Ordinary Acts of Alchemy

Ordinary Acts of Alchemy

Remember, my daughter,
Ripe tomatoes bursting themselves to seed
On the window’s ledge?
Bread rising in its hot oven belly,
Soup pot dancing a jig?

PMS crazed, we baked,
We fenced with wooden spoons,
The curved ram’s horns of our
Hips bumping in the narrow
Aisle of kitchen.

Our faces were full moons,
Spice dust crawled
Up the craters of our noses
To the waking center.
On our tongues, salt and sweet committed

Ordinary acts of alchemy.

Ownership

Ownership

The roof leaks
When it rains
Or when snow melts,
Crying to the
Hole in the floor
That springs and sponges
If I walk too close.

The dishes grow to a
Sticky counter collage
I avoid.
Maybe someday I’ll forget
And step wrong, and
The house will bite
Then swallow.

Memere

Memere


I’m the oldest grandchild, and knew her when she
Was my age, looking like me, full-lipped, dark-haired,
With a bitter bite behind the eyes.
The emphysema leaves her like a leaf,
Light and shaky: breathless.

She is displaced, the language foreign.
I think she wants to be back in Canada,
Wishes she never left Ontario’s plains of
Clear, high light, black spruce, dying lakes.

I’d like to hold her like a baby,
I’d like to take her by the hand
And lead her home.

1969 Beets

1969 Beets

Today my father gave me jars of beets.
My mother canned them two years ago.
The colors were glowing.
I opened one jar, the old type,
Glass-topped with orange rubbers.
The juice splashed my hand bright.

The stains are instant
And bring me back summers
When I would help by slipping the skins
From the gleaming hearts.

My mother’s hands,
Brown-skinned, wide palmed;
With slender fingers and long.
I remember how they felt when she patted me
And soothed, cool on my forehead,
Strong in my hand.

I miss her warm brown eyes,
Wide-toothed smile and the way she dropped her h’s,
Cha Cha hips she could shimmy.
But when I close my eyes I can see
Her hands.
Working the soil.
Pulling, rinsing, cooking, skinning,
Packing those red beets into clear jars.

Moonface

Moonface

Did you see that golden moon
Last night, rising?
I think she thought she
Was the sun, or maybe
Its only the August heat
Absorbed in her fruited
Belly bowl.

She looks out over the gardens-
Pumpkins, tomatoes,
And feels proud.
Her children sleep with dew
On their ripe and rosy faces.

Summer moon over mountains,
Over water shining like the lake
Swallowed her whole.
Fishes wonder wide-eyed
And lovers lie full-lipped,
Sweet-hipped upon the banks.

Lying On Floors

Lying on Floors

One of my first memories was of lying
On the floor behind the wood cook stove.
It was a shelter there in the long, wide, drafty kitchen,
Warm with the brown smell of wood dust.

I could see beneath the stove my mother’s
Penny loafers and white anklets
And the floor boards stretching beyond
And narrowing with perspective.

The house sounds, clinks, rhythmic words,
The soft explosion of a laugh,
Intruded gently on my reality.

All was safe and misted in wool smelling steam
From the stove’s reservoir, my head resting
On the dog’s silky belly as her old legs
Twitched dreams.

Nothing bad could happen here.

Choosing

Choosing

You have to lie beneath the tree to see
Her branches spread against the sky.
A view, a pattern never found before.

The spot you choose, the tree,
The season of the sky, the light
Within your eyes determine
What imprints there.

Never ceasing, the press of earth
Against your back,
The breeze riffling your hair,
The songs of birds.

Insects humming in the grasses,
These will be with you,
The day you choose to lie
Beneath that tree, on that day

In the season of your short life,
Your history stretches far
Behind and before you
Only earth and sky and tree

Between/behind your eye.

