lilies of the valley emerge,
pristine, from the charnel
of rotten leaves.
Prescription for the Use of Scottish Footwear
When you hike, wear heavy socks and brogues,
so your eyes may rise above the narrow path,
ignore the common gait, trust one foot
to find its place before the other.
Toes safe, scan the landscape for love.
Stride through fields of waist-high grass,
fodder before it’s scythed to bale, and borrow
a few stalks to carry. The world’s in hand—
food for winter, seeds of next year’s crop.
Kick a pinecone straight down a gravel road,
on parade for crowds of spiderwort
and sumac cheering from the ditch. Notice
that suitors vie for your attention:
the eager moon, risen early into sheer sky
and the sun boasting in scarlet and plum.
Write your name on the bones
of the old smokehouse, to tie you
to the past, and keep a fragment
in the pocket of your winter coat, a gift
to find each year. At night, in the warmth
of your fireside, pick burrs from your socks
and burn them. Listen to your problems pop
and sizzle. Savor their resinous smell.
Watch them curl to cashmere smoke.
Birds of Suburbia: Blue-Gray Heron
Misplaced here by the interstate,
you soar above Baskin-Robbins,
sapling legs sailing behind,
neck folded into blades
of Da Vinci wings,
his dream of flight.
From here you wear no blue,
your silhouette all shade
glued flat to an ochre sky.
In this landscape of Starbucks,
your exotic form drags behind
a rusty tin can of foreboding.
Where are your moss-draped oaks?
I rejoice each spring and fall
when our house is a stop on your route,
like Sweat’s bar-b-q in Soperton
for Atlantans en route to Savannah.
I look out the west window
and there you are
a gawky Giacometti
knob-kneed and statue-still.
Perched on the brick ledge
or one leg submerged
you eye the buffet:
former denizens of our fishbowl
and offspring of bream
pulled from Nancy Creek
by children on summer break.
Then I see your slate spectrum flash.
You’re welcome here, eat up.
The goldfish translate sun too,
but are more prolific, their design
less esoteric, less like a secret
whispered in Genesis.
Losing My Drift
In line for coffee, waiting my turn,
a song transports me back.
Joni Mitchell just released Hejira, and I race
down the fine white lines of the free, free way.
I’m vaguely aware that what other patrons see
is a middle-aged woman, spaced out in Starbucks,
her hair in disarray, atypical of the neighborhood.
She seems to think it’s her duty to explain the draft
and women’s lib to young people who missed the Sixties,
these young people who seem to be running everything
(when did they take over?)
I don’t know this woman, but she’s always around.
Easily distracted, she has binges of attention,
interrupts everything she does to start
something else, keeps piles in every room,
monuments to projects she means to finish.
One pile on her desk is for vanishing wetlands,
one for stupid real estate projects
she will deplore in letters to editors
(Joni was right about that tree museum),
and one of unfiled items for her garden notebook,
data about plants that died years ago.
One pile is for an essay on hypocrisy.
The same politicians against stem cell research
say bombs away at the drop of a hat, unbothered by thousands
of dead civilians. Frankly, she just wants to slap
her friends who voted to keep them in office and say, WISE UP!
At this point it’s obvious the disgruntled boomer
has taken control of this poem that was supposed to be
about the grad student who stood atop Balsam Mountain
decades ago and thought society was progressing.
I was going to write about the self, or selves,
about how what seems lost, isn’t.
But the self that soars over the valley like a Red Tail
is also the slippery fish, still shining,
but scarred from flopping in the bottom
of an old canoe, which is the body, I guess,
and it’s drifting down stream, heading for the falls.
Toni Hanner
1960—Lanny
When I touched Lanny’s arm, up where her white sleeve
ended, there were bees humming beneath her warm skin.
When I smelled Lanny’s hair, her straightened hair
the dull black of asphalt, it was sweet, just on the edge of turning.
