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Septiembre 21, 2005
Midsummer
His shoulders shook
where he knelt to retch
at the edge of the woods.
I stood there stupid,
bleating his name,
dragging across the gravel
road the cooler full
of lemons, medications.
He lay down after
near the water under
a pine and almost slept.
I sent my heart on
home to greet us.
But as we rose, nations
of swallowtails rose
with us, who'd sought
the shade, the moss
currents of the pond's
stone basements.
They climbed the spiral
air like tiny brides
trailing some lantern
on a stair beyond us,
or wanting us to wear them
there, lit in our hair like
garlands, rode our shoulders.
Back in the car we
watched them spread
a raiment in the road,
midsummer yellow.
I drove while my beloved
walked ahead, herding
the swallowtails into the trees.
Deborah Digges
Posted by sarita at 10:48 PM
Septiembre 16, 2005
When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story
--And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a
Wednesday and a Saturday,
And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday--
When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed,
Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping
afternoon
Looking off down the long street
To nowhere,
Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation
And nothing-I-have-to-do and I'm-happy-why?
And if-Monday-never-had-to-come--
When you have forgotten that, I say,
And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,
And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;
And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,
That is to say, went across the front room floor to the
ink-spotted table in the southwest corner
To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles
Or chicken and rice
And salad and rye bread and tea
And chocolate chip cookies--
I say, when you have forgotten that,
When you have forgotten my little presentiment
That the war would be over before they got to you;
And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed
into bed,
And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end
Bright bedclothes,
Then gently folded into each other--
When you have, I say, forgotten all that,
Then you may tell,
Then I may believe
You have forgotten me well.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Posted by sarita at 12:09 PM
Septiembre 11, 2005
August: An Anniversary Suite
I cannot hope to seize the concept of it except “by the tail”: by flashes, formulas, surprises of expression… I am in love’s wrong place, which is its dazzling place…
— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
i paper
Opening to
a private sky
birch bitings and burnt flutter. Our tent stretched —
smoke over the threshold when you ushered me through.
No talk —
night in the low roofs of our mouths.
Your Ford Fury hidden in a stand of aspens,
newly ringed, keys in the ignition. Idling
stardust, mosquitoes.
Koriusai, Utamaro, Ursa Major’s erotic drawings,
closer now
to black scribblings, hole punchings, a confetti of yeses,
the reversed Star shining from a yielding margin of universe.
Yes, yes —
Perseids, hominids, black-eyed susans, sleep.
ii cotton
Between us:
mosquitoes purring, a purloined reverie as memory.
Into the aspens, tripped up by roots,
into the woods on the way to the church —
everything turned up a notch, initials scarred into bark —
we’re stopped between homestead and the haunted church.
Will you look in?
Someone is pilfering linens, washing the offerings.
Is this your wife in loosestrife and coarse weave
handcuffed
to all the men I ever danced with — Hugo’s thief; the rumoured priest;
Buckshot; the Bolshevik in canvas coat and sheepskin collar;
the masked, humped
rodent with agile black hands…
while
the thumb of your left hand slips over my wrists —
and the other hand lifts —
iii leather
A shaver
to rough-house mouth, stripping the shadow that last night
bristled.
Unshaven imaginings:
what pinks that shadow pulled
apart. Your face masked in the dark of my favourite
rose and sorrel
scarf,
brushing a cloud.
I’m nailed to the spot
wretched over
belt loops, notches.
Polished toenails, cold tiles. Like that morning in Versailles.
Light faltering through milk bottles and cobalt
bric-a-brac finds you teased me for buying,
filled with lotions and cologne.
No cuir de Russie , but
the deadly bouquet of horseplay where jawbone meets the ear
lost
to Zorro’s razor — the sting of soap and water.
I’ve already lost you,
husband — to this other you — husband
buttering toast, answering the phone.
iv linen
Whisking a béchamel, buttering toast.
You’ve got all the pots in the house out to poach
eggs florentine. The Joy of Cooking splayed. Sleeves
rolled, forearms flexed,
forehead creased.
