To Yusef Komunyakaa
When I rise from the bank the water's slow as shadow in my steps, thick as blood. The whole river's secretive, still, dark as roux cooled in the skillet, as rank, as sweet, ancient as catfish, ancienter. The moon's sifted light clouds rumor to lilies or daffodils, an egret on the farther shore, a hunger, a stare, a patience I could recite. We have waited all night, nights, like a bridge for something to rise, like water for something to fall. * I know what Bogalusa means, that tea of deadheads and late-fallen leaves no one left can read, snuff-black pools that bathe grandmothers' gums. So many words one has to know not to say. So many names. The young, unconvicted hand. The bricklayer. The deputy. Names of flowers and warblers and stars. Last breaths of the disappeared. I keep my hands folded, my map blank as next week's papers, my ears clams with mouths full of sand. * So many songs I can't sing with my one poor tongue. I need a jukebox for a throat so the midnight's moan translates what a wolf once said to a girl in the trees, so their branches confess what the fog told them not to see. I need the lisp of a horn valved to spit which is the sound of a shadow forgetting what hanged it in the dark. How do I explain the way it slips the steam like a shirt, how it slides beneath the glass and does not rise again, how the halflight fingers the rails of the bridge, how many things no one's done? * Birds the color of history talk in our sleep. Our salts can't forget what water told them, what stars once telegraphed to the river the trees have written in themselves, what they say to the wind, to the sawmill's blades, to flame, to bromine and mercury, what they burn in the air. Dreams walk us back to the shore, pull the shirttail from the milkweed, the cattail from the reed, fold the kerchiefs into herons, questions for the shoals. * Night slips again into its last, locked groove. Mockingbirds stutter the rasp of broken reeds. I lean from the eaves of moss and cypress, the vestibules of the tung. Cormorant, coelacanth, snake, the world below is molten. Dark iridescence, the muscle gives back the bone. The spine's fleer, the orbits' gape, the ghost of a face waking beneath my own. Here, I bent so close breath didn't know which mouth to fill.
Copyright © 2013 by Jake Adam York. Used with permission of the estate. "Letter Written in Black Water and Pearl" comes from York's completed manuscript, Abide.
so it came to me to carry the abandoned mattress to the attic a month dead my father waited hillside in the field surrounding his house I was glad to see him to remember when the fathers seemed generic related a class of things as uniform as trees are when you don’t know their names a stand of them across the field I want to say autumn aspens the late fathers blonde as early evening wind startles their eyes and makes of your name a sail a boat above roots that rise to stem that rise to leaf his door and cornices his felt hat and mattress empty it feels like forever above the flickering field the fathers shrinking far beneath our feet
for Lisa Fishman
Copyright © 2013 by Brian Teare. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on October 22, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
Not every day but most days that summer I went calmly and quietly and climbed to the sixth floor of the library and walked not fast and not slow but with purpose down the last row and reached almost without looking to the same place on the shelf and pulled out the large book and carried it to a chair that looks out toward the ridge, to a mountain that is there, whether it is or it isn’t, the mountain people love, maybe for this, love and die with all their love, trying, and I opened to the page where I left off before, and sometimes the library announced it was closing, sometimes I got hungry, sometimes it looked like rain, and I’d close the book and carry it again, with purpose, back to its exact place on the shelf, and I’d walk down the stairs and out of the building, and it was like I’d left it ticking.
Copyright © 2017 Jill Osier. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Summer 2017.
I’ll tell you this: I am the only part of winter left.
It beckoned and I followed, past all reason,
followed it like the end of a broken train
through white woods, and I stayed, with simple tools,
set on trying to construct more of a season. It has taken
all of me to do it, and you would not believe the storms.
You would not believe how I sleep. From here anything
would sound like a cry. Everything looks like pieces of God.
Copyright © 2018 Jill Osier. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Winter 2018.
Soon the time when just roads and rivers
run dark in the white. Then they’ll be gone.
But during such days of path and vein
you’ll trace back how things became.
You’re standing in a curving lane of birches
with the word confidante. The birches
are hilled, coming toward you, going away,
and it’s with you, this word, the same as light
coming bright off the snow, or light being held
as blue shadow. All of this
not far off, but nothing’s even fallen yet,
the woods empty, done boning up.
Copyright © 2018 Jill Osier. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Winter 2018.