When I touched Lanny’s hair, smoothed my hand
over the rough surface so unlike my own black silk—
Lanny’s skin the color of Sanka in the jar, a stone
hot in the sun, flecks of glistening fool’s gold.
We took off our clothes and lay giggling in her bed.
We hid her brother’s magazines under the covers
and marveled at the pale women, their enormous breasts,
and marveled at each other’s flat chests,
her little buttons a color I had no name for.
I remember talking dirty, biting the pillows to keep
from screaming with laughter and something else. We had no idea
what any of it meant, all I knew was that I wanted my arms
around her thin little body I wanted to lie on top of her
with my face in the sweaty hollow between her neck and bony
shoulder, I wanted a world I would not learn
how to name until Lanny disappeared.
Catalina
for Gloria
How did we decide—you nodded right or left,
I followed. Did we tell our parents—how
did we get there neither of us
had a car or a license. In the photo we sit smoking
on a blanket on what must be a beach
although you can’t see the ocean—maybe
it’s a hotel swimming pool. Bikinis, my sly, shy
almond eyes. Your mouth prim, your body
already hatching your future. Seniors in high school,
college freshmen, I remember nothing
but being there, Catalina, 26 miles across the sea,
the Avalon Ballroom’s graceful decay lording it over
daytrippers like us. We took a rickshaw,
night came with the usual terrors. You
went out on a boat with a stranger,
he had a yacht or was pretending to be
a man with a yacht. I don’t remember where
I slept or how we got home. Just this photo,
smoke from my Lucky
&
nbsp; a curtain drawn across my face.
On Funerals
Over the land bridge to Idaho,
when my father died we didn’t
it’s how the Eskimos got there
and the Portuguese, my aunt’s
family, rows of Berriochoas
in Shoshone, animate as dust
swirling above ground, but when
my father died we just went home.
Africa, the Great Wall, we re-hung
the wallpaper in the corner cathedral,
we swept up the dust from Chernobyl
and fed each other with eyedroppers.
Now they come so fast, it’s hard
to keep track, my brother my sister
eventual only eighty years ago, now ellipses
in my mother’s autobiography. Oh yes,
she started it, my mother, with her June
snowfall, the monks gathering in their yellow,
her purple bruises, her flesh too yielding,
as if she were melting there in the salt flats
now each flies off after her, massive wing-beats,
we are already forgotten.
Boxes
Sister, here is your box, it has no stairs.
I will take you out when I need a slide
rule, a compass. Brother, your box
is tall, you will need to stand. If you grow
tired, ring the bell and someone will come
to turn you onto your side.
If you see our father
please tell him his supper
is getting cold.
After Dreams of the Dead All Night, My Father
I wake late, bones aching and stiff.
A busy night of dead sisters
and living sibyls, a mother
somewhere, stirring the pot.
My ignorant calendar tells me
to send my brother a birthday card.
He’d be 76 on Wednesday, catching up
with our sister, now both are ash. I bought
tiny cork-stoppered bottles, thinking to collect
everyone, line them up on the mantle,
now I’m not so sure, I have my father, maybe
he’s all I need, my blood,
my horse, shambling through family
in a flail, a smolder. The parentheses around
my father and me raising the hair
on the back of my neck, I conjure him,
he strides hobble-gaited through all the watchkeepers,
they can’t see him and if they did, he’d seem a fool.
Inside the pale gold glass, ash sticks
together, wanting to hold some form.
Christopher Dulaney
Uncle
They found him on his face in a motel room
where he paid rent with his hands, painting walls
and cutting lawn, keeping things up—
There were notes on the upright
that I could not play,
keys that would not sound.
You were afraid of his hands. You all were,
as if they had buried a part of you,
deep enough, you all had thought;
until it came time to bury him,
his death in your minds
like water too hot for the skin.
It was still morning and you were all old
and thinking the same things—
just as helpless as you were then,
those nights when you were young
and he, deaf drunk, found you
cold and still and silent
There were notes on the upright
that I could not play,
keys that would not sound.
