Poetry

Lucero Peak Cave
(The Woman Who Rode Away by D.H. Lawrence)

9 November 2014
Categories: Poetry

First, a fence, then a gate.
Alone in the morning’s bright imprecision,

you know when you find the cave of the woman.
Last night, Lawrence had murmured long clauses

that lined up in your head
when you should have been sleeping.

The intimate alphabet, invaluable
hours, infinite regress of endings kept

blurring your vision. Even after the clock
molded minutes thick into hours, you twisted

and meandered through fragments.
The pages coated with dew. Now, flint light.

Small splinters of wind. The cave is wet
in odd places: ledges, silver cavities of rock.

Many long drips of water — not together, not fast —
leave a white line in nooks.

You are alert to the upright pine against glittering aspen.
Still alert to the sentence.

Someone would die here without anyone saying
a word. The sky lays down blue, with gray in its center,

and fingered with madness. Overhead,
the same sun, no longer tender.

You have never before climbed into a paragraph,
or a conclusion. Leaving the site, you read

summer’s flat light on the road.
The sun is unpunctuated, but reveals its opinions.

The Gypsies Singing Good-Bye to Their Child

7 November 2014
Categories: Poetry

When we stole you
we also took the kitchen’s largest pot
and three round loaves of bread.
The pot you slept in sometimes.
The loaves became your favorite toys.
One you tore in half and used as a coconut
to recount for us Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
But we read the papers. We’re not such fools.
That’s why we’ve left you in this park.
Your front tooth we pulled so we’d at least have something.
It’s the only hurt we hope will never heal.
We take turns sucking it at night.
Each time it grows smaller, less distinctly bone.
I don’t know what we’ll do when it’s all gone.

My Grandfather, Dying of Alzheimer’s on His Ranch in Ganado, Texas

5 November 2014
Categories: Poetry

Some nights, you sing, in-tune and off
Your rocker, keeping time with two spoons beat
Against your thigh, a sweet
And husky “Down in the Valley”
Until an unexpectoranted cough,
A gasping grand finale

Reminds how near I am to death.
You sleep diagonally in bed, cry out
All night for S—no doubt
Still haunted by her QVC
Deliveries, her baby’s-breath
Bouquet, the sun-brewed tea

She’d spill on any surface—your words
A schizophasic garden I want to tend.
I pray for fear and send
Each intercession up like the thin
Three-harmony Sabbath hymns the birds
Out-sing each week. Church, kin,

The land you cleared each fall for cords
Of winter wood and Balm of Gilead:
All gone to seed. Half-mad,
An avatar of age, gone piece-
Meal, you sing someone else’s words.
Tonight, when silence has lease

On you and all I can afford are lamp-lit
Dreams of planting cognates in the hollow
Of your mind—steed and swallow,
Wife and breath—let me go
To a secret place, un-understand, and admit
The words I do not know.

Fountain of Diana at the Louvre

4 November 2014
Categories: Poetry

Arm draped like a debutante’s
around her stag’s long white neck,

she’s not so school-girl gorgeous after all.
No swift strong hands to brush back

the hair from my eyes or stain my mouth red
with berries. Her eyes are emptied of seeing.

Her bow, an afterthought; her quiver, gone missing;
one of her dogs, very angry.

We circle her for a hint of moon as the day’s last
lean-in light sculpts its quarry: the two of us, bereft

of one another, hearts beating fast to slow
the mute recriminations of marble and fine dust.

Transplant

3 November 2014
Categories: Poetry

In seats mud-rusted from the years of use
                      we perched, drawn in the wake of the blue

tractor: its tires, black and deep-cut, tread
                      like chiseled stones. Between us, steadily,

the transplanting wheel turned and turned
                      and turned, took our seedlings to the dirt.

They seemed small and limp in our hands;
                      they held strange pallor. We knew the land,

harsher than a seedbed, was made of hazard.
                      The sacrosanct sun, we swore, would burn

these roots. The field would yield few leaves.
                      Still, we gave ourselves fully to the machine.

