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.

Imagined beloved voices

                                                                                  By C. P. Cavafy

But Wise Men Apprehend What is Imminent

                                          The gods perceive what lies in the future, and mortals, what occurs in the                                                         present, but wise men apprehend what is imminent. Philostratus.

Mortal men perceive things as they happen.

What lies in the future the gods perceive,

gull and sole possessors of all enlightenment.

Of all the future holds, wise men apprehend

what is imminent. Their hearing,

sometimes, in moments of complete

absorption in their studies, is disturbed. The secret call

of events that are about to happen reaches them..

And they listen to it reverently. While in the street

outside, the people hear nothing at all.

Voices

Imagined voices, and beloved, too,

of those who died, or of those who are

lost unto us like the dead.

Sometimes in our dreams they speak to us:

sometimes in its thought the mind will hear them.

And with their sound for a moment there return

sounds from the first poetry of our life –

like music, in the night, far off, that fades away.

Come Back

Come back often and take hold of me,

beloved feeling come back and take hold of me,

when the memory of the body reawakens,

and old longing once more passes through the blood;

when the lips and skin remember,

and the hands feel like they're touching once again.

Come back often and take hold of me at night,

when the lips and skin remember . . .

Translations by Daniel Mendelsohn.

Things appear, glow, suddenly vanish

                           

                                      by Marius Kociejowski

Heat and Light

      1

Things appear, glow, suddenly vanish.

A tree, for instance, can be so intense

It appears surrounded with dark light,

And just as the mind is trained to it

The prospect of certainty is yanked away,

A cut sapling gripped in the hand

And swung through air.

      2

The distant explosions of a star –

The boy and his magnifying glass

Could set this whole scene ablaze.

The trees drop their leaves prematurely.

The path each leaf flows in motionless air

Is skilled by shape and weight,

In this stillness is itself wind.

A bucket is slung over a fence-post,

Its bottom a lacework of thinning rust.

      3

The proximity of each object,

How each outshadows or is outshadowed

By its neighbor or else stands alone

           in exacting light –

There is no chronology.

The luminous signals are spread

Flat against the surface of memory,

As stars are discerned

Only by their brightness.

      4

In the cracked geometry of the field,

A grasshopper climbs a dead stalk.

      5

An empty bucket set

To rust on a fence-post –

That which extended the meaning of a river

Is a dead tunnel,

Holds nothing

But the bitter heat of intention

Soured by neglect.

The clanging emblems burn in mid air.

Marius Kociejowski, So Dance the Lords of Language, 2003.

Bicycles

                       

  by Linda Pastan

To a Daughter Leaving Home

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

                            by Wyatt Prunty

Learning the Bicycle

The older children pedal past
Stable as little gyros, spinning hard
To supper, bath, and bed, until at last
We also quit, silent and tired
Beside the darkening yard where trees
Now shadow up instead of down.
Their predictable lengths can only tease
Her as, head lowered, she walks her bike alone
Somewhere between her wanting to ride
And her certainty she will always fall.
Tomorrow, though I will run behind,
Arms out to catch her, she’ll tilt then balance wide
Of my reach, till distance makes her small,
Smaller, beyond the place I stop and know
That to teach her I had to follow
And when she learned I had to let her go.