Post by LynnDoiron on Apr 18, 2008 20:45:12 GMT -5
Nobody says a year won’t arrive when February boils
the moving green from apple buds.
Nobody swears to anything, whatever, at all,
as absolute and known beyond theories. And,
even in this surmise: we could, again, be wrong.
When did I multiply, become the plurality “we”
who quietly argues the merits of song
with an unresponsive muse and a slow bird,
small as a scalloped leaf?
The dark goes,
first at a crawl between sash and sill, exposing
day knees, pink where they crush hills in supplication,
then gone and gone to blue and blue
with a white-hot vagina sun.
One day more is born to speak:
“She cleared a space of thistles
and stood where she would stand
to wash dishes in the sink,”
or “he held the children in his lap
and let them turn the wide black steering wheel
and turn and turn the fields for gardens
year after year.”
Before breakfast, we walk
through March into April and our faces
are hard with new days’ scuffmarks of harm
we failed to recognize the boot of, the heel of,
the grinding gait of – at the time. Hot air
balloon in primary colors, Napa valleys
and vines floating our shadow sailing with
boiled gases and currents buttered with May,
thick St. Helena larkspur and roses, low fogs
almost blue at the breaking and all those undiminished
eons of acres of grapes! I brought foreign beers
from the deli. We drank them with delight.
Whose story
is this one I keep lacing like a shoe? Runners
run while we kneel on the track,
the gun fires and more sprinters come,
long-strided, sure, fast – their sweat is honey
sprung from the skin of summer. You
gone with a woman gone too
and a dream of a door to the heart of the hive
where the plurality of me thought
I had all the answers.
We didn’t. We don’t. We won’t again
as if, as if, as if we ever did
Yes, my mother
rises up from her simple coffin
unhappy with our use of “vagina”
in reference to the sun. Indeed,
unhappy with my pluralization,
this thinning of one into several,
a conversation of selves watching
from night trees, listening for hushes
of pulse and the drip of honeyed sweat
from heart-shaped lilac leaves. We are
one, my mother and I, in our unhappiness
over meanings and words. Even now
hollow eyes turn from us at the sound. Is it
the long “i”, Mother, that jolts us from the grave
(for I am as half dead as you are half alive)?
How did we shape
ourselves to this discomfiture with a part
so profound? Hymns, Mother, should’ve been
sung through girl days of our vaginas, of us.
When Autumn came, when January accepted
your final breath (and half mine) and a hillside
took us home, no season passed that you were not
part of we. It all comes to one,
all these stars and suns, the hands
that would climax a widow grown white
with lies and the webs of finger-tatted clouds
so inconsequential in the great sky of things
breaking silence after silence.
Soon one spring evening is here, the heat
of wanting a collar bearing his salt presses, presses.
Our dreams tell us, “They’re gone.”
We ask, “But where?” and listen for pebbles
to arrange answers, for fire to skywrite
what wind knows in letters we can read
above these flatlands of wild grasses,
of small white flowers pooled across greens,
of buds beginning to shape old trees.
~
the moving green from apple buds.
Nobody swears to anything, whatever, at all,
as absolute and known beyond theories. And,
even in this surmise: we could, again, be wrong.
When did I multiply, become the plurality “we”
who quietly argues the merits of song
with an unresponsive muse and a slow bird,
small as a scalloped leaf?
The dark goes,
first at a crawl between sash and sill, exposing
day knees, pink where they crush hills in supplication,
then gone and gone to blue and blue
with a white-hot vagina sun.
One day more is born to speak:
“She cleared a space of thistles
and stood where she would stand
to wash dishes in the sink,”
or “he held the children in his lap
and let them turn the wide black steering wheel
and turn and turn the fields for gardens
year after year.”
Before breakfast, we walk
through March into April and our faces
are hard with new days’ scuffmarks of harm
we failed to recognize the boot of, the heel of,
the grinding gait of – at the time. Hot air
balloon in primary colors, Napa valleys
and vines floating our shadow sailing with
boiled gases and currents buttered with May,
thick St. Helena larkspur and roses, low fogs
almost blue at the breaking and all those undiminished
eons of acres of grapes! I brought foreign beers
from the deli. We drank them with delight.
Whose story
is this one I keep lacing like a shoe? Runners
run while we kneel on the track,
the gun fires and more sprinters come,
long-strided, sure, fast – their sweat is honey
sprung from the skin of summer. You
gone with a woman gone too
and a dream of a door to the heart of the hive
where the plurality of me thought
I had all the answers.
We didn’t. We don’t. We won’t again
as if, as if, as if we ever did
Yes, my mother
rises up from her simple coffin
unhappy with our use of “vagina”
in reference to the sun. Indeed,
unhappy with my pluralization,
this thinning of one into several,
a conversation of selves watching
from night trees, listening for hushes
of pulse and the drip of honeyed sweat
from heart-shaped lilac leaves. We are
one, my mother and I, in our unhappiness
over meanings and words. Even now
hollow eyes turn from us at the sound. Is it
the long “i”, Mother, that jolts us from the grave
(for I am as half dead as you are half alive)?
How did we shape
ourselves to this discomfiture with a part
so profound? Hymns, Mother, should’ve been
sung through girl days of our vaginas, of us.
When Autumn came, when January accepted
your final breath (and half mine) and a hillside
took us home, no season passed that you were not
part of we. It all comes to one,
all these stars and suns, the hands
that would climax a widow grown white
with lies and the webs of finger-tatted clouds
so inconsequential in the great sky of things
breaking silence after silence.
Soon one spring evening is here, the heat
of wanting a collar bearing his salt presses, presses.
Our dreams tell us, “They’re gone.”
We ask, “But where?” and listen for pebbles
to arrange answers, for fire to skywrite
what wind knows in letters we can read
above these flatlands of wild grasses,
of small white flowers pooled across greens,
of buds beginning to shape old trees.
~