Nothing will live, we told each other like a song,
                      and each year, at the harvest, we were wrong.

Dead Ringer

2 November 2014
Categories: Poetry

You in a hotel lobby—
no, your double,
trench-coated man
with leonine hair.
My sternum on fire,
the room still
cocktail-hour dim
with small lamps
like embers.
Selfishly, I think:
miss me. See my
shade in one of our
old haunts. She’ll see
right through you:
masquerade knight
feigning he’s set down
his lance and chest plate.

Window Box

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

Upstairs, the dog has dropped its ball. New life,
it bounces twice. New life mimics the old,
a thought which might bring comfort, might bring grief.
(Claws click like ice on ice, dogs do as told.)

I overdo. Like Kierkegaard or like
these flowers in their box, bedaubed with dew.
(Bedaubed—a word for writing, not to speak.)
With dew, the yard appears greener than you

might guess. Mornings like this, I’ve seen two rats
tumble the field so joyfully I think
they must forget they’re rats. But no rat forgets.
No scuffling rat, no Kierkegaard, would shrink

from this movement so like the orbital leap
from text to text. Rats tumble in their place—
bedaubed like Kierkegaard, in bloom, in sleep,
who knew that every flower overstays.

Improvisation on Newsprint

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

Say it’s true that they found her a mile from her house,
hands and feet tied behind her. (The reporter writes
she did that to herself, but only after she
ingested a lethal dose of morphine.) So say
it’s true police were aware of her for years, that
they had responded to no less than 13 calls
without a witness present or forthcoming, and
that by the window where he allegedly stood,
they never found so much as a cigarette butt.
(which is what they look for, butts, or candy wrappers—
boredom being a universal condition.)

The cops didn’t mind, really, but you can only
check the closets so many times. (The reporter
assures us her condition, although rare, is not
unheard of.) So it’s true, all of it. The theory
now goes that in the beginning there may have been
a certain someone who called a certain number
of times, but that all the attention scared him off.
And yet, a routine had been established, and she
simply took up the slack.
I can see it. We all
like to think we’re noticed. She might, on some level,
have depended on those calls. Maybe they sounded
almost neighborly—He’d ask after her daughter
and she would make sure he remembered his mother.
He’d call to tell her that the roof needed repair
or that the car’s engine sounded off. He might
have left notes, little things, reminding her to cook
the chicken in the fridge, or that the porch lights burned
through the night. Who could blame her if she kept it up?

It’s natural to improvise, and, anyway,
virtue’s in action, right?

                                              How just like him, she must
have thought. And the further she went, the easier
it got. After all, who would believe it—someone
as pretty as she had been beating herself blue?
So when they found her, it gave them pause. Maybe they’d
misjudged her, they thought. (It’s what I would think.) But they
brought in an expert. He tied himself up the way
they found her in nine minutes flat. (The reporter
says that the morphine would have given her fifteen.)

mike

Mike Smith teaches at Delta State University and edits Tapestry, a literary magazine focusing on the Mississippi Delta. He has published three collections of poetry, including Multiverse, a collection of two anagrammatic cycles. Recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Arkansas Review, The Atticus Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Magazine, and The Notre Dame Review. In addition, his translation of the first part of Goethe’s Faust was published by Shearsman Books in 2012.

The Astronaut

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

Belief requires lack of proof:
I think there will be stars because

they’re gone. Now you.
Now that you’ve gone

to prove again what absence takes
(the planetary heart, the stars)

I know belief as true. Thank you.
Blank verse. That’s what the sky

is made of: stars unrhymed,
imagined lines, disordered,

from satellite to moonshot,
wrought down here, by hand.

A line that stops—from me to you.
I know the stars, or one:

I know just how to spin within a hole
until the sun comes up.

Belief the planet turns requires proof:
absence, sense, a place

I’ll never see, payloads
rocketed into the sky.

Belief will end. Stop. Stop.
It ends—if you are gone.

