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Talking Wood
On the first blue day, birds write north
all over the sky, except for these robins.
One or two to a branch, they layer blue
spruce and pine whose limbs form skeletal
arabesques, delicate backbones,
sending loop after wooden loop
high and higher. In those wooden arches,
I can read the vertebrae of curly
cabbage leaves, and perhaps those great discs
of wheeling stars also echo
the delicate joining of rib to spine,
the web of twig breathing green
out of the chubby buds, packed
tightly with leaf and leaf
reveling in the rite to uncurl.
No one need remember the rain,
freezing as it fell,
or the wind that came up one day
when every twig was weighed down, crystal
branches catching moonlight, so that
they chimed, glowing yellow, then pink
with the dawn, before they broke.
Written in these woods, for anyone to read
are that hordes of seedlings struggled,
trees bent as they tunnelled up
at whatever angle---to where the sun
shines, a point in the dark, and above
they open; that rustling green song
filling heartwood, and roots and all.
Written in the fallen spruce
shielding the rooting seed,
Written in the oak that has no need
to remember the ring upon ring of lean
years and kind soaking rain and sun
just above the hundred thousand curlicues.
That the velvet green of August night
dissolves to feed grub, earth,
and nesting bird is written in thick
layers underfoot, of leaf and thin blue shell.
Argument
Her
story ripples. The sea tells
it.
Gulls talk of Persephone
as
they fly inland. Terns answer.
Tall
reeds, called the bulrush, are filled
with
such tales. Where she plunged under,
moist
earth froze. Wailing Demeter,
her
cold mother, is left circling
a
hot globe. A meaningless sun
and
all far stars, she will ignore.
A
labyrinth's worth of byways are
locked
in that name: Persephone.
PERSEPHONE
The
drop was unexpected: a vicious slide.
Amazed,
the sparrow chattered after me.
A
daisy, caught as the cleft earth closed
above
us, I took with me. But the scent
of
sulphur, of flesh rotting, curled its white
petals.
They scattered. So many grey shades
brushed
against me; fluttering, the sleeves of
rotted
shrouds, soft as moth's wing, touched my cheek,
as
soft fingers would have my warm shoulders.
And
the noise, mutter of their many tongues
(multiplied
by cupping rock, echoing
the
shout fear uses to keep what preys
upon
us in the dark at bay), was lost
in
the long climb up those steep walls.
Through
a crack in that high roofed cavern, I
heard
the awful moan my mother made.
Desolate,
in dark, I could not answer.
Nor
with the dance she'd made for me wake fields.
I,
his chosen, delighted Death's cold eyes. |
The Dow Road
Nobody cares for these children.
Their hair’s as tumbled as their house.
Heaps of cars rust in the yard. Tires
lean against trees. They’d ride tire swings
if a father would rope rubber
to that limb. The mother, unkempt
as a vacant lot just at noon,
has fixed herself for the new lover
who drives up in a red Caddy.
Her Pimpmobile, her son calls it.
She smacks him down. Squalling, he
runs
out into the street, pees on the wheel.
When his mother locks his front door
against him, threatens to call the police,
he kicks the door, then, kicks
the spindle-shin of his sister.
Her pain fills all the air between
our houses. She does not expect
tenderness, catches snot of her
runny nose on the frayed cuff
of a blouse nobody bought for her.
She is the daughter nobody wanted.
When she wanders away, no one
calls her name. Spring fields are paved
with flowers that will not wilt
when she is lost, nor will fields wither.
Pay the Piper!
I like to think the Pied Piper of frogs,
whose fringed cap tinkles with silver
bells, collected them all. A green piper
keeps them tunneling underground
where the water runs crystal clear.
And not that peepers, bulls, one and all
the frogs, plague-ridden, were felled,
not one left to call or answer.
So August became silent, as January
is
after the seventh fall of snow.
I would like this cotton wool of story
to wrap round them. Listen, open your waxy
ears; a symphony of peepers, bull, ordinary
popping-eyed frogs everywhere still sing.
It spread and no one knows how, the plague,
that cripples, then kills Even high in the
Andes where no one comes, the deformed
frogs die out. .And if one night out walking
in a dribble of rain thunder let loose,
We do, we hear, the ordinary croaking
come back. And I celebrate the words,
the sinewy words that went down to
where Eurydice still sulks and brought them,
by the hundreds, back. What say you to that? |
Marjorie Deiter Keyishian has
published Slow Runner with Finishing Line Press. She teaches
at Fairleigh Dickinson University, edits poetry for The Literary
Review, edited Journal of NJ Poets for a decade, and
has published a number of short stories, poems, and articles.
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