Things which will not appear in this lullaby

                                  

                         Three poems by Traci Brimhall

Family Portrait as Lullaby

Your father is the slow dance and I am the ballad.

Or he's the nightclub and I am six tequila shots on the bar.

I am the salt and lemon, too.

I am the snake and the apple. I am the tongue that says

to your father – Take. Eat. Do this in remembrance of me.

Your father, the monologue in the music box

and I, the plastic ballerina in gold shoes.

Your father is the swaddle, the rock, the cradle.

His potbellied heart loses its socks and is learning to laugh.

You are Mars. Your father and I are its two moons orbiting.

You, stardust on the telescope's lens

and the ice in the comet's tail.

Your heart is a poppy – bright, forgetful

You are the first mayapple of spring, unripe and rising.

And this is the hallelujah I asked the first stardust to sing at the quickening.

This is the dirty Eden, stalked by envious angels,

This is the land of Isaac, and of knives.

Things Which Will Not Appear in This Lullaby

This cast iron cradle on an overburdened bough.

That stone doll with a quartz heart and agates for eyes.

A boy waving a red skirt at a girl pawing the street

         in patent leather shoes.

A pirate ship circled by a shark that feeds on moonlight.

Mermaids training with tridents.

Instead I'll sing about a kelp[ forest caressing a glass-bottomed boat

        or wild ponies bathing in a starlit river.

Your father, his sweater held open like a sling weighted with pears.

Your father, anointing my wrist with a paper corsage.

My love, the fourth-longest river in the world.

Someone else's love, between the road and the woods,

Not Job's first loss or his forty-eighth, but his wife swaddling

        the second set of sons she'd been given to replace the ones

        God had taken.

Neither never, nor Neverland, but always and here.

 

Lullaby with Almost All the Answers

The bridesmaids in yellow silk harvesting

pears is when. Love set you going is why.

One third of the spirit entering me is why.

Moonlight gentling the curtains is how.

The angel Gabriel is who. The husband is who.

The stranger next to me on the bus who let me

warm my hands on her thighs is who. We all

want to be broken for each other is why.

We all want to kiss our names from someone

else's mouth is why. The tongue is where.

Neck is where. Collarbone, nipple, and nave

are where. Why: winter approached and heat

was scarce or the fourth glass of wine or old-

fashioned loneliness. My blood on the white flesh

of the bitten apple is what. I wanted a child

to live long enough to call me mother is why.

From Poetry Northwest, Winter and Spring 2015.

All the cameras have gone to other wars

                                                       by Wisława Szymborska

The End and The Beginning

After every war

someone has to tidy up.

Things won't pick

themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove

the rubble to the roadsides

so the carts loaded with corpses

can get by.

Someone has to trudge

through sludge and ashes,

through the sofa springs,

the shards of glass,

the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post

to prop the wall,

someone has to glaze the window,

set the door in its frames.

No sound bits, no photo opportunities

and it takes years.

All the cameras have gone

to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,

the railroad stations, too.

Shirtsleeves will be rolled

to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,

still remembers how it was.

Someone else listens, nodding

his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby

who'll find all that

a little boring.

From time to time someone still must

dig up a rusted argument

from underneath a bush

and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew

what this was all about

must make way for those

who know little.

And less than that.

And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there

in the grass that covers up

the causes and effects

with a cornstalk in his teeth,

gawking at clouds.

From Wisława Szymborska, MAP: Collected and Last Poems, 2015.

Feast on your life

                                                                 by Derek Walcott 

The Time Will Come

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another; who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

For the lives of the sons of daughters

                            by John Fuller

Elsewhere

in the Golfe de Lava

The sea is as sharp as diamonds.

The sun has a flat in the Oc.

Its tread has burned up the horizon.

The clouds are pillars of rock.

The sky's the grey-orange of rosé

That signals the end of the day

When Christian, Raymond and José

Went down to the pebbles to play.

And now the sunset's a cauldron

Of grief for the passing of years,

For our lives as thoughtless children

For the thoughts that turn to tears.

For the light on the glittering waters,

For the looks that turn away,

For the lives of the sons of daughters

And for the abandoned bay.

No one will water the roses.

The hedge grows over the gate.

The sun turns over and dozes.

And one more day is too late.

The breeze from the bay grows chilly

And worries the petals to rags,

For night has darkened the lily

And closed up our dreams in her flags.

No step on the path by the curtain

Will lift up the eyes from their book

For now only one things is certain:

There will never be eyes to look

Now the moon delivers its lecture

On light to a single star

And no one is left to conjecture

Wherever it is that we are.

The shutters are closed in the villa

And latched with a swivelling key

That curls like a rusting cedilla

And softens the sound of the sea

The Times Literary Supplement, May 22, 2015.