Roadkill

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

When I find you, darling, in the night
curled on the rug in the living room,
insomniacal as the TV—
though the dog’s happy, the coffee cake’s happy,

the chamomile tea’s happy—
and you’re crying, and I ask what happened,
and you answer, “roadkill,”
for a moment I’m sure you mean that’s

what we are in the universe, because
that’s how each day makes us feel.
A clump of hair in a drain, pickings,
as the moon makes of the furniture an X-ray.

With my hand like a little paw,
I hesitate, then touch your shoulder.

Crossing Peachtree

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

Atlanta, even your magnolias
  smell like credit cards—

they are pretty, sure,
  they’re grand. Always

the whine of power blowers
  like a thing strangled,

its last cries. Hear
  the fountain tinkle

in the erotic shade
  of a Japanese maple.

Atlanta, the twinkle
  of your glass raids ill

in me. I’m trying to love you
  without getting in the car.

Icarus at Lake Acworth

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster…

—W.H. Auden

Waterlogged and barely floating
in a cove of Lake Acworth,
a dead blue heron draws flies,
bobs in the wake of a bass boat.
Its wings expand in the sludge,
fill with the water beneath them,
spread over the rest of its body
that rots among cattails and reeds,
feeds creatures I cannot see.
From the bridge where I walk
with my children, the wingspan
appears out of place, worn
by some exiled angel, or a boy
who took flight only to fall,
drown in this lake, drift to this inlet
where no one seems to notice.
Motor oil laps the heron’s feathers,
gathers with bottles, plastic wrappers,
fishing line at the reservoir’s edge.
Days from now, even these wings
will descend to silt, decompose,
dissolve into all that remains,
recede in the relics of our own myths.

The Third Egg

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

Far from woodland or savanna, a rafter
of wild turkeys, at least a dozen in my yard,
their black bellies and iridescent wings

glistening in sunlight. Behind the glass,
I sat still and watched, repulsed
by the fleshy caruncles across each head,

the jiggly red wattles and dangling rope-like
flaps of skin on the throat,
and from the center of the breast, a tuft

of small feathers that had failed to grow.
They waddled and strutted and swiveled
their long necks like periscopes.

They dipped their beaks into the bird bath,
investigated the feeders, and foraged
the ground for seeds and nuts.

They cast long, dark shadows.
Two hens moved away from the group
and poked the piles of dead leaves, as if

looking for something they’d lost.
The biggest gobbler looked in at me.
I heard his low-pitched drumming noise.

He was not afraid, but I clutched my belly,
beating with child, this time my last hope.
I prayed hard that these feathered creatures

were no omens or portents, just birds on a stroll.
After they left, I searched outside for a feather,
an amulet for the seed blooming inside me.

Entreaty

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

You get high, I’ll have a drink. They’re just words,
same as sediment, same as palpate. Let’s make

something small to steward together, one

little saxophone player with a reed
in his mouth. You can grow thin and still be

yourself, coax a beard and button your coat,

while I’ll keep wanting it all: every man
and woman I meet. But we’re done

throwing chairs at people we don’t really

love. Hand me that bottle, kiss me goodnight,
spin me around our old kitchen.

The Bright Forever

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

You will be leaving soon, drifting to where you cannot find me—our days a flock of blackbirds gone south for the winter. I miss already your words at play: laughter that breaks the skin of the river again & again. Behind the house, smoke drifts from the neighbor’s chimney, the birdbath’s empty—I have no words for this: I am lost in the crunch and click of the frost—its voice an accusation: I do not want you to forget my name but when you do, promise to remember what we had, to linger in every goodbye like the last wren at the feeder, like the salt on your skin after making love. Our time together was marked by more laughter than tears—these notes, they’ll continue sailing; there is nothing else like them.