It was me who held his cold hands
who straightened his curled fingers
so that they could lie flat like the rest of him,
crying like the rest of the room,
thinking of how
you were only girls then and already
full of feelings without names;
left with the ugliness of his touch,
the blame of his hands:
as if they had buried a part of you,
deep enough, you had thought—
there were moments in the night,
in your night—
They were notes on the upright
that I could not play,
keys that would not sound.
Somehow, Distance Becomes A Bosom I am Gawking At
Today I walked to work with a Steinbeckian tractor for a heart,
a dust covered machine lurching towards the Bethlehem
behind my eyelids,
overworked from plowing the cropless field of our love. I am stuck in oscillation
between honesty and victimhood, searching myself over
for a wound.
I turn around to spot no trail of blood or chain and ball—I yield only a sense, a memory
slipping in and out of focus: Wrongness.
I woke today from a dream of Krishna dancing with his gopis,
my dream self juggling a blue desire to be recognized, to be collected
into the arms of God, to be seen dancing,
chanting the Maha Mantra with my eyes closed
out on my permanent lunch break.
But these wrongs, even renouncement can’t smother:
the injuries acquiesced along the curves and protrusions of togetherness—
the yo-yoing of the heart, the titter tatter of my brain—
my hands
always in your braids,
fucking them up. In the dream, Krishna laughs as I approach him,
and his laugh is an ocean, electric with death, darkened by sex. I am embarrassed.
Ashamed of the limits of my love for you,
guilty for pretending they could be any less severe,
for never taking my eyes off the distance I would place between us.
In another dream, you were the turtle crossing the road
that I didn’t swerve to miss,
that I told myself
I had only nicked.
Unsearchable
“The heart is deceitful above all things,
& desperately wicked: who can know it?”
—Jeremiah 17:9
If I open it up to find it bare,
unadorned with the sap of experience,
beating fast, (though I’m breathing slow),
I find its red almost insolent, the way it’s
both bright and pale, shimmering and dark,
the way it wavers but doesn’t fall, like
infrastructure made with the earth in mind.
As if we are children playing on staircases,
faced with the peril of the questions we
didn’t think to ask, or else older, grown and
always mesmerized by the consequences
we seem to escape; dogged with the trouble
of looking out and only seeing our wide-eyed selves.
I start to think of light as the first
and most elegant fiction refracted by what
is really there: a parched desert bush, a fruit tree
by a stream, my hand as I reach out to touch you,
always and forever wishing that each time I do
really is the good flesh continuing.
I am aware that I shouldn’t trust it,
/> that it is not mine to search—
but here, with you, beneath this blanket
of coalescent days, perhaps I am
folding into the thing of it now,
perhaps I am catching on.
Fever in My Pocket
Up until now I’d lost it, that tune you’d hum between A and B,
us alone and on foot, our stomachs ruined with an idea:
the difference between wisdom and ignorance,
between how the two make you act.
How you’d known all the ways to keep me out,
and yet neither of us knew when to let me in,
nor did we guess that when you did it would
do nothing for our stomachs. Even months later,
with you off for summer, the light still
pours through the hole in the window above
the sink from the last time you sent me home.
Alone in my kitchen,
I shake the thought of us around in my head
like a riff from Exile
on Mainstreet or a lyric
from Blonde on Blonde,
how the one bleeds
helplessly into the other,
how a plea is a plea
and every time the a/c clicks on or off
I hear myself singing
—come, come on down Sweet
Virginia—
—because sometimes it gets so hard
you see?
Because someone once taught me that flour
doesn’t rise unless you’ve remembered to sift it first,
and like your dress on so many of those dead note
nights, I am afraid we are not self-rising.
There’s a difference between someone you’ve fallen
mad for and a lonely pool of light,
but I don’t think I’ve found it.