Egg shells in the bain-marie ,
bananas on the sideboard, freckled and sweet.
A little rum, a little cream.
The breakfast table dressed in the washed-out wedding gift fleur de lis
linen with fraying seams (skirt to my knees).
Forks set down in a flourish the way you might lay a heart
or lead with a spade at the same table after dark.
A bed of spinach and sorrel, a forethought of salt.
And afterthoughts:
where’s the nutmeg? Do we have nutmeg?
But I must grace the table as a guest,
trace the fleur de lis, the butter and tea-stain motif
— and wait.
v wood
Pheromones. Something roan. Billy Bragg on the stereo.
Broom handle, collarbone. Just a lucky so-and-so.
Rough-jaw, U-haul, screw ball
bully in the butter.
Woo woo woody-woody
hip-roofed, lean-to, ask you: kissel me low.
Hocus pocus, Hi-Fi, hexen-tanz marzipan.
Farmer’s daughter, chamois cloth, honey on the butcher’s block.
You-who, voo-doo, buckwheat infusion
eyebrows askew, ask you, ask you.
Nightshade, lamp shade, ponytail, shoulder blade
off the shoulder, off the cuff, paw-paw in a paper bag.
Unbearable, d’érable , syrup in a tin can,
lights on, lights off, go on — dance your donkey dance.
Woody-woody, wuderove, dirty stove, wodwo
hunky Guthrie cookie cutters
slacky feller
felled.
vi iron
How can you fall asleep?
I resist the drift — separate cities wrought with gates
clanging shut. Rain: oxidized, electric,
falling. I admit it, I admit — demons, legion.
Your wet belt-buckle at the top of the heap,
Paris long behind us.
Tonight — flashes in the darkened theatre
between black and white —
horseshoes, hammers; yellow roses;
a young girl’s pretty hands, examined
(the flat nail of your thumb thinking my wrists)
her insistence: now choose.
Our bicycles in rain over the train bridge, after Toto Le Hero
down Queen Street and 6 th Avenue towards home. I’m lost,
can’t follow you easily to sleep.
The screen door to the kitchen garden, latched —
a cross-hatch of darknesses in stove light.
Bee balm rising in the night
while I heat water for tea in a long handled pot,
ladle it out.
I am in love’s wrong place
in another hour, and another ——
vii wool
Clouds ——
drifting, chemise untied —
gathering obsessions, rashly saying I love you
for days on end.
An open book, blue ink circling an indifference.
The garden: moody, leggy, overcast. Freud to his fiancée.
Letters . I read the same sentence over and over:
he’s jealous of her gardener’s attentions.
Sweep aside
musings over
blue cheese and brown bread, neglected weeds,
sluts’ wool under the night table
— chamois matted with dream —
dusty bull calves in wormwood and sage —
too near, too near, barely
there — Charolais strays —
cloud-filled ——
Thunder ——
the threatened
one one-thousand, two one-thousand, miles and miles, seven years
from the page, the edge of the bed.
The wait, the wait, the static
prick of heat, hay.
Lettuces bolted, (Letters), lamb’s ears stachys lanata
blooming in tiny magenta crises along the woolly stalks.
viii bronze
A braggadocio
0 bouquet garni , green on gold in the throat.
Sleeves rolled, arms heaped and emptied, heaped and emptied —
the bathtub filled with cold water and the morning’s harvest of
flagrant basil — the scent peppering your hands and hair. And yes, this
hunger,
the infinite light on mortar, pestle, pastry brushes, and the unexpected
bushels of viridian — spoons and spikes, green thumb-shaped leaves.
Heart leaping a bronze grid of screen. Porch-door open to
the garden path, one artless row
now bikini-line bare.
We’ve slipped between waves of heat, the wavy pages of French recipes
foxed and ringed with olive oil and wine, we’ve
slipped between the sheets — and Pistou!
Basil in the bathwater, a whorl of
pennies in the mirror.
ix clay
A penny for your thoughts. The peripheral
blue conductors — turquoise, azure — of Waskesiu.
