Star Gazer at 102,800 Feet

Before I walked-off the highest step in this world,

I stood inside the gondola of a hot-air balloon,

held space and tasted nebula like pomegranate seeds.

Star-clusters raced away, melting like snow

on blacktop. The taste on my lips was a galaxy’s

that no man had been to before. I wore

a suit pressurized with pure oxygen to

keep me guarded from frostbite, high-winds,

what little I knew of heartbreak in Outerspace.

I couldn’t tell I’d been falling faster than my voice:

in love with my susceptibility to the ground,

in love with the yielding of my wrists to your grip.

Sling them over my head, I said, like a parachute.

I’ll float the rest of the descent back to Earth.

BRIDGE

Let us go out and stand for a while

in the deserted, back-country church

of an old iron bridge—plate, beam

and rusty rivet—a place of light

with lofty rafters framing heaven,

with enormous triangular windows

depicting the world in October,

with brown and yellow willow leaves

drifting onto a trickle of creek

meandering toward us on one side

and slipping away on the other—

lesson, sermon, collection and hymn—

a place through which so many lives

have passed and so many prayers

and hopes have been carried away

that now it rings with silence.

Leaves are falling. Take my hand.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem WARD WORKS HARD TO KEEP YOU HIDDEN

In the mangroves

                of Ward’s memory

you’ve become a little fish—orange

                and flapping your tail fin

as you used to—swaggering down

                Marlboro street, dogwood

fireworks above—back

                before I watched you

slip away for deeper waters. Yes,

                Ward dreams of you always

in these incantations,

                these silly songs: once,

you were a groundhog—brown

                little log rolling

across the lawn; once, your form

                took flight as a moth—

green and shining; you flashed

                like a thrown card

through the forest.

                You’re rarely you

but when you are you are

                the you of years ago,

the you of your million voices,

                always leaving, always

through Ward’s front door:

                a black umbrella blooming

before you and into the rain.

                And it’s here that you became

an absence preceding Ward;

                it’s forever at the spot

of your last leaving where he feels

                he must step through you.

But he can’t. Every day he tries.

                He walks from his house,

and your absence, like a bank

                of cold air, floats

before him. Through it, he appears

                smaller than he is, diminished.

He hopes you never notice.

ROSEMARY

 for Rosemary Kennedy, lobotomized age 23

Little Rosie rolling through the field,

half-dazed: when you spoke,

you spoke out of turn; you rode

in that boy’s car; you broke

out of the convent on a rope

of knotted sheets. You were not

your precious, golden brothers

nor placid, nor sweet. You roared

through that house; you hissed

at your mother. There was no place

for you, though they loved you—

there was no place for a woman

so dumb and so fierce. Desperation

led them to the doctor’s office,

desperation and the misplaced hope

of who you were meant to be: quiet and kind,

your brothers’ keeper, the oldest sister,

darling and upright. When the surgeon

pierced your skull, you were wide awake.

Know this: they did not know.

They did not mean to hurt you.

But then all you had was the dull snap

of those synapses breaking and

the boldness of your body, stripped

of language, stripped of reason,

still bulging awake each morning.

And all they had was the greatness

of your need. You were the first

tragedy, Rosie, but know

that you were not the last. Know

that your sisters huddled by,

that Eunice visited once a month

in her elaborate hats and her small,

latticed gloves to read you passages

from the Bible.

KEYHOLES

If I take you to this place,

                             you will only be unhappy.

 

                Your worried mind—

useless as a snagged sweater.

 

                                          There are hallways

               and so many doors

                                          that will remain shut

 

despite a slow rotation,

              despite a ring of keys.

 

              This is the question

                             answered.

 

This is your hand

                              and this is the flame.

 

              Listen—             your ear pressed

                            to the keyhole

                                           of an empty room.

What light

                            pools like spilled water

              from the slit

                            beneath the door?

