Poems

Palimpsestet

All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story.
But those pears, honey, those pears were real sweet.
All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story.
Without them is the rest of my life.
All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story.

Under this wallpaper of willow leaves and birds
is another one with loops of small roses.
Under the yellow roses is lumber that was timber,
a stand of burr oak, maple or pine felled by an ax
that was ore deep in the earth before smelting.
That was ore deep in the earth before smelting.

Photographs fade to a sepia wash.
Still she tells who sat with Aunt Anna
on the front steps in Omaha, Did you get
what you wanted?, who moved West and never wrote again,
who waltzed with Isaac and did you get what you wanted
from this life, even so?

My body split open.   And lava flowed?
I became a trellis. With tangled vines?
My mother wrapped herself in wind?
Twice I clambered up on the silver table.
The new moon lay in the old moon’s arms.
The whole point of composing is to sound inevitable.

Attribution of italicized lines
Stanza 1-Isek Dinesen      Stanza 2-Kate Barnes      Stanza 3-Raymond Carver    Stanza 4-Aaron Copland

From:

Palimpsest

A Man Named Job Once Lived in the Land of Utz/
Job’s Wife Lived There Too
(text of the white scroll)

Lot’s wife was lucky.  Turned to salt.
Her daughters’ witness on the plain, a pillar-
beacon gleaming, alabaster–salt
of the ancient oceans, yawling salt of mother tears,
salt the small roe deer and fawns comfort
with their rough-tender tongues.  Lot’s wife
chose a last looking back, her why.
And my children?  The ten mornings of their birth?
Dawn rolled out rosy silk to swaddle them.
Swallowtails stopped their migration to freshen themselves,
sipping the dew where we lay.
                                           And the noon of their death?
Charred my eyelids.  Shriveled my moonless womb.  Lit coals
under the soles of my feet.  Should I say otherwise?
                                                                         Who would I ask
when I am become prey?  Ten lions stalk me.  Ten carrion birds circle.
And above them the sun has shook loose its orbit, flung Time
from its place.  No daybreak.  Nor afternoon rest.  No evening,
her sweet cooling breeze.
Oh husband, why do you care why?
Let me put on ash of roses, squat at the justice gate.
Look, no name sisters, how white grief renders me,
skin translucent where sorrow gnaws, where shards
scrape, a hide stretched taut on the frames of windows.
Listen.  I am the mine abandoned when gold veins
run dry.  I am the looted tomb.
                                             My name  a flute
no one’s breath flows through.