The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem SERTRALINE

Object permanence: something my dog doesn’t think
I possess. She sits on the ball when she no longer wants

to participate. I wish to one day hold that kind of boldness.
Near us, a heron puffs his chest, wades knee-deep into

the marsh. What is more than one heron called? I never learned
that one. A flamboyance of flamingos, watch of nightingales,

bouquet of pheasants. My mother is somewhere, probably
working or maybe driving to the store. She likes to shop the sales.

We used to have the same birthmark, right over our left hip.
Hers: gone. Mine: bleeds. I look for deeper water. The dog likes

to float. Isn’t that how witches were tested in Salem? Something
about floating, something about weighing the same as a duck.

To keep still, I imagine the oil-sheen of a mallard in the dog’s
mouth, my mother’s hand in mine. It’s a siege, a siege of herons.

CROCUSES

 

 For Stuart Dischell

After nearly hacking them down

while mowing my back lawn,

I think of Rimbaud aroused

by their purples and greens

as they spiked between

the stones of the Rue de Buci,

barbarous among the modernity.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award ON SEEING A BEE DRINK HIS NECTAR

Here I sit almost 25 years old,
never knowing how a bee drinks
its nectar til today, having followed one
from geranium petal to geranium petal,
leaning in close, seeing his tiny hands
grab each tiny flower, watching him
extend a shining, black cone
from the center of his face to lap up
the sweet stuff. It’s a dipping tongue,
apparently, which I was calling a
retractable nose, and butterflies
have one too, and I don’t know
how I made it this long never properly looking
at a bee! There should be entire grades
dedicated to this stuff and other grades
set aside for looking up at oak trees from underneath.
My ignorance of the world is oversized
like a shirt. It has sleeves that drag the ground
when I walk. My neighbor tells me
how a mother robin keeps her nest clean—
carrying the young birds’ waste in her
mouth and making deposits in the grass
somewhere. It’s true. My neighbor has watched
this happen, she says, and all at once I love her,
want to marry her impulsively, buy a big house
just for the porch, and spend the rest of our lives
uncovering the daily routines of moths,
listening to the sound spiders make
when they slurp liquefied guts, wondering
what chipmunks dream about, and if they kick
their legs in their sleep like a dog sometimes does.

A SORT OF ART

They made a sort of music with their feet,
a seesaw slapping as they hit the ground
in time with undead, resurrected years—
the monochrome past of sepia suffering.
They made their music ring in children’s ears
all day and night with its staccato beat,
then made the children make another sound,
something like an orchestra for the king
with mami, papá, dios, retch, and wail
for notes. It quivered through the king’s rich heart.
Now they make another music with bones
crushed and sifted through screens, a whispered trill
that sounds like burning notes. A sort of art
of no remains. Not names. Not even stones.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem MISS SAHAR LISTENS TO FAIRUZ SING “THE BEES’ PATH”

If you’re going to go,
if you’re going to scorch this heart
and leave a desert in your absence,
tell me now and I’ll follow the bees.

If you’re going to scorch this heart,
I’ll hem the horizon in solitude.
Tell me now and I’ll follow the bees
inside the anemones scarring the hillside.

I’ll hem the horizon in solitude,
the light lengthening, breaking
inside the anemones scarring the hillside.
I’ll spiral inside the dome of the sky.

The light lengthening, breaking,
this moment gathered around us
as I spiral inside the dome of the sky.
Spring is a ravishment forever dying dying dying.

This moment gathered around us is
honey and wild greens and the promise
of ravishment forever dying dying dying.
We’re just another love song, remembered or forgotten.

Honey and wild greens and the promise
of losing you in the desert of what happens next.
We’re just another love song, remembered or forgotten.
Will you stay until the anemones fold back into the land?

Will you stay until the anemones fold back into the land
or leave a desert in your absence?
Are we just another love song, remembered or forgotten?
Tell me now and I’ll follow the bees.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award APPALOOSA RIDER UNCHAINED

Your horses ride today to set you free.
No longer shall your voices be contained,
Or chained to the watchman’s land without a key.
Here, blades and bows—weapons keep the peace,
Yet who provides shelter beyond the walls of rain?
Your friend will yell your name, then set you free.
Ignite the fires. The song becomes the key.
Unlock yourselves from umber cages, terrains
Of soot no longer bind you. Never lose this key.
Longboats await offshore. Together we
Ford rivers of golden grain. Steady the reins
Of your horses. Let them break away. Let them be
Unafraid. When darkness falls we ride across the plains.
Unbury your family plainsongs from the grave deep
Inside your throat. Sing out the missing key.
Reclaim your ancient speech from amber plains. See
Beaches aflame. History ashen again.
Our friends will yell our names. They set us free.
If your horse breaks away, let them be.

WOMEN WRITERS VISIT THE CAVE OF THE MOUNDS IN WISCONSIN

Too dark to see one’s hand before one’s face
Too dark to see any part of oneself

A silence so final we were afraid to speak,
The five of us accustomed to speaking freely,

Accustomed to shaping language into art,
Jolted mute by our corporeal knowledge,

Now and new, of the grave, crypt, catacomb,
The tomb and time and generations gone

As thoroughly as if they never existed,
Of helplessness before the fact of death,

The pit flat black, the surrounding black as dense
As a dead man’s brain.

The guide turned on a light and we were back
In the world but it was no longer the same world.

It was clear now how foolish were our ambitions
And how necessary to our survival.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award BELLS WHICH WILL NOT RING

I might have learned to hear in any stray rotting log
what rot has reached the very root of us.

This infinity forced down the gullet,
this string of bees that once turned

honey into sun does not answer.
One by one they open in my head.

There is, I know, a science
of separation, an infinite inch between

that sweetness and your hand.
In night’s disheveled elegies,

stifled laments—a trapped hum
crazes in your brain that it may lie

rough and real against your collarbone.
Soft atrocity, sweet fright.

Even the chandelier shakes.
I watch my telephone with a watched eye

like a bee, completed, dying hiveless.
You, with your square windows, holding

on to some airless annihilating height—
eat your god, child, and love it!

The clockwork oxen jaws, the tense
anticipation, eating money by the lemon river

for the country that comes when I close
my eyes. The world wears its

nerves in the screams of children
playing at war, playing

your sad, your same, your only air.
And the splendid official, all otherness

and air, sighs like a vent in the earth
and breaks like a black wave above my bed.

 

 

Note: “Bells Which Will Not Ring” is a cento
composed of lines from the work of Osip Mandelstam

OF AIR AND EARTH

Of course they’re only dreams: the face of God,

the daughter drawn from constellation flames,

an ever-present sky devoid of void,

the peace you hoped your mother found at home.

They speak of nothing meaningful as mud.

Sometimes, though, you wish you could buy those dreams,

accept that world of elder men who toyed

with callow minds, who shook their heavy tome

of answers in your face.

                                        Beneath the sod,

mute bodies lie below their stone-carved names.

Sometimes you lie in dreams until you’re cloyed

with doubt of doubt.

                                  Keats lies unnamed in Rome.

Your body roils with air and earth alloyed.

Of air we make dreams.

                                        Of earth we make loam.

THIS BE THE OYSTER

This be the cup, brimming fathoms of nectar
This, the well that flows from forever

This be the saltcellar, trencher of tears,
and also the teardrop, stone-wept from ocean

This be the stone, lost among cairns,
and there, another, hidden in middens

This be the hull that casts off its seed—
thus grows the reef, encrusted with life—

This, ancient vessel, anchored to reef,
This be the ark where life resides

and this, tiny cradle, bearer of treasure,
This be the oyster, slow-rocked by tides.