Blueberry Management Area

Blueberry Management Area

Ringed by hills dark and darker,
Looking over humps and shoulders,
Sitting on prickly plants,
A rock at my back
With its lichen map,

The sun sifts through me
To my firm fleshed days,
A child at my skirt,
One asleep in the ferns,

Moving like a mama bear
Slow and wary through
The blue fruit, filling my tin,
Not for the economics of it,

But for the freedom of the high air
And seeing farther than a wooded dooryard.
A picnic of rough bread, cheese, and
Water from my spring, a feast
And we stain our teeth with blue smiles.

Now here I am still, those children
Gone from me; we were so thick then,
Waking, touching, moving through
The day, tied together with our needs.

But here, this summer on a hill,
All the same again. The calling
Of small voices, pines ringing the meadow,
Cicadas winding out their song.

Keep That Hand Moving...

Keep that Hand Moving…


You’re only a writer if you write
Put the tip of the pen to paper
And run away to places, faces flashback,
Smells and the tickle of sweat
On your sides, canning tomatoes
Into august of 1979,
Pregnant and nesting
With ridiculous fecundity.

To march of 80 – a cold winter
And giving birth in the thin light
With brown-eyed midwives
And the smell of tea and toast
And blood on the sheets.

The baby’s skin against your own and the tug
At the breast and in your middle,
Expelling the afterbirth.
Giving birth is easy, like falling off
A cliff, no return and then
The sting, the sliding out,
A whole person between your legs,
Pinking.

Forida, Mid-50's

Florida, Mid 50’s

We left winter behind and drove south where
My father could work as a carpenter.
No cold or snow
Or grumpy great-aunts here.

The light stayed long and we went to the sea
Every day when my father returned from the housing boom
In Naples where stick frames littered the palm-meadow
Like whale bones.

The aqua sea rolled on the white sand
To my brown legs foaming and sinking my feet.
My bucket held shells and branches of coral.
My mother lay like a curved bronzed sculpture in the sun.

Old women smiled here; they bent to me,
Their hats shading us.
One told me she liked to eat cold potatoes
With salt, another gave me a lemon the
Size of a grapefruit.

I roller-skated on the patio in the garden
Between the strawberries and the finger bananas.
We drank juice from oranges growing in the yard.

I was allowed to put a thin silver dime
Into the big red coke machine and a shapely bottle
Dropped down: beaded light green glass.
I drank it all myself with my feet dangling
Just above the terrazzo floor.

Big boys walked by, cutting slices of coconut
Into their mouth with sharp knives.
There were snakes in the palmetto but they had
Paths and secret places in there.

My mother wore dresses and sandals and red lipstick.
My father’s shirts were crisp and pressed and
Smelled of sun and Old Spice.
I wore ribbons in my chestnut hair and took my first
Communion next to Billy Door.

Dreamt Spring

Dreamt spring

Last night while wearing
The heavy wool of winter,
My breath rose and fell
On the swells of a dreamer’s sea.
Green things grew behind my eyes.

I slept deep; the banked bed of
Coals glowed while the house
Geraniums slyly unfurled knobs
Of blooms, unsheathed red claws.

Listening under a frosty moon
For winter’s last gasp,
Uncoiled and open,
I dreamt the birth of spring.

Taking Down Barns

Taking Down Barns

We took down the barn at Homer Noble’s farm.
It was a large post’n beam, falling in
with stuff from another life strewn like garbage.

Mack’s old pick-up pulled out the center beam,
cracking the hand-made pegs, tumbling swallow’s
nests. In the settling dust we worked,
snaking out rough-sawed beams like trees from the forest.

There were horse harnesses, of rotted leather
and great rounded collars. I found a tin basin.
It wore the name Blueberry, after a horse
I imagined as a roan or dapple grey, working
his life out on the slanted fields in the 1940’s light.

We saved the tin from the roof and made our stairway of beams
and our flatlander friends referred to it as the Robert Frost Memorial stairway.
They filled the hole and from the foundation, made
a stone wall straight across to park the visitors.

There’s a plowshare at the edge of my garden and a
wind chime made of farm implements. It clangs like
ghosts singing, rusty. Reverently we stood in the dim stalls
as though to say a grace before we gleaned
and it was gone.

