Poetry

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.

Apples or Waffles

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

After the Super Derecho, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, 2012

On the third night of the power outage,
we sat in the living room after dinner
trying to believe, as daylight faded,
that the curtains were swaying not because
someone knocked them stretching,
or reaching to the table for more wine,
but because of an actual breeze
traveling on some repentant front
from high up in the Blue Ridge, where it was cold—
an efficient breeze that maybe still contained
enough coolness to lower the heat
by the few degrees that would let us trade
our oven-like insomnia for sleep.
Then I remembered the election game
Amanda taught me: “Apples or Waffles,”
where everyone votes to save just one,
banishing the other option to oblivion.
Majority ruled. By clockwards turns, we’d
nominate contenders. In the first round, apples
beat waffles, 8 to 3. At apples v. peppercorns,
apples won again—7 to 4. By round five, cats
arrived, and would not be toppled, though the vote
was always close—we lost cars, then planes.
But the moon tipped the scales, and Aaron
nearly left the room, as the reigning moon
spread its ghost light, exposing otherworldly shadows
in a dark and darkening caterwaulessness.
Then clothes (why did we cling to clothes?)
beat out the moon, and electricity
(since we’d been living without it for days),
and then clothes fell to music (as they will),
and so did sex, which stunned the minority.
And then came trees. The trees. Three days before,
the lights went out on us at open studios—
we’d blamed the artists’ digital displays. But then
we heard trees snap in half, and saw by flashlight
at the open door, far away, limbs falling
fast as leaves, bowing ballerina-like over the yard,
crossing the exits with a hero-pyre of saplings.
A rainless hurricane—it arrived without a warning.
All over the property, huge trees blocked the paths—
green walnuts blackening like hell-coins on the ground,
the cedar’s ripped pink pith exposed and alien in the sun.
For two days, Aaron cleared debris out of the pool.
In the game, trees outlasted the ocean, and trees
outlasted words (and Janet noticed, every poet
there chose trees). When words were gone,
we ended the game, and someone muttered
“trees or sleep,” and by then the darkness
covered our faces completely, so we couldn’t see
each other clearly, and we walked out of the house
in darkness, under the trees still left, into a world
we were now unsure of, its stillnesses unfixed,
into a world we could not be sure we hadn’t ruined.

Operation (I)

22 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

Covert, hardly cordial, came commands
from the quarters, hind
and head. Twin branches of the same

government. My mind: heretic, fiend
for fashion, my rhetoric
a couture magazine, all pictorial

content. Back issues abundant, still,
in the pews, the waiting room,
meant for other congregants hell-

bent on staying empty.
In them, as in me, no creed
but beauty, and a brain pretending scorn

for beauty. Chimes of the church I
worshipped: the unholy body, well-read.
No holes to speak of. No heart.

Pepsi

21 February 2014
Categories: Poetry

1.

Because she thought even fish said something about class.

Mud-blooded catfish, for example—fried up only by men who
mow lawns and nail shingles and make their living with dirt
hammered under their nails,

but bass, bass were wild, wide-mouth, pink throats caught by men
with enough money for a boat, their heads taken off by the working man
who works the other men.

And trout? We heard about men who ate a fish called rainbow,
but they were freezing their nuts off up north, hip-deep river water,
reciting poetry, casting houseflies across a stream.

So why would soda be any different? RC was for overall-wearing kids
with runny eyes, a once-a-month Moon-Pie treat after huffing
five miles to the general store.

And Coke? Chugged by the common freckle-face gal across the river
in Indiana—a Hoosier who hived her hair and squeezed into June Cleaver skirts—
Lord, look at her in her Sunday best; she actually thinks she looks good.

Pepsi though? Well, Pepsi was married to Joan Crawford,
Pepsi was a bitch who knew how to ash with two taps from a two-inch filter,
not one nicotine stain on her manicured hands.

Pepsi knew how to walk in Italian leather, how to pin a hair piece
at her crown and let it waterfall into an aerosol nest of
natural, how to glue a strip of lashes to her wink.

Pepsi was a short, zippy drink, and chilled just right, it made a place
for herself in this world, knowing just how easy it is to get a man
and just how hard he was to keep.

2.

Because the sound of the first can
                                   in the morning was the sound of   nectar
                                                     firecracked,

a sugar sent up
                 to the sky, a dull liquid
                                   kissed with foam, the sound of ready oil
                                                     excited by flour,   your gravy being made.

Because in a sweating   glass,
                 it cooled
                                   her knot of hot sleep
                                                     to the same crisp

as the air-conditioned room.

Because it was the secret
                 of lemon and orange and vanillin
                                   tickling the air, a fizz that
                                                     whispered,

wake up now, Fanny,
                                   your bad flashing night is through.

3.

Because she was loyal—downright militant—to things she loved, Pepsi was all

she would drink. Rarely water, not juice, not milk, and damn straight, no trailer-trash
beer. She might have coffee later, before her shows came on, but this was the drink
that woke her, the drink that kept her up.

Should you fix her a glass, you might get the full Pepsi Lecture, her obsessive
counting game, because there was a hell of a lot she couldn’t control, but she could
control this:

Make it four pieces of ice—not three, and not five. But four. And I don’t want it too full;
don’t make me spill it all over myself. And use a six-ounce glass, not some big suck-o jug,
not a little old juice glass, but six ounces, that big. I want that glass to be plastic and pretty,

something with flowers, maybe in pink, but don’t give me no ugly cup. And it better be clean too; don’t give me no dirty glass, pull it hot from the washer if you have to, but just four—
count them, four—cubes of ice.

4.

Because in the hospital
we lost her
in the deep folds
of a coma
for days,
and when she finally
woke, she was
confused, looked
around, asked,
What are you all here

staring at me for?

Her oldest answered,
Because,
Mama,
we need you.

Well,
okay then,
she said.
Quit
being so useless,
standing around.

Somebody pour me
a fresh Pepsi?

5.

Because it was not water pulled from the well, water from a place with no pipes,
because it was not water so rich in iron that washing with it was like taking a bucket shower
in blood.

Because it was not a chipped Mason jar filled lukewarm from the tap.

Because it was not milk with a layer of unhomogenized creaming the top,
because it was not tea her mama set out on the porch to brown in the sun.

Because it was not Bowling Green, not western Kentucky, and there’s no need
to ever wait again for the mule pulling the ice man.

No, you have a pocket full of change now, Fanny. It’s 1944 again,
no sense in scuffing your feet, standing outside on the hussy corner of the dime store.

You walk right in, order straight from the fountain if you want.
You’re in Louisville now, you have yourself a man, and you’ll never have to choke down

anything flat again.