Series: Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

underneath the skin: who was it that first taught
you to always prepare for the inevitable? So much

for cautious optimism— elegy being the reason
all poems and songs, the different ways we try
to harbor what glimmers before it flutters away,

are beautiful in their brave but measured embrace of
this world. The bird with green-blue feathers bobbed
his tiny head from side to side, perched on the rim

of a tin cup half-filled with water. The small
brass bells with bits of orange ribbon still
tinkle, brushed gently by a finger. And why

do I still gasp, going under the first shock
and spray from a cold shower, or breaking
the film on the pool to try the dead-man’s-float?

Through the skeletal trees, a car engine backfires
several times; but that is not the sound of distant
shots across the water. On the first floor of

the local mall is an old watch-maker. His wall
is full of cuckoo clocks whose doors open and close
on the hour: in one of them, a child comes out with her

bag of crumbs. A girl meets her beau under a linden
tree. Then they sit, facing the sunset. Only the bird
comes back as a bird, who knows the song of time.

– for Picasso, my daughter
Julia’s conure, who will be
sorely missed

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Ang mga sinulid ng ulan, tinatahi ang
pira-pirasong damit ng agam-agam.

(Threads of rain are stitching
uncertainty’s tattered garments.)

And at dusk, the filigreed trees, the light that turns everything briefly to gold; and in the bright-dark shimmer, the houses and trees; lamp posts, the cobbled walk edging the park, oil-glazed puddles of water like wax melted down in votives. Oh such honey trapped in a clear glass bell: and like a clapper, the bee’s bright wing to beat and beat against it. You know I would follow the thread from its tangled beginnings, wind it around and around my wrist. When darkness falls, I know I’m not the only one here. Rain fine as mist, faint as silver. Fleeter bodies than mine, hidden amid the trees. My tongue-tied ones, your heartbeats flush the air.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Breakfast of weak morning light, trickle of coffee. Steam from heat vents along the street. Tendrils of hunger. Gently I push them down, move them to the back. I say Later, later. And it’s later, and I’m still saying Later, though the sun is high and the clouds now move across the sky, puffs of mousse on a Magritte platter. One of them looks like a young hare: white on white, hunched around its hunger. Another’s corded like the shell on which the goddess floated, like foam on the skin of water. Meanwhile my insides are gnawing on the leaf of impatience. Its veins are green and have no dressing; and butter does not always make everything better. What do I want, what do I need? Later, I tell myself, later. There’s plenty of work, the hours full of obligation. But I know I am not virtuous: I am always my hunger.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“What patience a landscape has, like an old horse,
head down in its field.” ~ Denise Levertov

Through the grass, through the tall weeds, brush fires; then winds that blow their alarms, lapping at everything in their path. There go the trees. There go the boxy houses. There go the railroad tracks, yanked like bones from the back of a fish. What else could they eat in a trice? Only the weeds smudged close on the earth escape notice; or the insubstantial calculus of stones. Months later you’ll find a charred copper penny, a mangled boot; the bones of small animals and their grainy reproach.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

The soul’s wilderness is ringed by pine and rugged cliffs above which birds with wings stronger than mine circle and circle the primed canvas sky. They give me their surplus of feathers— dress remnants of silky black, ink grey, satiny pearl. I find them strewn carelessly in the discount racks and rush to gather them up. I study them closely to make adjustments— ah what I wouldn’t give right now for even a jar of Gorilla Glue or a hot glue gun, in lieu of a crossbar and wires, battens, a keel. Something that noses into the wind and lofts quick with the changeable currents, to take me away from here. It’s cold at sunrise: that time of day when the honey and the wax need most prodding (I’ve come across tiny striped bodies, asleep in their padded cells). My arthritic hands need warming too. They hurt intermittently, as though these fingers were carving labyrinths from stone. It’s always more difficult at night, or in the long winter months when the light slants, elusive, in the cave. And yes, that crazed bull likes to sit in the mother of all mazes, making frightful noises: uncombed, unwashed, unkempt. But, surprise— it unravels too. All it takes is one skinny thread, one end of yarn poking up from the corner of your brightest red sweater. It works something like a ripcord. Pull on it. Or wear it and see what happens.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

an angel stands behind the entrance,
water in her cupped hands made of marble.
And in the nave, two by two, hour by hour,
nuns prostrate in prayer. Now they kneel,
though you are told that in the old days
they used to lie face-down on the stone
tiles, a strip of carpet beneath them.
Imagine the floor gradually warming
under their cheeks, the sides of their
foreheads. Hours pass. Shadows move
across the window. The only cloud in the sky
finds the sun, and still they don’t move.
In the atrium, the signs instruct: write
your petition on any of the strips of yellow
legal paper. Lay it on the plate. Drop
some coins and hear their muffled clink
in the collection box. Strike a match along
the iron votive holder. Hope that this isn’t all
improvisation, even as the choir begins a hymn.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

And in the driveway,
widening ripples
that form and overlap—

When it is time for me
to go, let me feel
at last the swell

of fullness I
might not have felt,
for all my striving:

for that moment let me be
the raindrop magnified
at the point of termination.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.