space
Trees Labeled Hazardous
A summer hurricane-wind tweezes the root-hairs of cedars, maples, oaks,
trees whose names you’d just have to guess, and catapults them into
a walled city of derechoed branches, necks without crowns. Moments before, Iowa
smelled like a quiet afternoon, leaves of grass, a few dots of blue. Maybe locusts would
sojourn. Two seasons later, I’m still walking streets of broken, limbless
trees spray-painted with the X of orange alarm: REMOVE. In the city of trees,
cameras at the playground brush us instead of the winged, buzzing arms of ash, elm.
My baby flies on the bucket-swing. Head back, all neck and glee, she flurries
like the last blossom, laughter in moon-cold, one too-small pink mitten.
She grew from my belly, my milk, all my not-sleeping, into her bobbed resplendence.
Skeletal landscape, trees-in-arms, spilled to inner heartwood, hewn apart
not to a number of circles so much as gut feeling. Scribbly telephone cord.
Cursive, manic, perfectly legible traumas, big T, little t, inside where the crisis is.
Trellised soul, juniper-branched corset, sylvan heart of birdsong, red-tulip shouting,
yeast-stained envelope-poem series, walking-ivy scriptotherapy. Or take my cervix rippling open
another diameter, radiating with a new life it cannot, for all its work, culminate into real,
actual being, for all it tried in the lavender-oil air—so much so Dr. Rosenberg said, If she was
going to be able, the baby would be right over there against that wall.
Small pelvis, snaggy hips snarling my baby’s colossal head. Roots that will not let go.
Give in. So I was sewn after I was hewn across my stomach, a trunk.
I hazarded a birth, three births. I didn’t die, but in another century, I would have.
Now post-Roe, I’m scared of no period since February.
What’s left of trees here are spirituous, tall, lithe women, who without birthing them, mothered
birds, hundreds. Robins the size of mittens flickering where leaves
would be. Whale-carcass, broken umbrella of felled trees. Birdsong in a horizontal landscape.
Something like I can never go back, or I can, but I can never be new again.
But this is your song, for when we were more tree than sky. You’re the foamy pulp of my pencil.
Inside the pencil self’s a bullet tip that broke once in my mouth when I was a child,
and I saw the bullet’s a stem, ivy, a shoot. You’re my son playing pretend,
who when he plays school, shows me how to do a lockdown drill.
We hide. Construction paper shrouds windows. Arms over our heads.
Lights out. Fan off. We make ourselves quieter, smaller. We were never here.
b
Elegy for New Work
for Stanley Plumly 1939-2019
A ghost going into a sure handstand, five-toed bird, wherever, everywhere, gentle as Kafka’s
doll letters, insisting on poems having a real occasion. Still decrying the overspill
as in stop: the poem’s over at house. Always closer, like contractor’s specs: What’s better is
truer. When we met, death-gripping our pencils, he drew out the secret voice that, at
twenty-two, wore identity, feeling. With all my commas wrong. He loved poems, poets, the
messy shadows of new work, with something that is like passion but is not let go of like
passion. How are your poems? How are you otherwise? he’d ask, leaning at his desk, into the
austere squiggly parenthesis of his face and left arm nook—blue-grey hair and eyebrows,
real suit, scratchy with the suede elbow patches, to which my timorous, ridiculous, earnest self
mused, How can there be an otherwise? A working artist is a momentarily dormant
volcano covered in rapt jonquils. An apple’s voluptuous skull railing into my vermin body’s
antennae. A mender, horse hooves, in the sharp crease, embroidering something the way I
learned to hold a pencil. His poems, if poems are about anything, concern distances, which is
also about closeness: watching the bird go into the point of vanishing, somewhere near
the fuzzy ocean though his mother never saw an ocean, not for real anyway, and Wallace
Stevens went no further than his mind. In her diary, my great-grandmother rewrote, No one
called. No letters. She wrote the birthdate of her dead child on his birthday. She was trying to
stop time; as Stan says, all poems extend the moment, all poems are about loss—if you’re
happy, why write about it? Then, this urn that can’t hold what I want to hold onto. Tightly.
What did Ashbery say? Don’t go, I liked you so much. That. Today, a blurry yellow
garden of wet daffodils, a pencil-dark birdbath outside my window. All the birds who are
never all the birds, all the leaves that are never all the leaves. Plague zigzags houses
in low-grade grief, cartoons people without wrists, the crescent of the head! At the end of the
world, I was going to keep walking into the creek with my children, bending the mulberries
down, little hives, scribbly purple earrings. See the bluejays drinking collapsed sea. How the
sublime can go locket-small, fit through the ear’s porches. Nearer than quiet.
b
b
Midwest Review 