Series: Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2013-14

In childhood, often I confused words I knew only a little about for other words: for instance, overhearing my father on the phone conveying his sympathies to a friend who had lost a family member, I wondered why he kept bringing up that sweet-sticky milk I liked to smear like jam on my bread. Condense, condolence. In a way grief is sticky like that, and when you have opened the can it’s as if you have to keep going until you reach the bottom, until there is nothing left and your teaspoon hits metal and the sound lets you know there isn’t any more. So you rinse it at the sink, you put it away and teach yourself gradually the differences between guillotine and glutton, animate and anemone, windfall and waterfall.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

to smolder and smear:
everything serviceable

as kindling— paper, wood
shavings; promises, lies,
joss sticks, posturing.

The hard become soft,
treasure of coal with its heart
of burning coral. Blown breath

in the cupped half-cove
of darkness, fire in the belly
that must never go out—

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

During the war, his grandmother was part of what they used to call a concert brigade. Once she sang at a programme that included the legendary Oistrakh. Bombs were falling through the sky, the city in ruins; and yet people came to listen, those who were not yet dead, those who refused to be done in by their daily ration of half a roll of dry brown bread, one cube of sugar, a hundred grams of vodka for courage. Snow fell, or freezing rain; and who anymore had good clothes? But they curled up like leaves in the shabby remnants of theatres, clutching their threadbare coats to their sides. They pressed their fingers to their cheeks as if they could inflate them with breath, as if the cadenzas might lead to a birth chamber— They would tumble like newborns into a world flooded with light: no echoes of guns, only a clearing in a birch forest filling with the cries of resurrected birds.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

It collapsed upon itself from so much complexity.

The leaves that formed the hedges, uniform in size and shape, decided to grow new veins and stippled variations.

Someone installed a mobile of paper cranes under the blue awning of sky.

One way traffic, all left turns.

X marks the spot where, a long time ago, a red sweater came unravelled.

Every once in a while a peacock flashes its jeweled fan; this is called flirting.

Persistence is rewarded by a flask of ginebra and a matadora’s muleta.

Danger lurks where you most expect it.

The soil is your nearest radio station: this is why they say Keep your ear to the ground.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

When was the last time you felt
the white glisten of tears before their

harvest in a vial; or the random
punctuation provided by birds swarming

electrical lines? Across the valley
that winter the cold made the almonds

shrivel, the citrus crops shrink
their promise of little suns.

In the yard next door, a girl read
a passage aloud from a book using

that way of talking: lilt at the end
of each phrase, question where there is

no question. Overhearing, I wanted
to strip the rosemary of leaves,

offer a brittle handful— as if
they could be used as pauses;

as if the faint languor of scent
that remained in each virgule

might bring a different
nuance to the horizon.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

We slept in rooms that were but thin
partitions against the cold— bare
wood, tin roofs, and with our coats
unlined; yet we had no word for winter
in our dictionary. That year I learned
to eat fermented things, learned to drink
coffee sweetened with sugar, lightened with milk
from a can. No children had come yet but I knew
the press of stones against the swelling riverbank,
the shale that cut through loam. I divined then
what the herbalist meant when she whispered
as her hands worked to massage the chill
out of my limbs: There is a space beneath
the ribs where hearth stones lie close
to rub against each other— take care
their heat does not go out.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Bring a carrot or an apple
to the animal of the new year

that has come out of the gate,
that paws impatient at the pebbled

topsoil— Because it is ready
to canter into the field, offer it

a handful of blinding snow,
white as a portent for no sorrow,

cold as the slate which waits
to be turned into a track

where we’ll walk forward
and back, into infinity.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Who will sift the snow
fine as dust from the eyes of the clock?
Who will find the ring
buried in layers of cake?
How does the tendril on the vine
still believe in the rotary phone?
Who will take off his shoes
to walk across the blistered sand?
When will the child lay
her hand across the mouth of suffering?
Why is the rooster’s crow
indifferent to the progress of snails?
Why should I return
dreams that refuse to open?
Who will instruct
a wounded star?
Who will embroider the cave
with splendid suns?
What is required for you
to take up a weed and dance?

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.