And sometimes that breaking is light,
a feather let loose in leaves,
the day’s simple rituals—
telling how something tastes,
how the bones have felt their marrow—
sometimes a curtain blows aside
and the good of conversation announces itself
like the good of morning
in unachievable, everyday glory.
Sometimes the lips part, the wind of the woods
rises from the lungs, the tongue begins
its dance against the teeth and,
with one person in the presence of another,
the truth—long-stirring, time-sifted—
finds the mouth parched and prepared to speak it.
A Way to Work
I
Good morning.
A body is not just one body.
I inspect every part I can, touch parts that rarely get touched.
I feel the aliveness of being on both sides of the touching: toucher and touched.
I can’t depend on this to continue, but I do.
This body will fail me, and when it does, I won’t mind, I think.
Whether mind or mine or I survive the body: shuts me up.
It opens me at the same time, parts the air as if somewhere in the back of my eyes, I could turn on another frequency of vision and see the insides of being.
As if seeing the insides of being weren’t what we’re doing, us innards.
II
Now the cells constrict, the blood slows, the skin screams against going numb.
It is really fucking cold. Brr doesn’t begin to describe it.
Breath crystalizes on my glasses. It hurts to wipe them off.
I remove them and thread their arm through a hole in my lapel.
Hello, blurry world.
Dogshit, I can still see you coming for my shoe.
III
There is attention and there are kinds.
The weather has a hand in it: twenty, a hundred and four, fifty below.
The blessed seventies, before heatstroke, before dementia?
I have thirty-some years to find out. What an assumption, the future.
IV
Desire is the greatest liar I know.
It even gives us the want to believe in its visions. Says see, you want this. And we do.
It will be warm when I get home.
There will be water in the pot and the stove will work and the tea will raise my core temperature.
I will sip it thinking of my wife’s soup and eat her soup letting my thoughts dissolve in flavor.
She will ask me how I like it and I will have to think to tell her.
She will question the level of salt.
V
I arrive at work. The office is cold. There is no stove. My colleagues say hello.
We generate warmth for one another because this is our chosen family.
We will either choose or be forced to leave it.
If death is the force, and gravity’s here, the ground will take us back.
I mean the force that makes us leave each other could be the end of earth, in which case gravity may not matter, the ground may not be under.
VI
My mother wants her and her mother’s ashes blown from the tops of the Cherokee mountains.
I hope when I get to the top the cold doesn’t drive me down.
I’d like to watch where the ashes go.
I’d like to live long enough to offer them to the wind, intact enough to climb.
I imagine them blowing back on me, sleeping up there, waking up sore and comfortably dirty.
The kind of dirty one can never wash clean. The kind of dirty one wouldn’t want to.
The kind of dirty that becomes the residue of family lore, whether that family is one’s bloodline, one’s loveline, or the line of sentient being.
Or the line of being, sentient or not.
Poems That Are Poems Even Though They Aren’t Poems, I Swear It
A poem doesn’t have to be etched on the page,
warm in the mouth or caught in language;
it can be unspoken in the course of your day,
it can be the unspoken course of your days;
it can be the way you conduct attention,
emotion, the way you treat someone,
the way you turn toward an echo down an alley
that sounds like some long-sought call
from another version of your soul;
it can be your heart as it lifts almost
out of your chest in response,
your voice as it strikes your throat
as an organ of the body
and an organ of the earth;
it can be work, streaks of pain,
the undetectable merger of days,
rust-heeled nails, unanswered mail,
wild strawberries in the mouths of cats;
it can be the way you look at
the light, the light filtering dust
and all that comes to dust
onto your window
and down to its ledge,
the black granite ledge shining,
the stormgates of your pupils shining;
it can be the way you reach out your hand
to wipe away the dust
and wonder how it all comes to this.
Cassandra Sanborn
Bird Watching
See, I want to tell you about the crumbs on the windowsill—
or are they coffee grounds,
dark and small,
smearing against the fake wood?
—well, it doesn’t matter.
(You will say it never matters,
before you sigh,
tap one long finger against your glasses.)
I only want to explain:
our window isn’t
clean anymore.
But this is where we saw the birds
suddenly burst together from that tree,
the one with all the red berries
flinging themselves into the air
as if driven by some foe I could not see
as if the ground would melt their claws
or as if the dirt would cling to their feathers,
pull them beneath the grass.
I said I would
never want to be a bird
and you asked
why I wanted to live with my feet on the ground.
One bird fell from the group,
dropped straight down
onto the grass.
I said something about always wanting
a door to close.
You put your hand on my shoulder,
tangled cold fingers into my hair.
The fallen bird’s wing
bent behind her back.
I turned to answer you,
lost her in the grass.
Do you sit there on Sundays now,
while I am away trying to remember
how to love?
Do you eat your pancakes
and watch for her?
I had forgotten her slow hop,
the way she stayed behind.
Or perhaps they left her,
brown feathers half-hidden in green grass.
Last Night
Maybe the world began like this:
a hand,
palm up in the bottom of the basement
a quick gesture to the open window,
where arborvitae roots crawl through the screen
as if we have been hiding
better ground inside,
as if we know how to help them grow.
Three of us, awake,
and someone says something about isolation,
surviving the apocalypse
or roaming the stars.
Either way, all of us separated
from the world by that screen,
set apart from everyone sleeping above,
those left outside.
I lean back on the couch—
purple, overstuffed.
Gilded graduation announcements on the table,
gold against the dark wood.
Say I think it’s all because we want to be alone
us and the quiet of the basement:
the muted television,
the roots just tapping,
that vein of water creeping down the wall.