I have a hunch, squinting
out from the blue tree-lined sunder of lacy shade on clay
shadows — or are they shadows —
not quite able
to make out what you’re looking for.
The lake a dead give-away of dark glasses glancing off
to where swimmers with Frisbees shriek and laugh and
trendy yellow two-pieces
are all that’s left
of the tanned invisibles.
What I’m looking for is
electric and dangerous,
sinking past the glitter, out of reach. Our blues
separated by the hard-packed rut of beach
just beyond the concrete
breaker.
x tin
Expecting tin can lanterns, a party:
cold trout on blue willow, spark of the river’s tinsel.
The aluminium canoe, a tinderbox we slide ourselves into
tipsy on the river’s sulk.
An anniversary gift, better than confections
or silks. Scissors won’t open it. A secret
the clouds conjugate north of the weir.
Tenir . To hold. Tongues of silt.
August: the aspens open their tissues, temptations.
The river, a rival
current. On the surface: flotsam, a million proofs.
Clutching the oar, shove out the thoughts that nudge ——
xi steel
It began in July. Hives rising on your skin — welts, petals,
a worsening infection of dream-missives
under the daily calamine of reassurances. A cumulus
line, an aisle — the bleached skies — pillowslip to pillowslip in the sun, a bride
weighting each white flutter with stones.
Something is spilling in the air, the vases have tipped, the light, and
the neighbours, now, are glancing through the slatted fence,
rakes abandoned, thoughts of notches. Heads of false lupin aspersing pollen:
confetti, illicit driftings. Aspirin-dulled, I’m awake and
blinking through viridian: the filigree, the forgery,
the shining affidavit tracing the temples.
Distance, a borrowed blue
met with green blades, a mean streak of questions,
sheet metal lightning, the tumble-down affair of clouds over the garage.
Day-knave lilies darkening, sharpening their knives —
xii silks
Kitchen witch, sugar witch, fish witch — wife
on fire —
dishy diva with bunions and cleavage,
court bouillion vaulting the ceilings.
A tart apple tart cooling in buckwheat honey and thyme;
the reduction of onions and wine; rose petals, anise; pastry fine;
parsley married to garlic; knives! knives!
white linen in from the line: no surrender to low blood sugar.
No short cuts.
One French recipe after another.
What did I forget? Roquette, romain, estragon, dent de lion, rampion
torn and tossed.
Mussels scrubbed and bearded.
Taste, my dear —
the spatula slathered: butter of cognac and duck liver — just lick from the tip.
Fork, fork; spoon, spoon; knife, knife.
Table laid.
Come, let’s sup.
xiii lace
Letters
scribbled on the backs of things —
unopened envelopes,
torn corners, roof estimates, flyers. Were you up in the night?
A longhand drift
of morning’s matter-of-fact kind of muddle:
butter and wax, pollen and salt,
pollen and pepper;
I dreamt of the sea and rush grass; errands, meeting schedules.
You should have wakened me —
loop holes of logic propped against the sugar bowl
or slipped sidelong between the racy pages of the novel
we’ve been reading aloud in bed. Notes: what you heard in the night —
wisteria on cedar. Sirens. Rain.
A change of mind, something crossed out.
x x x — desperately and always will —
xiv ivory
A kiss
à la cannibale:
this close, you
choose. All afternoon you hung about the edges of the room, ruthlessly
watching me, close-set —
in a light hound’s tooth suit that barely concealed your mood.
Collar pressed. Shoulders square. Holding a
chipped teacup, rough knuckles
useless, too big, too nude.
I feel your eyes move, my breath
a notch truer to mute. This close
you’re blue. One brow fused, navy-lipped,
all canine, uncouth. My eyelet tangled, blouse loose.
This close, this close
a kiss.
You’re a brute
Picasso triangle of tooth, blunt rectangles, absolutes;
and, beside you, I’m rearranged.
Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen
Posted by sarita at 5:03 PM