Sixfold Poetry Winter 2015

  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