It is the hardest to find
(across abandoned ballfield,
October, city street,
no sun).
Wind cuts at the throat
and scours what’s left of grass
to stubble. To anchor
the eye, one blue
anywhere? Anything?
Category: Poetry
First Light
A drainless shower
Of light is poesy; ’tis the supreme of power;
’Tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm.-John Keats, “Of Sleep and Poetry”
“Get up, Mommy. Get up!”
I roll over and click on my phone to check the time. Four months in this place and I still haven’t bought an alarm clock. He climbs up on the bed and squooshes in next to me.
“Come on. It’s time to get up!”
“Okay, okay.” I slump back over and giving him a cuddle he endures for all of 3/10ths of a second. Then I click open the link from The Academy of American Poets. Every morning, verse lands like a charm of goldfinches on the windshield of my new day. If there’s time to idle on the shoulder for a minute, I can watch them flit and preen there, flaring necks and inflating the frills of their wings. Most days, I am in 5th gear before even one has a chance to alight. My gaze glances off the buttery blur as I brace myself for oncoming traffic.
My thumb moves to delete this one but I stop it short. “You’re not going to believe this.” I scootch in under the covers and show Bug the phone. “Do you see that title? This poem is called ‘Get Up, Please.’”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. Let me read it.”
The problem with opening the Poem-A-Day on my ancient Blackberry, especially when it’s 7:20am and we were supposed to be walking out the door five minutes ago, is that I never know what I’m getting into. Will it be a 3-line haiku or the whole of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? Do I dare dive in without the weight of ink to gauge my descent? This one begins, “The two musicians pour forth their souls abroad.” Bug listens. The lines have no shape on the matchbook-sized screen. Where one breaks and another begins is anyone’s guess. I read it as I hear it while Bug, in a rare moment of stillness, listens to me render Kirby’s story in verse.
The poem tumbles from the music to the makers then out past them all, from a santoor which looks like the love child of a typewriter and a hammered dulcimer (only with a lot of extra wires) to an Econolodge in Tifton, Georgia where Mrs. Patel explains the reason her children bend to kiss her feet before leaving for school. When the narrator bursts into tears, I come close. Bug looks up into my pause. “What, Mommy?”
I gather myself and go on.
On to the bus carrying the fourth grader to long division, on to the parents whom we never honor enough and then we are ready and then they are gone. On to Keats who claims finally to understand how martyrs could die for their religion because love is his, and he would die for it, for his You. Then comes the end (and I know it is coming because the ground is rising up under this poem, fast and nothing like soft) when squandered time meets surrender – too late for sure, but what choice do we have? – and we finally inhabit the shape of what we’ve always loved, even when we didn’t dare, even when it wasn’t enough. Even when it still isn’t.
In a final act of mercy, Kirby lets his poem “brush across the feet of anyone who reads it,” and this time, I really do cry.
I turn from Bug for a breath, unable to make my mouth shape the final line. Then I can and so I do, poorly but it will have to suffice. Bug is watching me closely now, taking the measure of this surge. His fiery mama. His sometimes far away mama.
I say, “Wow, what do you think of that?” Coming back to him, smiling as best I can.
“I don’t know what any of that means,” he tells me. Now it’s his turn to look away.
“Yeah, it’s pretty long. Also, poems sometimes loop all around to get at what they’re trying to say. Do you want to know what I think it means?”
He surprises me with his nod.
Even though it’s a school day and the sun is already up, even though we will surely be late, I put my phone down and begin. I try to make my own words do justice to what I heard. Music, gesture, the mighty dead. Mrs. Patel and Fanny Brawne, the kiss. The bow. In each of us, the god. I tell him what I believe to be true (at least this morning. Another morning is anyone’s guess) that it’s hard to decide what’s important enough to die for. That it can be even harder to decide what to live for.
Then I say, “Those kids bow to the light within their mama. Would you do that to me?”
“No,” Bug says.
“Oh, come on. Let’s start our day like that every morning. Let’s start right now.” I sit up in the bed and spread my arms over my son. “I bow to the light within you.”
“Stop it!”
“No!” I dip down and nuzzle his belly. He squirms away. “Your turn,” I tell him. “Bow to the light! Bow to me! Respect the distance I’ve traveled!”
“Stop, Mom!” He cries. Giggling, he twists off the bed. “Get up!”
“Please,” I say.
“Get up please,” he says.
“Okay. “ I pull back the covers. “Since you asked so nicely.”
—
Visit the Academy of American Poets site, Poets.org, to see the full text of David Kirby’s “Get Up Please” and to register for Poem-a-Day.
Seasonal Effect
From the curtain rod it dips
low and rises again, as air-laced
as a playground swing brushing
branches and kicking down
showers of petals brighter even
than months ago.
They call this kind of floating
delicacy Georgette, the scarf an ornament
carried in folds
of rolled summer shirts, a gift
from Australia.
