The Ferryer (audio only)
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Not once—not when I toppled, rigid, a
5'7" pine felled,
stiff as a board, a five and a half foot
plank, 16 x 32,
and not while I wallowed on the rug among
his oxygen tubes and my cane and his 8
wheelchair wheels, and not when I sat by his
hospice bed, chirping I’m fine!,
and not the next day, when the brilliant violet
and black slash-slathered in my easy-life skin,
or days later when the purple turned yellow and the
blue green—never once when I
said No pain, Nothing broken,
did I feel lucky, did I measure the force of the
blow, the floor speeding up like a heavy-weight’s
smash to my cheek and eyebrow, not until
today, did I begin to feel
grateful for my good fortune—no concussion, no
fracture—as if I expected to be able to be
struck by the earth, a wrecking ball,
and not feel it—
as when someone on the other side of the world,
or the city, is struck in my name, I do not feel it.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
(for Lucille) Our voices race to the towers, and up beyond the atmosphere, to the satellite, slowly turning, then back down to another tower, and cell. Quincy, Toi, Honoree, Sarah, Dorianne, Galway. When Athena Elizalex calls, I tell her I'm missing Lucille's dresses, and her shoes, and Elizabeth says "And she would say, "Damn! I do look good!'" After we hang up, her phone calls me again from inside her jacket, in the grocery store with her elder son, eleven, I cannot hear the words, just part of the matter of the dialogue, it's about sugar, I am in her pocket like a spirit. Then I dream it — looking at an illuminated city from a hill, at night, and suddenly the lights go out — like all the stars gone out. "Well, if there is great sex in heaven," we used to say, "or even just sex, or one kiss, what's wrong with that?!" Then I'm dreaming a map of the globe, with bright pinpoints all over it — in the States, the Caribbean, Latin America, in Europe, and in Africa — everywhere a poem of hers is being read. Small comfort. Not small to the girl who curled against the wall around the core of her soul, keeping it alive, with long labor, then unfolded into the hard truths, the lucid beauty, of her song. 15 Feb '10
A funeral home before the funeral.
The ghosts it despises.
Evaporated holy water.
Messiah of satin roses.
The prayer before it becomes a prayer:
in the throat, the machine for lamenting.
*
Musk of kindling after fire.
Char, as in: these hands are reaching,
but all they can grasp is air.
The road the hearse used to carry the body
to the wormhole.
A sling carrying a body with broken clocks.
Taproot.
*
My mother in her mainframe, captive
to pumps, pipes, irrigation tubes.
The spotlessness of her gown,
immaculate hem of nurses’ smocks.
Wasping of night hours invading morning,
spreading tick-tock like spilled salt.
The way they pulled the needles off, as if freeing
a smoker’s lung from its escutcheon.
*
My grandmother in her wheelchair
at Good Samaritan Nursing Home, rubbing
a rosary into dust, and flecks of gold leaf
on her lap, and the way she would stare
at a space in the wall as if God was speaking
in that language.
Hurricane calm. Before the posts prayed.
Coven of whistling thorns.
After the relocation of water: blessing and blessed.
*
Coming home to that shack on Calle Tulipan.
How the lawn had yellowed as phlegm.
How the blocks under the house had worried themselves loose.
My father, who'd lost his leg in Korea, sprinting
along the fields to save our grapefruit from frost
and in his speed two spinnerets playing pat-a-cake.
*
The mark of the poor: tentativeness.
*
A body crimpled into cassocks. The sunflower field
where it was abandoned, and the moon in its resignation.
The dream of all hunters: to justify an absence
that requires sacrifice of innocent things.
Pulling petals from a dayflower to form a fence.
Smoothing a rock to make a false eye.
As if creating the missing of things
could cure the loss of some others.
Bamboo shoots on my grandmother's side path
grow denser every year they’re harvested for nuisance.
Breezes peel blush and white petals from her magnolia,
lacing unruly roots in the spring grass. For nine decades
she has seen every season stretch out of shape, this past
Connecticut winter slow to relinquish cold. As a girl
she herded slow turkeys on her Aunt Nettie’s farm, fifty acres
in a Maryland county that didn’t plumb until midcentury,
plucking chickens and pheasants from pre-dawn
into the late night, scratching dough
for neighbors, relatives stopping by for biscuits, and the view
from my window changes. It's Mother's Day
and I’d always disbelieved permanence—newness a habit,
change an addiction—but the difficulty of staying put
lies not in the discipline of upkeep, as when my uncle
chainsaws
hurricane-felled birches blocking the down-sloped driveway,
not in the inconvenience of well water
slowing showers and night flushes, not in yellowjackets
colonizing the basement, nuzzling into a hole
so small only a faint buzz announces their invasion
when violin solos on vinyl end, but in the opulence of acres
surrounding a tough house, twice repaired from fires, a kitchen
drawer that hasn’t opened properly in thirty years marked
Danger,
nothing more permanent than the cracked flagstone
path to the door, the uneven earth shifting invisibly beneath it.