Aireater

Air Eater

You watch your baby sleep, the
Fluttering eyelash, rosebud mouth…
Then she is eight, newly toothed,
And I am thief, I am the watcher,
The keeper of the family bed.
Beside me she lies dormant
But for the pulse above her collarbone
And her breath even on the swells
Of a dreamer’s sea.
Hands open.

I know I’m already left.
I know the signs…
Her sloe eyes
Cutting to her brother.
I tell her she smells of sun,
Children do, and I breathe her hair,
Drink the golden broth of her.
She is a smooth-skinned plum
The exact shape of my heart.

Soon her hand will slip from mine
For the last innocent time
And her sweat will take on a new tone
Of minerals, and bread, yeast rising.
It is the smell of earth in spring.
Green things will grow behind her eyes.
Somewhere a flower will bloom.

As she turns, I’ll cry out at the
Pure curve of her cheek.
As she walks away on dancer’s legs,
Her back will sway, supple in the
Cradle of her new hips,
And her arms reach toward someone
I cannot see.

Dream Stream

Dream Stream

I remember vaguely hearing on NPR:
“Training maneuvers in January over the Green Mountains”;
and have heard them, high and distant, deep in the night.
But last night I swam up fast out of sleep at the roar
of jets riding the edge of the sound barrier,
ripping holes in the rain drenched thaw clouds.
I wondered what the shapes were, knowing the F-4's and F-111's
of my husband's war and the B-17's of my father's war--the
silhouettes of them as distinct in my brain as heron, hawk, Corbie.
My heart is clicking and swishing faster, rising into my throat,
the red tide of it pounds behind my eyes—I can feel
the vibration in the rough hemlock framing of my house
and in the long bones of my body.
When I sink back into dreaming
there is the pupil point of a gun pointed at my head.
(I who cringe at the pointing of a finger,
with all of its subtle implications and intent.)
In the dream my first thought is:
"Oh, it's one of ours"--but my second thought;
hand-cuffed to the first:
"But a predator doesn't take sides."

June

June
The trees were talking today and dancing,
Wearing all that new green.
I sat in hot sun, in sun at its zenith.
(When else will I find such a concentrated
Energy to soak into my skin, my bones?)
In thin February light I’ll pull out this day and hold
It to the window, a golden talisman,
Remember browning my wrinkles,
And that hot light glowing through my eyelids,
Breathing in that sweet air, heart beating a sun drum,
My ribs a cage for summer.

Tangled Web

Tangled Web
 
We think of the third world in primary stains,
Bending to the red ground with their short sticks.
Bring them cities and jobs and their children play in the gutters
And lie on the street with blue-painted faces
After huffing the fumes that tear open the skies
Where chem trails flutter; falling down...
 
The west in black and white and sooty thumb-print.
Penguin kings in high rises flip their secret handshakes,
The tasteful red accent of their ties a bloom on their frozen chests.
And in the alley below the homeless wander cold in the land of plenty
And children cut and pierce their skins and join tribes in the hunger for home.
 
Half the earth is always turning toward morning and
The other toward night. Some of us are lying our bodies down,
Some are keeping watch. The clock ticks blindly going around again and again
And we follow the hours in orderly fashion.
 
The spider is hunched in her corner waiting for the fly
Who has already laid her pups on their grisly feast.
Arteries have hardened, instead of soft foot paths and streams,
Highways, bridges, fields of concrete--vehicles spewing a virus
Of smoke and lead, old sun pulled from black lakes beneath the earth,
Dinosaurs and trees breathing toxic morning breath over all.
 
We carry the seeds and sins of our greatest grandparents and
Perhaps we are here to learn how to winnow the chafe and let it blow away free,
Leaving grain heavy and sweet in the baskets we have woven to give to our children.
EVERY THOUGHT goes out from you like the huff of a dragon or the songs of mothers,
Moving lines--changing time.
If you were to soften your gaze, maybe you could just see
The light shining on every fiber; connecting everything dark and everything bright...

