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The Keeping Room

(for FR)

1

After the pain of one thing you found
another            less sharp        it tickled
the hurt you kept company
to feel again so you
could go on without
really moving
one more time
from this
and

2

On the way to the island what happened
receded like the shoreline you knew 
it grew smaller but you didn’t
find or try or think or see
a way to keep the scale
as it had been before.
Things happened.  That’s no:
no revelation.
It’s not sealed.
But still—
oh.

3

The green light Rohmer wrote of in that film
what did it mean? Can you remember
anything more than the hopeful
expression fading from each
character… is a dream
the grass blown against
the source… is it
that or that
we wake
yet

4

Sisyphean levity we said our
joy cresting as we turned outside out
ourselves our happiest moments
in rooms four-or five-sided 
by air and earth and trees
we hold that sometimes
flatteringly
together
us two
now

5

Let’s make a prairie one beautiful thing
we will have to remember again 
our agreement to make a way  
out of what we are given
the uprooting terror
of our undoing. First
cut what has been
living here
cut it
down

6

Today everything you love weeps and leans
its metaphoric arms to the ground 
pendula           pendula           the trees
take their shape from their parents
even the peashrub sprawls
outward and downward.
Today’s a day
for sitting
down, yes?
Oh

7

No one has come to tell us what we want
to hear is hardly the wondrous thing
existence is though we wonder
whether each opening takes
will take us further on
from from to into
from from to to
from from yes
from from
from

8

Chores enough for days and days enough for
whatever we might want time to do
days sweep and cower under breath 
sleeping under the daylight 
bower rocking in wind
we are the baby
the baby cries
what it wants
it wants
then

Copyright © 2020 by G. E. Patterson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 16, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

More by G. E. Patterson

The Responsibility of Love

Where you are now, the only lights are stars 
and oil lamps flaring on vine-covered porches.   
Where you are now, it must be midnight.  
No one has bothered to name all the roads 
that overlook the sea.  The freshened air 
smells of myrtle and white jasmine.  A church 
stands on the headland, and I hope it might 
keep one thought of me alive in your head.  

Autumn is here: warm days becoming cold.  
The trees drop more leaves, love, each time it rains.  
I eat my meals with the TV turned on, 
but softly so the neighbors won’t complain.  
The kilim is stained by the food I spilled 
the first day--and the second--you were gone.

Related Poems

A Few Things Are Explained To Me

for Daniel; after Pablo

It was five o’clock when paper handkerchiefs descended
over the ocean’s surge—
              one ocean varnished by oil in the morning, fish under the surge’s blades.

My country, you whimpered under fog. I awoke to the tender
sound of seashells on the radio.

I knelt by myself and listened. Your flat skeleton, large skeleton,
would group at your back.
Come, you murmured over canned goods. Come. I will tell you
everything—

clay seeps onto roots, roots drawn by salt, roots crowned
by trees. The cords unravel from the flesh of trees, unravel
by the storm shutters. Come.

See the roads brim with red poppy, roads tracked
by green serpents
                                                                       ((a la víbora, víbora / de la mar, de la mar)) 

I tendered nine eggs before the ignorant lion 
of exile, who nodded.

At five in the morning, everything seemed to be made of lime—

one torso shrouded by magnolia, one torso under vulgar peal 
of grey morgues, and the fish.

Human Time

Beige building with
black mildew streaking
down the side

Shut blinds above a
kitchen sink I
know is there

A plastic bottle
of luminous dish soap

its hourglass
at half

Succulents’ small utterances

Faint gloom

You dissecting a crow
in science class
years ago

Someone with a clipboard
outside the market
asking for signatures

A cloud and a plane
pulled in opposite directions

Someone pushing me
up against a locker

cool
orange metal
at my shoulders

On the sunlit album cover
a price sticker

almost touching
the folk singer’s
pinched brow

Two chairs
at the table

sit together
proxies for us

in human time
we’re still outside of

Between each hour
and the next

are days
we take cover in
like roadside brush

I pressed
with my fingers
to “see”

A limp little forest
trying to remain
upright

Isn’t rigidity a number’s job

the blanket’s job
to be sad

The white t-shirt’s anonymity

The dusk takes with it
every detail

Eclogue Onto an Idea

Up ahead out here, and his affiliate, rival in the eyes,
     someone near, but not our crowd, someone whom
you approach in a poem only
to the extent of his vantage out, to the verb open out
onto. To that extent, you fit into his
looking suit, to the glove points, othering,
a long parenthesis of lens, a self sort of, a caul kind of
first feeling, to the doubled pocket
mouth. Kissed him from inside:
                               what’s yes in any es gibt, contributing thus
the plus of a little sentience. Have you too felt extra fleetingly?
The early given is he faces the same way we, as though
we sent him to this promontory. To him assign
yourself, and borrow charge. What part of us
you are yet, and what through him and his would I,
if I were you, retrieve in the purview—or whom,
if you want someone with a look, sending looks,
     someone underway and expressing it, someone
drawing from ceremony sensation, separating her own
from others’—gets lost in happening. This is their scene.
Situation’s giving onto someone.
Put out some hedge and overhear.
The foreground and the horizon are idea’s.
Consider the milieu durance.
Way out there now.

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