2 Poems

From the Great Dismal

There in the dissembled dawn

an orange orchid,

the awkward elegance of egret.

A kayak, silently sliding between cypress knuckles,

parting lilypad and algae as still as solid ground.

Algae, neon, as still as some afterlife

where the extinct, innumerable,

survive.

*

A reflection beneath.

Above, Spanish moss,

laundry forgotten on the line for centuries.

I don’t know what century it was or is.

We walk the paths of panthers, extirpated.

We walk paths beaten by the feet of the fleeing.

The innumerable had no intention

of being counted.

*

We arrive under the moon, maroon,

maroons orchid-hunting.

Blooms, magic wounds of morass.

Bass-fishing. Okra harvest.

Seeds smuggled braided in a grandmother’s hair.

A grandmother we never knew.

Moses, freedman,

flew in dreams over fen-fire.

*

What else lurking in your ledger, loiterer?

What else filtered through a historian or two?

Language didn’t exist before the dream.

Churches needed no walls until they did.

Catbirds scan the earth

crying like humans, newborn, us.

The dead could care less

kissing under the water table as they do.

*

My divine assignment in the hollow of white oak,

bat pup.

Bobcat, don’t give me that dumb look. Stop pacing.

Sip the peat-steeped tea.

That ghost moan is owl howl.

Those are the bellows,

the clicks, the calculations of procreation.

Yes, still waters amplify even the lewd.

*

Silence, why would we fear you?

You don’t even exist. Soundstruck,

the stars so bright you’d think them responsible.

The innumerable have no intention.

Hoverers, denizens of the dank,

I stow my ledger.

I lift off, wobble on the wind, land lakeside,

copperheads coiled in the grass.

after Lucie Brock-Broido

                                          That summer beyond blooming

like any summer when folks from their the green-golden gardens

and lawns won’t wave back at a minivan, cough drop red.

                                          We left one state,

arrived in another.

                                          We collected kindling,

teased Hannah Banana, cuddled family by family in vinyl tents.

                                          Now scant escape

on this narrow country road from the truck with the tinted windshield,

                                          bumper eye-level,

                                          wanting us tail tucked between our legs.

When will lobelia, so blue it’s purple, pepper the meadow?

Would it bloom better in the shade of wet woods?

                                          Hannah, you were not yet your mother.

Thirty-two years later it is she that comforts me from her hospital bed

                                          in a dream two months after she passes.

She floats above us now whistling through the white pine.

Route: Along the Greenbrier River. Past Droop Mountain.

I remember it as summer but my mom said it was halloween.

                                          Flashlights beneath their chins,

our fathers stoked the fire, so to speak.

Then on the way home through Lobelia, scattering of residences,

                                          unincorporated, remnants of the timber industry,

                                          grasshoppers haywire.

Porch swings swinging, no sitter. A man walking backwards,

                                          flowerpot for a head.

Do you feel the elevation in your inner ear, Hannah,

                                          having welcomed death,

having parted your hair to reveal the length of scar, defiant?

Some kids pop whatever a parent offers into their mouth.

                                          Others refuse outright.

To lift that sense of self, untrustworthy, that takes hold with age,

                                          pills prove unhelpful.

Why eat a flower, we thought, when a finger would do?

                                          Why burst at both ends?

I place lobelia beneath my pillow and am passive in dreams and

                                          memories no more.

                                          I remember, I pose questions to a sister

I’m resigned to never see again to pose questions to myself.

                                          Dance, don’t speak,

your mother would direct, her hands warm on our shoulders,

                                          to heal, for a moment, the eternal,

                                          the internal wound.