At first it draped like jewels
around my neck. Now it serves
a higher purpose, casting its nameless
coral-drunk flowers, its sapphire reef
across the threshold of autumn’s breach.
It jars the white blinds
into dimensionality, pulling them from wall,
carpet, ceiling, from the insistence
of a morning that hasn’t even bothered to bring the sun
along for reveille.
My eyes wish for nothing now. They fall on absence
and do not complain.
I know the danger.
Fortification is imperative.
After the scarf is hung soft
enough there, I position a lamp
bought just today, just for this
corner. Knock-off Tiffany,
it is too big and the wrong shape
but needful nonetheless:
pressed-leaf glass shade, the sweep
of flora, celadon and indigo twining
between amber-veined isinglass panes.
Who could wither in this glow
of meadow, monarch,
day?
Color is a collusion
between evolution and light
to help us survive
the winter.
I tie a purple ribbon around the cord to pull
the switch near and call
my eyes like the face of a flower
back
to lift,
to thirst.
Listen
Tree
by Jane Hirshfield
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
—
From Given Sugar, Given Salt. Copyright © 2001 by Jane Hirshfield. HarperCollins Publishers.
Population Density
Upwards of a million people live in the single square mile of gulley and track called Kibera. The number is staggering. Almost inconceivable. Each face, each flooded trench, each rusted corner of corrugated tin multiplied again. And again. And again. How do we count past a few dozen, a hundred or so at the upper end? A family, a clan, maybe a gathering of the tribes. Beyond that, names bleed into one another. Their associated lives press down in shifting layers, superimposing, becoming indistinct. How do we remember who matters to us? Who is dangerous and who is a friend? Who belongs to whom?
Who counts?
Seven thousand miles over land and sea, the plane circles in on our city. From above, we place the river, a muddy shadow like an erasure through a canvas of lights. We see the photo negative of our home. Black through gold, we mark our coordinates and draw a frame. That must be west. One fishnet stocking hugs the cool leg of a monument that never fails to center our gaze and still the spinning needle.
Nestled between strands of gemstone necklace and glittering beam is our chosen address. The place is our belonging, both the what and the where of our claim. The shadow there, between bridge shiver and engine thrum, is ours.
Both our heads turn the same way. We peer as if of single vision, contriving sharp edges despite mar and blur through the pressurized plastic window. It does not crack no matter how hard I push.
Which I won’t.
I won’t.
Instead, days later, I look up. Up from the teeming ground. From my open-breath, 5000 people-per-square-mile home. These cards in my hand, the luck of the draw. I lift my eyes up from the latticework brick that forever buoys my well-shod feet even when so heavy they fall, and catch
silver glint against blue, the sun cracking hard against the place I dared not lean
and look backwards through leagues of sky to the soft underbelly of cloud. Look further still, through the scuffed plexiglas pinhead. There, a fleeting fortune. 11D, E, F. An accident of place.
From this distance I still see you tucking around me like one.
One and one.
One whose face in any crushing riot, any burning land, I seek. One who counts
as ordinal first. One I count
on to draw in light
and its absence the improbable land
of us.
Join
My husband pulled the bobby pins from my hair one by one and placed them on a table in the dark. He ran the brush through with more care than I had taken even as a little girl, even with my china dolls.
Proximity becomes porosity. We were limestone in rain. The monuments to ourselves etched with begets and allegiances weathered to shadow before we could rub the shape into permanence. It was tomorrow and then the next century.
It will be ten years ago we met. Then two griefs and three oceans ago.
Now I lay in wonder in arms I don’t deserve and he traces beauty down into my skin. Into follicle, he hushes a whisper of first light. Even my pores are seen now. Seen and seeing, as if freed from blindfold and handed a mirror in the same staggering moment. “Oh, so this is what I have become.”
He asks questions no one ever should of a girl whose voice was just hatched. Then he marvels at the tears when all we’ve talked of is sweet things. He can’t know how ill prepared I am for this act of dedication.
How lazy these hands.
How hesitant this contained force.
Of course, he does know, and he fixes himself to the spot and draws closer. We quiet ourselves for a moment words cannot reach and listen to the song on shuffle.
“I am going to come up with an adjective,” he says. Then he tucks it away and we let Regina Spektor fill the room and also us with what we can’t yet tap in ourselves. Halfway between hard and soft, her lyric is a silver glint in the dark. An unsheathing ssss of steel pulling free. She holds the blade against our wrists and turns it this way, that, to feel where it curves and where the slanted script at the hilt edge sips in just enough of the offered light to wet channels between lines
and flings away the rest to flash against a corner of the room
the corner we only just noticed
had been wearing a cloak of shadow
over an old table, a handful of hairpins
a corner we never realized reached so far back
beyond walls
that were almost never there
Your Then to Now
You are young but don’t know it.
It is going to be a very long walk. Your imagination
is too small to contain it.