Sometimes Winter Comes When You Least Expect It

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

Like a winter day that arrives in June when there’s nothing to do but drink black coffee, watch the rain, so too will the thin white inch of memory round your neighbor’s corner, disappear down the block. Like touching my finger to your lips, so too will the day-long mist sharpen something for us, perhaps our image of how life could be on a different street. St. Francis stands by the birdbath, his arms opened to us. If not for the rain, I’d call it a miracle. The wind gusts obscuring your face, any thoughts as to why we remain so devoted to the return of winter—its forced isolation. That thin white inch—is it a wound that will never heal, a promise continually broken? My finger breaks the mirrored water, soothes your lips—a healing you desire, but for reasons that are all my own.

Faultline

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

We’re drinking coffee at the shop on Grove
when my aunt’s DNA starts to rumble. Nerves
shake to the surface, shear waves ripple

her cheeks. Her eyes tremble,
and she waits. Quaking over the precipice,
I buckle under memories—a childhood spent

washing my hands then checking, over and over
through the night. I clutch my cup against tremors,
feel its heat, solid and slick. She says

the meds are working,
and I look into the black chasm
of my mug. Maybe you won’t

need     won’t need
them, she says. Maybe you’ll be
fine   fine    be fine. 

She blinks hard and fast like a child
trying to remember what
she already knows, and she starts

the stories again. Suicides. Rages:
my grandmother hurling blue Delft
at my mother’s head, ceramic raining

from the wall. One by one,
portraits tumble. The faces
fall. Paint pops, and the gilt

frames crack. I grapple with their weight
and try to rehang them, to square
splayed corners with the edges

of my mind. We walk to my car in silence,
and with door open, she leans in to say goodbye. 
Remember, we’re survivors.

And swinging it shut, she clips the frame
of her oversized glasses. They flip
from her nose, dangle from one ear.
She stares straight ahead.

All That Happened

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

It began when I was small,
ended when I was much larger.
You could hardly see me
through a microscope, then
only through a telescope.
Yesterday I was a sliver,
then I became the moon.
Yesterday I was a point,
then I formed everything.
In between there were treasure
chests, eyeballs, spaceships.
Ghosts and pickled eggs.
In between there were martinis
and olives. Totalities, existences.
I could remember what happened.
I could never recall it all.

My Lips Are Made of Wax, My Teeth Are Furry Blades, and Other Lies

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

My hair is a bristly statue. My ears
are gramophones; a small dog sits
on my shoulder and cries into them.

My nose is a funnel of love. My lips
are made of wax, sweet and red and chewy.
My teeth are furry blades, chipped and rusty.

My neck is a chicken wattle, a ratchety
bobble and swing and sway. I’m looking out
for an axe.

I am always the brave one,
never fearing fathers, husbands,
brothers, and other gods.

My throat is conch shell, listen
to the city in it, the swoosh and hush;
my breasts are a trio of ringing bells.

My arms are not wings, nor a flight of angels,
nor—. My fingers are mechanical
pawls; my thumbs, blunt sockets.

My fingers are quills scratching words.
My belly is an inkwell—hips are two trains
running headlong into the dry mesa of my belly.

My knees are knocking, but no one can come in.
My feet are ready to answer
but they don’t know the secret word.

O Mary Lou

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

Mid-summer Mary Lou’s getting hauled
across the way, surrounded by the sweaty men
of Weeks Marina. She sways gently in the lift.

Elsewhere, perhaps the Mary Lou
the ship’s named for walks the halls
of a nursing home to greet the dim light.

And somewhere else another
Mary Lou fidgets with a pile of bills,
pouring herself a second bolt of gold

crisp with the light of this morning’s air
that makes clear not all Mary Lou’s
are imaginary, just as all those songs

must have been about someone real
easy to greet and hard to say goodbye to.
Who’d believe such passion can be sung

to a cipher? But one never knows—
no slur against Ricky Nelson here—
or Dante or Petrarch’s woman of the light

that neither was able to hold as wife.
Who’d complain of longing when
one could linger on for toast in bed?

And all those boats named for women
may not be named after one on land.
Still, across the river, there can be no doubt

men are hard at work on the Mary Lou.
High aloft she swings in twin belts of steel,
creaking like the trees that made her.