protest: it was absolutely astounding, at 11:00 pm, to see not only this great throng of demonstrators, but the people in their homes, in their cars, spilling out of restaurants, bars and cafes, all cheering, making noise, smiling, waving their arms, encouraging their children to join in. It was more like a parade than a protest march.
Untweeted
A lot has been going on here lately. Had I not been feeling so reticent, I might’ve posted the following updates to Twitter or Facebook.
A dry high: the best weather for brewing.
*
The face of an intruder caught in my flashlight’s beam in the tall weeds, pale and out-of-place as a late-season snow.
*
The night after the burglary, I sit outside for hours watching fireflies in the moonlight, listening to the deer grazing: slow footfalls, loud chewing.
*
A patch of dead grass where the police car had parked with its engine running, leaking coolant in the noonday heat.
*
I’ve been actively flirting with disaster. Which is to say, for the first time in years I’ve been driving a car.
*
The sky before a violent storm turns green just like the face of someone about to vomit.
Provisions
I wanted so much to be the girl in a red dress bending to pick a blossom in the middle of a field of poppies; or the woman in a blue dress carrying a parasol through it, with a little girl at her side. Any one of them, actually: girl, woman, child. Each one vivid with color, flushed from the noonday heat, coming or going in the benign countryside. I wanted to be the chipping sparrow emerging from the lilac, wings brushed just faintly with scent. But I confess sometimes I do not want the bird to answer the high-pitched cries of nestlings. Not immediately, at least. You think that’s a terrible thing to say? Well, I feel it sometimes. Their cries pursue her asleep, awake. Each tufted button’s a homing device; rows of them, like lights lining the field in an airstrip. I wanted a house of my own leaning against a hillside. I wanted simple wood floors, wide ledges for sills. I wanted air, a light more generous than milk, spilling through every window. Even wild things know about caution. Even wild creatures need to preserve what’s left of the husks they have, for the coming months lean with cold, lined with the twigs of their brittle age.
In response to Morning Porch and Morning Porch.
Ouido
From the drainboard, I collect discarded husks for the goddess of garlic peelings.
The saint of innumerable road construction obstacles is my patron for the day.
I do not think the child wished to be destined for sainthood. She walked days and miles with her sister on her back, despite the pebble in her shoe and the crick in her neck. They just wanted to go home.
So who is the saint of frustration, who adorns my heart with scabs peeled open again and again?
Under their rough bark, I see they have grown fruitful, almost competing with the stars. I can only do so much, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t care.
My neighbor offers me the saints of antidepressants and tranquilizers. They have names filled with Ls and Os. They drop into amber-colored vials like tiny porcelain buttons.
The interior votive light of the open-all-night shrine clicks and hums. It dispenses cold water and crushed or cubed ice.
I line up linoleum-cut rubber stamps on the windowsill: nautilus, sundial, chameleon. Reliquaries of my lost selves.
The saints of living by learning as you go would tell you there is no way to teach any of what you want to learn. They carry little musical instruments. They have always played by ear.
In response to failure, falling down, & the living hagiography.