The Nine Senses. Melissa Kwasny
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Under oak. Light that opens like an eyelid to the same trunks, same patch on leaf or leafmeal, then closes. Then opens. The same stuttering pink light. Someone arrives with luggage. Someone has plans to make the best use of her time. And then the time is done. All the eternals—having a father, a mother—are changing form, leaving before I’ve really understood them. Yes, this is how things happen: one dreams of strawberries, and they are served today for breakfast. One opens a book to the page, “When my father died.” I think of him this morning, like a fawn in the long grass. Paralyzed by fear after the diagnosis. (He wanted to speak in tongues. He wanted to travel.) Should I mourn him already, while he is still alive? Oh, Visitor, the silver spoons are clanging in and out of the wind. Above, the periodic tabling of thrush. I could never reach him there. Where reach him now?
Sparrow
The dawns are numbered, as I am. Though I remain ever after in a state of surprise, like a child, dumbfounded by the word “Enter.” My name is small, a garden-mint, a sprig to decorate a plate. I rarely try to speak for others, and consider the words I say, not like the mockingbird who repeats banalities, not like the robin, habitual, not like the rabbits who are silent but move loquaciously. Clack of dried pea pods, cloud of mosquitoes, one can have too many roses in the house. The world is loud, anguished by its processes. Though perhaps it is wrong to settle, as I have settled, for the simple meal, the cutting garden, the circumscribed stroll by the pond. When what I want is to sing something monumental. My family is rough. I wish I could smooth them. I have been lucky. Not married out to trash men. But while I sleep, the great winds come. Spruce forest. Pine forest. Fir forest. A door opens. A door slams shut.
Shell
Bluff and double bluff. We could make ourselves sick waiting for this place to open up to us. Polished by our childhoods. Bruises the waves leave. Shell: skinned knee, scraped marble. We know too much about process to try to get around it. What is vital is sometimes hidden inside bone. Bramble of the blackberry that blocks the entrances. As if we weren’t meant to be here, though here we are outside, loud-colored to the heron. Morbid, the idea of rubbing through one’s own skin, yet we yearn to stick our fingers inside. While the dead make their way through the custom lines. Shell: a quiet verb, slowed by its own sound, gull wings dipping over the clam beds. What if they disappeared, these sculpted, painted things? What would we do without their number, their secret congress? This thinking placed outside ourselves has gotten us here, an interior flame-soft, brushed against a cloud, small cloud of bleeding things, gray feathers.
Bamboo
To be almost dead, that careful. Hollow-boned like the birds. Though one is numerous, part of a pack. To expect less of each other. To glade instead of grove, stand instead of grotto. A tender gardener, one might say, who can twist the trellises. Here is where we make our stand, one might say. A body that breathes will eventually make its own noise. For those trying too hard, here is shade. One could live next to people and know one’s presence heals. One could have an empty heart as they do. Bamboo grows straight, marrowless. Look, how we are bent and we have marrow. Down here, the shuffle of leaves barely reaches the still trunks. No matter the words spoken in leaving. Bamboo. It is a child’s word one wants to repeat. One wants to continue to wish the other well.
Delight
A spirit that is limited, small as “I imagine,” one that flutters on the shoulder between concrete and abstract, a bird’s call, not its song, in the distance. It is the fragrance of your voice or the colors in what you say, the floral prints, not the solids. Palms laid out like tables spread, mangos with salt, fried potatoes. It is the feeling you perhaps learned as a child leading your mute twin by the hand, pointing out the yellow-headed blackbirds. Delight you must have learned in order to speak for him. Sweet Heart. Red Clover. Cardinals strung along the fence like paper lanterns. We want to go out in the world no matter what. We want to come back home with plans to plant things. Salutations, oh pigeon! And fireworks for graduation! Pine and fir so we can tell the difference between them. The mind thinks of all the boughs and stars it wants to give, unaware of all that’s lost at the periphery. Dear Epicurean. Dear Carnation. Dear Frivolously Blue.
Ophelia among the Flowers
after Odilon Redon
The body is full of cadences. The garden, in fact. A party, by which I mean candles. Dresses, yes, because it is inside them we want to be, weighing nothing, hair in our eyes, running up the steps to meet a lover. One begins with salutation, something all the old cultures knew. Good night. Good morning. You are a gift to me. One welcomes the ostracized back into the fold by reciting a list of their good deeds. An eyelid closed in sleep might hide the color of this hollyhock, a dark pink silk batiste. Poppy, bright amulet of the blood. But who are these flowers? My friend has died, is dying, might die. I sit in the garden under clouds. Long enough to watch the petals detach in the wind, flutter like fish after touching ground. O, you must wear your rue with a difference, mild and soiled, like silk in heat. Baby’s breath twisted through my hair.
The School of the Dead, the School of Roots, and the School of Dreams
title after Hélène Cixous
White shoot germinating from the burlap seed, wet, dark, deflated now. What is the earth? Rosary of black beads, clumped. A decade between them. Home of the sorrowful and digestive mysteries. My peas didn’t rise. What is under there to maim us, disable us? A sparkle at the deep place as if water pooled there. When I was digging with the spatula, planting the pinks, I struck something hard, skull-like. What is the earth? Bad queen searching for simples in the dark. Cabbage world. Old country. Underlife. While the coffee grounds settle, while the sweetened root tea thins our blood. What is the earth? Our security alarm, our savings. Please don’t talk as if you’re going to die. Silver reeds poking like tent poles through the tarp. Rotting thatch of the summerhouse. What is the earth? Brew pub of purgatory, slop bucket of souls. In a nutshell. Gravy.
Nettle
for Patricia Goedicke
Green clusters of soft beads, the nettle is flowering. When I disappear, you said, write and tell me everything. Snakes slide, when they hear my footsteps, further into the weeds. The tide shudders as it turns over each stone. Is this what it was like as earth began to end? It started out in loneliness and turned to poetry. Here: a scribble of seabirds, a peak across the Sound, so distant and vague, like your death to me. Last night, an Iranian doctor performed that tongue-cry she had heard the Arabs use at weddings and funerals. She had examined Fidel Castro and pronounced him fit, four times more charismatic than Clinton. Somehow, I thought you would want to know. Everyone is starting to take on the appearance of ghosts. Rain tips the needles of the cedar. If our days are the ritual we perform for the dead. If our days are the ritual we perform for the dead. I wade into the current and leave it open for you. I find excuses to say your name.
The Nightingale’s Excuse
Wind, as we walk on the plains. I am crazy about you, that extreme subjectivity. So we duck for the coulees, which is where the cattle go, wearing the ground down between the junipers. Piss-green, to match my peevish mood. Our lives have changed. How is it we didn’t notice? We are gray haired, wandering among ruins. The berries in the drylands are pithy and thick. Tin and glass tossed intact into the gullies. Who knows? Perhaps we are at the end of time. Blue aromatics tucked behind our ears. The nightingale’s excuse: she is too much in love with the rose. Too fiercely jealous to leave. Are you a plant, a tree, the phlox, the sage? You cannot weigh much less than the moon. I am not used to sharing the green-robed angels on high. But here I am, trusting them with you. Between the wagon trail of the quest and the swell of the new, there is a crowded city pouring through the heart. And the self? Nest constructed of field grass and flower paste. One the masters say we must give up.