And Julie waves her hand again,
says if we’re pretending
let’s imagine it’s only space.
(We want our families to be alive,
staring up at the sky, imagining
we are that light no that one
waiting—we might return.)
Ellie maps out our ship,
blue ink on notebook paper,
five buildings united in air, five people in each.
Tell me who you would take.
Who do you take
when the universe is sprawled at your feet,
when launching means everyone else will just keep living,
lives spreading out below like roots in good dirt.
Ellie’s pen hovers over pale blue lines;
a breeze brushes my neck.
The roots in the window tremble.
Botany Lessons
On the radio, the man who can hold a note
longer than I can hold a breath
sings about fields in Indiana
and hickory trees.
His voice wobbles.
I have lived by his fields
and never seen a hickory.
Unless I did—
unless I, careless,
saw one, all rough bark
(complicated leaves)
and called it an ash,
wondered how it survived those bugs.
My mother’s grandmother would have known.
See, once she took the shotgun
from the closet in the laundry room,
propped it on her shoulder,
tried to kill a vulture
sitting on the fence in the shade.
See, he was looking
like he knew something
and goddamn those were her trees,
her walnuts rotting in the grass,
her birds hiding in the leaves.
Older
When I get my letter from the graduate school,
my mother tells me about ink on her fingers
and typewriter tape,
stacks of papers crammed into corners,
retreats under golden, crumbling sycamore leaves.
Whispering to almost-brown grass:
The Star. The Post!
She puts her hands on my arm,
says, but I got all of you.
Her cold fingers—
how’s that for an inheritance?—
tighten, then release,
move up to stroke my hair.
A callus catches;
I wait for her to untangle the strands.
Of course I’d never give you up.
She frees them without looking,
her eyes on my letter.
My hair falls against my neck.
Revelation
There is no carpet in the office,
just cool, green tile
so she slips off her shoes,
presses her toes against the ground,
lets the heat from her body slip
into fading linoleum.
She reads the financial report to me,
shakes her hair.
Curls bounce in the air
and I look at her shoes—
black leather, shiny,
but worn by the heel.
She has discarded them
like we would discard water bottles at the beach:
empty for a moment
until you need it again.
And for a moment I want to say
I just finally understood prayer—
but that’s another lie.
Maybe it’s only the kind of prayer
I knew when I was a girl:
hands clasped
like I was holding on to something,
reciting the names of the people I loved
until my father turned out my light,
and I, left in the dark,
let the words stop dripping off my lips.
Left them lying there,
a pile by my side,
waiting until morning.
Linda Sonia Miller
Eclipse
Last night, front lawn, the Dad stands
after arriving late from work at the E.R.
where he’s watched a thirteen year old girl
slip into a coma—and puts his arm
around the shoulders of his 12 year old
daughter, now as tall as he.
They stare into that starlit velvet dome
eyes on the moon slowly enveloped by earth’s
shadow, its fullness diminished, then enhanced
as it turns rusty brown then iridescent red
each shade, each change mysterious
the way earth’s perfect roundness eclipses
the moon’s until it vanishes
beneath this planet’s exact otherness
as though moon and earth were twins
or friends sharing a moment
as parent and daughter might share
some unspoken understanding perhaps
on a night like this, she still child enough
to love his company best, he still energized
after a long, tiring day by the presence
of his sylph-like daughter, who asked him
to wake her, hours past her bedtime, to witness
this transformation together.
Kaida Does The Stomp
“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”
—Sir Francis Bacon
Gray autumn day, sliver of sun, tennis court bestrewn:
leaves, puddles, abandoned toys. Playground bereft
of children but for the two-foot tall, fairy/elfin creature
in blue corduroy coat embroidered with flowers and owl,
feet in three-inch slippers, pink leather petals on each set of toes
—barely anchored to earth.
She pauses at a puddle, studies a floating spire, yellow trees
grizzled trunks, rhythmically stomps each small foot in turn,
ripples, unravels the scene, runs to the next puddle, pauses
stares, stomps again, a dance of sorts, puddle to puddle
across the court, oblivious of all but the mystery of a world
afloat, sound, feel of water splashing
until she reaches the net, raises that shabby curtain,
stagehand and star, crawls beneath, faces her audience
of one—and applauds herself.
Full Circle
(after the painting by Peter McCaffrey)
On new legs she stands, eyes wide
afraid—it’s the world after
that moist landscape, unremembered
mostly lost
before that other
muddled affair, kaleidoscopic
dark and bright
slowly coming into focus,
Timid, legs placed wide
for traction in this unfamiliar place
she glances back
and bleats
newly sprung from one unknown
to another, and much later
another still awaits her
but this time perhaps
she’ll be brave, replete
sweet hay, sun-drenched grassy plain
strong bovine body, calves of her own
that kept her warm.
Delivery
I stretch into the pose: inhale, exhale
bend, stretch
feel body and mind
attempt escape
morning news: six year old boy, hand broken
by his father’s torturer
two-thousand refugees trapped
in no-man’s land
my joints fight September’s chill
a phone call:
my mother tells me she cannot see
only blurs and memories
across the room, rope of sunlight
a bird appears, flutters
against the windowpane
as if trying to break in
disappears, re-appears from that blue-gold
high above the green
soars to a neighbor’s roof, a sign
above his side-door: Deliveries
descends, looks in at me again—beak and black-seed eyes
press against the pane
as if my small, constructed world
clapboard walls built long ago
promise permanence or safety, while I desire that vast blue
clouds wild, buoy of light:
ascend, descend, gold to green
and back again—Deliver Us I read
The Weight of Birds
(after the painting by Peter McCaffrey)
Even the soul
though beautiful
and weightless