Photo—1927 (To My Mother)


Who put you on that chair?
The high-topped, oak-backed
One in the year 1927 in Ontario, Canada?
You have your hand to your face
And your skin is brown and smooth.
The cotton diaper you are wearing
Is crooked and falling off.

Your father’s bare fields behind you
Stretch out of focus,
A land without trees, open to the
Wind and sun and sky
Falling all down around you.

Who took this picture, freeze-framing
Your child’s body so I could hold
The yellowed image in my hands
And know how your arms would grow
Long for hugging and your hips would
Be wide and swing in loose-limbed dancing?

I want to hold you, with your child’s
Limbs against me and look into your
Round brown eyes,
I want to whisper the songs I learned from you
Into your shelly ear.

You are many parts of many I know
In my bones.
Like the child in this picture,
Sometimes the ones I never knew
I love the most.

Airman's Wife

Airman’s Wife


My landlady slapped a cockroach to death
on her table without missing a word
of the story she was telling about an old
drunk niggra her daddy scaped up off
the tracks in Biloxi in 1923.

And I was 18 then in 1966 and fed the bread
she was kneading that day to the birds
even though we didn’t have enough money
for food at the commissary.

And nights the train would rattle
by our bedroom window, shaking the glass
and cause the fig tree to drop
her ripe fruit to the spongy ground
and the shrimp fisherman sang, coming home loaded.

I was homesick for Vermont
even though it was January and
the mountains would come up white
in the dawning;

And here, the Mississippi Delta
heaved and oozed into the sluggish sea
where dogfish swam and young
airmen from anywhere stopped
me at my walking, just to talk.

Vermont Cabin Fever

Vermont Cabin Fever

There are places untapped in my deciduous soul
Where something dark and sweet bubbles
And feeds the buds rising to April light
And my winter toes reach their knobby lengths
Into the frozen ground, the thawing earth,
The sandy breakdown of old mountains.

My rough veined hand holds a 3-B pencil
To the tablet and at the peripheral of my
Vision the house breathes and settles
Around me, flapping its brittle plastic
And someone is cutting the white pines
Standing next to my land, letting in light
And the chainsaw growls and blue smoke spirals
Between the fallen limbs.

Mourning doves and the cawing of crows
That roost in the pines are cries
And I think maybe their homes are gone.
There was a field of Canada Geese resting
This noon by the creek and I wanted
To be of their tribe, my long neck reaching,
Gleaning the corn stalks and murmuring fowl
Language, soft as water under my breath.

And what do you readers know of me from these words
But to stand in my bare feet on the frozen ground
Near a scattered woodpile and plant the garden
In your mind again and again for as soon as the ground
Thaws, the spring will come, wanton and quickening
To an eastern forest paradise and the big cars
Will glide up from New York and Boston to see
This wonder of green, the mountains lounging
Like untouched women, the silver pulse of rivers
Taking trout lines, winking in the sun.

But no one really lives here, we are invisible like the
Deer, the wild strawberries beyond the road’s ditch,
Though not nearly so aesthetic, we are artists and
Teachers and shopkeepers and cooks, our children
Are bored and ride bicycles and camp alone in the
Mountains to find themselves which were never lost.

Before The Flood

Before the Flood

The Cook and Piper brooks converge
Outside my window.
Gold water drained from meadow springs,
From beaver dams where
The ashen fingers of spruce
Lean over the dark womb of water,

Submerged bones of trees
Wave their limbs in the filtered sun,
Swimmers fallen to the silty bottom,
The water runs down the mountain,

Singing.

In The Moment

A Day in the Moment

In the moment we cry out in the high, clear light
Even as the worm turns to the dark in waiting.
Watch the smooth gray of beeches
On an elevated slope, looking to the east
Where dawn breaks, singing the birds
From their nests to the day and their work.
The pecker to his hole.
Staccato wave the branches
To this rude and hungry beak.
The rhythm taken by peepers and crickets
In marsh and meadow.
It sings our blood, salted host of the heart,
And drives our wings to grow for the dimming flight…
A moon we chase so futilely, her round belly
Swallowed whole by a lake,
Shining in the night.