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previous Poems of the Month Amphora Preserved in Liquid This one was made of glass. She buried it in his tomb near his head along with the hair pin he made for her, also glass. Her hair must have been thick and long. Color of sun and moon, pulled and wound into a bun, she’d stuck that single pin into it a thousand times with one hand before they cut her hair off for mourning and sold it at the market. The two-handled jar at his feet held oil for the lamp near their bed. She saw no reason to light the lamp after his death. Their dinnerware was clear glass as well. Bowls and plates correct, their details squared off like good citizens, even the light thin and perfect where it entered the rim of a plate or collected at the bottom of a cup to resemble green wine. It was he who went empty-eyed to the tomb to wait. She placed everything he needed to be comfortable, even rich, in his next life. If she kept anything to herself it might have been the thought that in her next life she hoped for a different union, one with more laughter and less tableware. Nightshade First there is the flower— luxuriously purple, given to foliage. As if it were enough to crave beauty, small bells flute and turn. Then slightly blue, the stem end, where, when flowering’s done, a berry begins to form its yellow pearl, so pale I think of the moon. A few days come between us. The berry reddens, begins to glow indecently. Then I turn inward, away from you. Calling the Pigs The scent’s gone stale and the memory’s fetid but he would stand until it became important that he be the only man to care for pigs mired in mud. Sooo-eee. Sooey sooey sooey sooooo-eeeee. One by one they’d come, furred and nimble, cloven-hoofed. He had nothing to give them so he pulled tendrils of grass up by the roots and fed it through wire. Grasses were taken into snout and stomach, grass became more than the sum of a life surrounded by women who didn’t understand why he stood most nights with his back to them, his hat askew in the sad light that had spent itself in loss and gain. The mud dried on his work shoes and fell to the tile floor when he walked into the house nights after calling the pigs. It was these small squares Mother swept with her broom, muttering under her breath, beads of sweat gathering on her forehead. Then he sat back in the armchair satisfied that the pigs had come, the pigs had come to him. Butcher-Wrapped See what I have brought for you, these gifts tendered in wax paper folded back against itself— the thin shelf doubled so nothing leaks. Not fluid, nor blood. If you think these gifts are stories of the past you are wrong. They contain all the souls in heaven and all the dead in hell. The meat rots and is preserved for another ugly century. The chicken’s back, dimpled with holes where feathers were plucked and thrown into a pail, the curses of women, the huge tongue taken from a cow— all lie pale and prophetic silent with revelations. Go now. Don’t wince when you peel open these sacks. Use the fingers of a raccoon and the brain of the surgeon when he carves a patient’s back and welds vertebrae together, inserting the thin wires that will act as discs. Use your discretion. Newborns They prickle my dreams this life come from and forthcoming always making remaking itself out of the stubborn itch of an insect They make a breach in the disease of death when they come out of the gurney after fermenting in bed in a great wealth of pain They expose the milk for what it is and the breast for its function How well intercept waking and falling asleep masquerade as unity, divinity in their bare outfits as if the Buddha himself where born again and had forgotten to behave The stork’s been busy with his beak I ask the policeman and how? Very well he replies and when they come I dream badly of them as if they were two cockroaches we ordered from torn menus in the age we were given and at the appointed time. They emerge covered in sacs with cheese torn from their mother too early like shards of glass or beaks twittering under the skin and inside the ear it happens like the early hours always too small, If they are sisters they clatter if brothers their grim dignity unbearable if figments of a repetitive nightmare that part finishes where the highway ends the water then we put them into tubs that act as boats launching the restless energy Reeds hide us from those who would take the newborns away from us but it’s we they’ve put into the boats The sky is dawning faintly as we say good bye to the territories our porcelain bathtub bobs on the river we hear their ululations from the bank— shush… Another Winter - after Jehuda Amichai The pain-people have returned from their countryside— metal, fog, gray, and cold. They finger bare branches and turn up in waking dreams. The pain-people have come back with words in their mouths to ask me to join them. A few months is not so bad, they say, come home. But the countryside— how am I to survive even a few bad months within these barren grounds. The weather is prison enough— gun-metal sky, fog, cloud-gray place not worth looking around in for what’s gone cold and hard as a dead star. Off color jokes and gossip like slander. The pain-people run raw fingers across barren trees—Big-Leaf Maple, Cherry the crows picked clean, Dogwood with blood-red branches. The say words that sound like vote. Of all my waking dreams this is the worst. I pace, holding what I can of pleasure to my chest— baby bucking in the throes of colic, memory of the sun up high. The Business of Murder It was there, in the room above, company calling, I learned that space extends across the lake, that the gun was just a weapon like a knife or a smile, and I could, if they came to my door and knocked, if even the intimation of a good morning lingered too long on the peripheries, I would commit what for so long had been fodder for the machinery of news: nightly stories of families whose black sheep turned suddenly lethal. Losing the Hurry The small white butterfly can’t decide where to land. Not on the stone bench beside you, not in the wild currant. Though you like to think these pinks have never been sweeter… Off goes the butterfly into its own obsessions of pleasure and defeat. Before graffiti defiled the fortress of solitude, it may have been easier to subtract the chaff from the germ. Far away waves fold and unfold— arcane envelopes sealed with spit. Water and wind, wind and water. Two things not to know— where you’ve been and where you’re going. Cottage in the Woods Ragged grass threaded with dandelions, daisies, poppies. Wicker coffee table, teal pillow, kitsch metal chairs covered in rust-colored velvet. Cottage with a kitchen too little for two. The black-bottom frying pan covered in grease, the jade-green kettle sitting on its element. Birdsong passing through single-pane windows. Nights of rain, and the streetlamp like a dutiful guard—its yellow lamp unsleeping until dawn. In the yard a picnic table gray with years. To sit in séance with the dead, to recall one’s children when they were young enough to worship their mother… To sit with the numbers of the living on all sides and not to call them. Not to feel the urge to make a single call. The White Lilac In humidity, as beneath the weight of summers past, malingering before a season of rust and heat. Tinged by the rescue of starched blooms with scissors, by the pairing of all colors with the purity of one. In blight, as in its heyday, like trollops reaching for rooftops, curlicues of petrified quartz. A clique of blossoms welded to one another as much by night as those flagrant questions posed by musk. Freighted by the need to colonize the earth, where one brother will be bloodied by the other. Judith Skillman © 2007, 2008 |
