Series: Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

Let’s fold and crease the paper, once here and once over. Remember cutting half the outline of a paper doll then watching a chain of them shake loose in the air? Identical in bobbed hair and pleated skirts, hand in hand in hand, soon nubile-breasted. On the edge of the lake, a dark-haired woman walks barefoot, skimming stones and feeding bread to the swan draped around her shoulders. Winged silhouettes are always harder to do, so this time let’s try sheets of ice shaved into snowflakes. Cut out the shapes of prisms through which the light can fan, clear and cold, feathered lace against the skeletal branches. Hold them up against window glass: such flimsy tokens that we offer at the turnstile, as we pass.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Are words more beautiful than things? In El
Greco’s painting of The Annunciation, the angel
in the gold-colored tunic is half-kneeling, half-
floating on a puff of cloud. The woman appears
to be in a scriptorium, though there is a marble
courtyard with a view of columns beyond, and a sky
chalked with white and blue. No oversized stars
reel yet in the dark, no hills ringed with the arms
of trees gilded with frost; no stumbling pilgrims
following the strange compulsion to search for
omens in the deepest part of the year. According to
tradition, he says to her: Be not afraid. Think about it:
how it is completely plausible she might have wanted
to bolt, run away to hide in the kitchen, in the fields
only stretching like eternity. But here is the moment,
clear and still: her hand pressed to her heart, thin
strip of crimson ribbon marking her place in the book.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

You’ve been here before, walked this path
under branches hung with brilliant rust

and yellow— all those moldering leaves
like torches lit for their glow, like lamps

whose wicks are dipped in tallow. For company,
only the nearby gurgle of a stream, the even

crunch of gravel. Solitude’s silver and blue
arrow streaks toward you, lodging like a piece

of ice under your skin. Fragments of salt
that lace the wind. Memory of others

come and gone, their spirits nudging you
toward wherever it is you need to be.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

you’ve scraped me clean to the bottom
of the bowl, where the flint-

edge of spoon rasps against dented
metal, and lunar hollows give off

a cold and mineral light. From here,
the sky’s a bordered rim the eye

might skim, for the skin of passing clouds.
Now I’m anxious even for the sound of wind

or rain, the branches’ waking rattle,
downpour of warm remembered sun;

then by degrees the rising sap
like honey in the veins of trees.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Hardness is the earth’s own lament,
refusal its punishment. See

how the small birds tremble
in drab grey-white, how they call

in small pebbled relay among halberd-
leaved tear-thumb, asters bordering

the ditch like fringed husks of stars—
Who would not be moved by their darting

and pleading, their search for a soft
place to burrow among the stones.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

If the woodpeckers call
back and forth to each other at
the wood’s edge, why should rain
not come with the gecko’s call?

If the seeds of sorrow are sown
in the moment of joy, where are
the explosions of joy on the horizon,
from the multitude of sorrows sown?

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

And I have tasted salt
and blood’s iron bite,
the backwash of tears

mixed with bile; and I
have known what humbling
mouthfuls of sacrifice,

what burn of years and
their slow toil down
the gut. So let me now

taste new-fallen
snow, dissolving un-
complicated on the tongue.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.