Spells. Annie Finch
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Two close centuries of stone and cloth and paper
chalked your cheeks and carved your hands to broken.
You are not a monument any more, now—
more like a forest
moving shadows under simple trees, dark rivulets
mottling snow fading in this warm gray winter,
melting the centuries you didn’t know, Henry Longfellow—
wait—I can hear you—
a low and earnest voice, wind in fir trees, burning
through this room, where you wrote your saddest poem,
through this house, where the farm and family built you.
Your sister Ann’s portrait
stumbles, eyes black as night behind a candle.
The marble urn in your red brick yard has fallen,
knocked down in the emptiness of the fountain.
Cries of the seagulls
reach through walls to find you again, pour down
the carrying knowledge that grew your branching gardens—
and tell me which old words, which new wings, will carry
you from this courtyard.
THE NAMING
Lopez, Jurgens, Lozowsky, O’Connor, Lomax
(Shoes, and spirals, dust, and the falling flowers)
Díaz, Dingle, Galletti, DiPasquale,
Katsimatides
Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names:
DiStefano, Eisenberg, Chung, Green, Dolan,
(Women running suddenly in their high heels)
Penny, York, Duarte, Elferis, Sliwak,
Yamamadala,
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.
Wounds widen the remembering earth:
Weinstein, Villanueva, West, Sadaque,
(Spirals, dust and spiraling dust and hours)
Bowman, Burns, Kawauchi, Buchanan, Reilly,
Reese, Ognibene,
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.
Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Kushitani, Ueltzhoffer, Wong, Ferrugio,
(Breathed in only in or beyond the naming),
Inghilterra, Tzemis, Liangthanasam,
Coladonato—
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.
Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Sanchez, Talbot, Afflito, Siskopoulos
(Every question with a long sob of naming)
Tarantino, Zempoaltecatl, Thorpe, Koo,
Stergiopoulos,
Zion, Zinzi, Song, Shahid, Santiago,
Ortiz, Pabon, Ou, O’Neill, Newton-Carter,
Miller, Mohammed,
Zakhary, Campbell,
Deming, DiFranco,
Chowdhury, Blackwell,
Zucker, McDowell,
Goldstein, Basmajian . . .
Wounds widen the remembering earth.
Closed eyes see beyond the flames.
Grief opens hands to feel the wind.
Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.
FROST’S GRAVE
I think of your quiet grave now and again
When innocence has rolled me out of sleep
Close to my husband’s side, to lean again
Against his breathing human side, to keep
Myself breathed in his liquid human breath.
I think of your nurturing grave so often. Death
Has made you a place I like to imagine going:
Opening the gate to your grave, entering in,
Reaping your silence where a small tree, growing
Generous in the forgiveness of your sin,
Leans over your stone, the grass, your bones, the grass,
The grass. The grass. I like to imagine frost there, hung
Like frost on a beach in November, when the sun
Rises on winter, just as it rose on spring,
On the humid decision to grow, past everything.
TAROT: THE MAGICIAN CARD
Rain wets the wand, wind moves a sword,
lightning lights crystal where the thundering cup
forms me a channel and takes on a word,
pouring the pentacle I gather up.
Time carves the storm in the palm of my hand,
till it fills with shapes that send me down
through my river-body. Do I stand
at a table the waiting planet surrounds?
Through my own fingers, eyes, and palm,
and through other worlds, huge or small,
one fury spins and turns me calm;
I breathe and watch it land and fall,
holding what I hardly know or see,
filled with the storm that makes, makes me.
KEYS
Phi Beta Kappa poem, Yale University, 2011
Like an island, a key makes a door. In the surge
Of its mineral clarity, seas come unbound.
Though an arch curves together, the keystone will stay
Braced in gravity, locked by immensity, wound
To a temple in air by the spiraling play
That could tumble much heavier forces. What’s found
Past the musical notes that cascade and converge
In a key, past the tock the tick carries away
When it’s wound by a key? There are patterns that merge
Meanings, silent until we code them open,
Clued to us by the random