Your ankles will break
and bleed right down through your soles.
You’ll sleep on stone,
host a colony of vermin, upturn a nest of bees.
It is not going to show
itself, the way. Not for miles. You’ll find
a shelter. It will keep off some rain. You’ll hide
out. You’ll rest. You’ll let the forest
night voices whisper themselves hoarse.
You will be good and it will save you
for a while. You’ll get what everyone
who meets you believes you deserve.
You’ll trust you’ve earned your freedom
from your doppleganger’s claim. You’ll recall
of course how it felt to be grabbing back
at the throat of that you-faced everyman
as it clawed for yours. A battle
of reach, both of you lengthening
the distance while bridging
the gap. You will dream it
alive. You will walk on the sunny side
just to be safe.
I will be there
always turning my own face skyward
in a clearing I’ve torn
by hand. You’ll pass so close,
you’ll smell the raw earth.
You will give
yourself away. You will argue
and win the scuffle but not
the life
someone (you thought) promised. You will caulk
the cracks with the climb
the map
the children
the gear. You will see yourself
in photos and wonder
where that weighted stranger came from
and went, how you never noticed
the shadows dropping like molted
feathers across signpost, stone,
face. You had wound the haze
into a skein and packed it up
with zip ties and strapping tape
and locked it in a trunk
and tucked the key deep
in your scabbard.
You will need to hang
something out
to signal or maybe
to dry.
You will curse the absence
of that lethal cord
just at the moment
it unwinds
and snakes its way back to you.
Beautiful
It’s that
lifted cheek. Those improbable toes. The scent of raspberry in the fold of a yellow rose. That flourish in bottle blue mosaic, this single climbing vine. That black damp and wingbuzz at the mouth of shuttered copper mine.
This fountain. A canyon. That monarch. Those mountains.
It’s that
way his back bends when he feints low and away from his aim’s first trace. This just-right note down in the smoke and bass. The kiss under apple blossoms, and come to that, the apple. It’s this skin. The juice.
That taste.
You are, we whisper. It is so, you gasp. Make me feel, I plead.
It’s that
jump shot. Midnight walk. That sword of beam and concrete, this tower of glass.
This hot scalp of infant hunger burrowing into breast.
The swell, the salt, the foaming crest.
It’s that
Do you? That have you? That what if?
This yes.
A first spoonful. A last ember. The clasp on the chain at the back of the neck. That creak of opening, this bed of silk. The light biting at corners. A sweet sucking clench at the intake
of breath before
That letting go.
Your masterpiece in oil and the way water cuts channels through
This everything.
It’s that
key in your hand.
Those notes in script
you can’t read yet.
The drawstring, the marble, the button, the pocket.
The jar with no label.
This canvas still wet.
It is so, you say.
You are
I reply.
This is
we claim
It’s this.
Choose your Own
I pull him on top of me, say let go,
I want all of you.
Fully clothed but so very naked,
he asks
Is steadily increasing
closeness required? and I admit
(though not out loud)
that the way my ribs fall open
suggests, yes, I want him to enter
into me as tumblers
slip wide the hushed sliding
doors to a museum
where the glass wolf
eye and thinning lapwing feather
improvise a nest
in the last strip of silk from the wrist
of a deposed Saxon queen. This place
a low glimmer of a room
(it has only been rumored to exist)
and he is the unwitting key
as well as the single honored guest
passing us through virgin
corridors lined with relics
bearing no descriptions yet, one masterpiece
after another unfurling before our eyes,
no nameplate bolted into frame
and, come to that,
no frame.
He asks Can we have our vaults?
(his reliquary, a Parthenon of marvels
I circle in keen deference)
and I bite back the question
of whether he means spring
or safe (can we give and retain
with the same gesture?)
I say of course
and in this breath, speak a whole truth
with half a heart
threading its edge to one
who has the power of to draw
tunnels through concrete
and tilt the whole endeavor just enough
to spill us down to first strokes
of infant fingers through paint
whose color has neither been seen
nor imagined before
our eyes fall upon it. On me
he presses
open a fissure
between history and tomorrow
by defying logic
and lifting hands both
away from and into
gravity.
She Would Have Been
teary eyed still
smiling while
wringing her hands,
a half laugh
blushing
the quiver of her chin.
She would have been
shuffling in the house
slippers, her bird-boned
legs a dampered clapper
inside a bell of ruby velour
shushing the floor
and swaying her towards
Eddie Arnold
who croons from the bedside
table to fold
her in sleep.
She would have been
dusting powder
soft folds below her arms,
whispering powder
blue vein into crepe
chiffon before putting on
her lips. She would have been
calling me
Sugar.
Sugar, come over here.
Let me have a look at you.
Her hands
both
busy laying out the satin slip to wear
to her grave
and open
to me. Always opening,
she would have been
102, teary eyes still
like a mouth
turning up
for a kiss.
Shannon E. Williams 