The review of Flares and Fathoms, from which the following poems are taken, appeared in the previous issue.
Blizzard: Brooklyn View
A man shovels in a parking lot
for a car supposedly there
but the car so loves its burial
he gives up and goes,
engulfed in swan’s down, Florentine swirls,
the ticker tape of heaven.
To sparse trees comes a minimal spring,
precise and oriental: three blooms here,
four there, birds brown and blood – red.
Bricks take on the texture of
their mortar; shingles show as if newly cut.
Traffic? What is traffic?
People? There are no people.
The ornate wind, thousand – flaked, leaps from
building to building. Softly the
neighborhood alters to a mock Siberian scene,
swathed in ermine,
capped with repeated conical hats.
Good people, kept home today
from your various jobs, look out your windows,
grasp what might be a
metaphor for love:
simplicity in a deepening world.
Lightning
When wind comes, it comes like wolves
with a strategy, turning the trees expertly and
circling with intent. Running relays with an easy
power. This is the hunt that parts the air
for the sequence of lightning, wind everywhere,
pulling resistance down wherever it finds some.
Then lightning, bodiless but for a huge
pair of hands, bodiless and yet with a fine
acrobat’s presence, grips a bar no one can see
and vaults across the landscape, bleaching the hills,
bringing the barns forward a furtive step.
We’re driving home in separate cars, though as
lightning vaults again, I feel these hills
might be the hills of Mars or of memory,
childhood hills or some valley Death secretly
folded us into, so that we travel
without knowing we’ve left our lives behind.
I follow you, thinking of Violet Kennedy, who was
struck by lightning and survived; of how pale
she was, as if the bolt had stolen all her natural color
but charged—before leaving her body—
her blue eyes bluer as a gift. And how if lightning
could be attracted on the basis of names, surely
a strong choice would be Violet: a flower so firmly
of the ground, its color the color of lightning’s heart.
In mind’s eye, I see our room lit in detail
from two windows. Lightning illuminates furrows
in the cloth of the bedspread, the dark chair
whose startled legs leap to support the seat at each flash.
The marble top of the bedside table levitates, the
shade of the small lamp trembles like a bell.
And who will I find at home when I pull
into the driveway, where the parked red car,
the house, the maples, stutter in and out of existence?
You’ll already be in our room, a dear familiar stranger.
Your face as the flash finds you and
imprints you in my brain, will hold the
brevity of our lives brightly before me,
moving me towards you in terror and love
to touch you before the light goes.
from Five Rock Pools
First
Stranded, the tiny
take stage, mostly for no one.
Here dines the
crab, thumbnail sized,
palely transparent.
You call that a shell? I say, but he
waves both forks boldly,
lifts another bit of invisible
feast into his mouth.
Wee gourmand, savoring—with all the
salt of the sea—
something delicious.
Fifth
Go on. Take a stone
home. Which will it be? Some say
nothing. Some whisper in
stone sibilance: Choose me.
Out of every possible grey: warm,
cool, pitted, smoothed,
smokey, sullen, blue-ticked,
double of ash, of dove pinion,
Confederate, dapple, driftwood
(the list’s a sinker, cut from its line)
take from a coastline’s crescent this
adventurer. The most
persuasive, the one sporting a white
belly band: circumference of quartz
running wild,
only to close upon itself.
I’m lonely, keep me company.
I’m tired, come sleep in my hand.
Good friends and bitter rivals,
bid the chosen
good-bye.
The Snakes
shed their skins and disappeared.
One ghost lies stretched beneath shade of
drainpipe, one curves under pinxter bush.
I put my grass shears down in the fallen
blades, and pick up those put away lives:
light as cellophane, perfect,
opened only at the mouth.
I think of the one I mowed over by accident,
in twilight of early September. How it coiled
in a knot of regret and headless,
untied its life in the grass.
(Ribbon of God, forgive me).
With sun shining through the panes
of each specific scale, and the calm interior of
what was, I think of greenhouses. Certainly
snakes are stems on which we place the
flowers of fear, but I am done with those gardens.
I am thinking of greenhouses
lying their lengths out, dependent like
snakes upon the sun, and the casting off
of what fills them season to season: poinsettias
giving way to lilies, roses yielding to chrysanthemums.
Wind lifts the lovely emptiness I hold in my hand,
recovers the movement of sinuous past, then
lets it drop. I lay the skins on grass;
I study them long. See the sun through
small panes various and beautiful.
Have patience: I am reminded also of churches,
of wanderers entering to
depart with the window colors in their robes.
Cup
It’s not funny at all to your mother,
but you laugh and laugh.
What else to make of this
arc of juice,
your sudden power?
Cup! You can’t say it,
but stridently can crow.
Can’t say gavel, court, but close
case with lusty banging.
Shriek of cockatiel. Lift. Let
fall. Thrilling contact when thing
resounds with metallic thock!
Again. Again.
Fine game until She looms, her
hand large, largest of all.
Cloth comes at you—moist, horrid—
chair and tray cinch you in,
turn you tyrant in this land
that often aches with unreason.
Mine, you’d say, could you
say it, but trust instead to a
vowel. Clutch hard the shiny.
Intent to have your way.