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

O bless the Internet,

where by dint of an @,

an unwitting British party girl

might send photos to Ross White,

an American stranger in a cheap apartment,

not altogether an unwilling recipient,

mistaking me for Ross White,

who, last time I looked,

was a peachfuzz-mustachioed

footy player living in a prep school dormitory;

who, from the captions provided,

seems to be the intended recipient

of photos sent to Ross White,

American stranger—

not the Kyoto-based Ross White,

who teaches English and reports

fascination with Japanese girls

in neon cub-ear caps . . . I’d like to marry one,

and certainly not to be confused

with world traveler Ross White,

who reports Penang is a hot stinking place

too far from Australia

and the mates I left behind,

who didn’t like wearing short white pants

with high white socks

on the estates of wealthy Malaysians—,

an American stranger who

(and I’d like to put this part in third person,

but this Ross White has an affection

for confessional)

is both me and fascinated

by Boxing Day,

which is when Ross White’s British friend

took her mates out dancing:

Emilie, who, according to the captions,

drank too many shots,

was weepy in the bathroom

about a bloke,

crept out to make calls on her mobile,

and Lauren was dressed

like a black-and-white bee,

and Lora, in every photo

but about whom the captions say little,

so perhaps Ross White knows Lora well,

and Liam from Leeds was there—

let us not forget handsome, thinly bearded Liam,

he was in only the one photo,

Lora and Liam from Leeds

and Ross White’s British friend,

arm in arm in arm, both girls

kissing Liam from Leeds on the cheek,

though he leans toward Lora!—

and if I were Ross White

(which I am, you know),

I might be red-faced over Liam,

because he’s only in the one shot

but too handsome to repeatedly omit,

so I wonder if he held the camera all night,

in which case he paid loving attention to Lora,

and I might pace or plot or

pound at the keyboard—

though perhaps that isn’t behavior

befitting Ross White,

the other Ross White,

maybe any of the other Ross Whites—

but if that Ross White would volunteer

his e-mail address to his British friend posthaste,

I would be ever so grateful,

for it appears that I’ve become a little flush,

placed in the awkward position

of unintentional and eager voyeur,

and thank heavens

the pictures were of a night of dancing,

no more—still, please,

Ross White,

send your address to her.

SOMNAMBULISM

I dream enraged light in the eyes of cathedrals.

Objects like flesh infecting our mouths,

 

the curriculum of salt my body is,

toxic as the daughterless hills.

 

The corrugated waking found lately

in my voice is the one sob the dove made

that became the moon.

 

I dream what God calls the elements. Adrift,

 

with oars lowered to the task—the object of me

flown from the roost.

 

A hungry downriver in my voice.

Sleep has gray and vocal ruins.

 

I have a little god in me

and she doesn’t cry at last.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem TO HAVE BEEN ON FIRE

The mind goes, eventually,

where it needs to go.  As does the body.

 

Not so with the heart.

The heart has nothing for need.  It sits in a little hut, and all the

      roads

are well-worn, all the wagons breaking.

 

Tonight’s breakthrough is I try to lull myself

by imagining that I have been badly burned.

 

In the drawings I can’t draw there is a new window

open on the left side of my neck.  The lulling is for this,

for shutting it.

WHEN FOG, WHEN MOUNTAIN

So many cracks—

                               my window is always open.

Heat and cold,

                               electric saws, steeped ash leaves

and moths all drift in,

                               but what’s best is this:

the smell of a cloud.

                               As if a mountain grew

beneath my bed

                               while I dreamt of skyscrapers.

 

My train is now

                               a country train, cradling coal

through mist.

                               Here men masked in soot look

askance or long

                               for me to bring them babies.

Here my mother

                               endured five labors after me,

under moonshine

                               kept on a high shelf.

 

This vapor world

                               that knocks the glass—what has it

to do with me,

                               a woman of the valley who

would rather

                               the earth tower than kneel

before her?

                               I would marry it, but the cloud smell

is a cruel smell:

                               filling me with wanderlust, refusing

to touch my face.

TAUNG CHILD

What led you down, first mother, from the good

dark of the canopy, and then beyond it?

What scarcity or new scent drew you out

that day into the vertical-hating flatness

of the bright veldt, alone, or too far from

the fringes of the group of other mothers

following the fathers out among the herds

and solitary grazers, the child clinging to your back

when the noiseless wing flash lifted him

away into the shocked light as the others ran?

Two million years ago, and yet what comes

to me, in time lapse through cascading chains

of changing bodies, is not the tiny skull

I’m holding, not the clawed out eye sockets,

his fractured jaw, but you, old mother, just then

in that Ur-moment of his being gone,

what I’ve felt too, on crowded streets, in malls,

if only briefly, in the instant when

the child beside me who was just there

                                                                          isn’t

before he is again, that shock, that panic,

that chemical echo of your screaming voice.