Authors: Katie Ford
It was that it didn’t need
or require
my belief
that I leant upon it
as a tired worker
upon
a gate.
I prefer it even to love,
alone and without ghost
it falls a hard weather,
a withdrawing room
that revives me to stolen daylight
in which I feel no wish
to brush a gleaming finish
over the sheen-broken glass
I’ve arranged and rearranged,
an apprentice of mosaics
who will not be taught but asks
to be left alone with the brittle year
so carnivorous of all I’d made.
But the snow I love covers
my beasts and seas,
my ferns and spines
worn through and through.
I will change your life, it says,
to which I say
please
.
When a human is asked about a particular fire,
she comes close:
then it is too hot,
so she turns her face —
and that’s when the forest of her bearable life appears,
always on the other side of the fire. The fire
she’s been asked to tell the story of,
she has to turn from it, so the story you hear
is that of pines and twitching leaves
and how her body is like neither —
all the while there is a fire
at her back
which she feels in fine detail,
as if the flame were a dremel
and her back its etching glass.
You will not know all about the fire
simply because you asked.
When she speaks of the forest
this is what she is teaching you,
you who thought you were her master.
[Tell me it’s April,
tell me you live into a little girl,
when I tip you back to lay you down
your breath remains and keeps remaining,
tell me the morning trucks delivered bread
to the market while we were sleeping,
that the newspaper is flung against our door,
tell me it woke us, it is Sunday, all we have to do is
reach outside, in it comes! and open it —]
The massive inner life of ice
descends over the violet newborn
of this city. The open-mouthed statues
of the winter fountain, the tourist horses
stomping their hollow bones,
the apple-skins and feathers.
O see it try to break our world.
But if a hundred years ago influenza
almost took this city,
if tags were tied to toes when patients
were carried into the wards —
if they said
but I’m still living
as the horrified doctors covered themselves away —
then, my love, we should wake
to each other and ransack
this flushed skin of everything
but praise.
In that tight-sheltered ghost
of quiet I keep,
I count her more dearly
than any genesis night
when the first dark fell
and the father reckoned up
the world. How I count
is day in and out
and without end.
I need no sabbath
from the count
seated in my closed, open,
half-shut eyes.
Strange we must be
to the maker who made us
less weary in love than he.
Despair is still servant
to the violet and wild ongoings
of bone. You, remember, are
that which must be made
servant only to salt, only
to the watery acre that is the body
of the beloved, only to the child
now leaning forward into
the exhibit of birches
the forest has made of bronze light
and snow. Even as the day kneels
forward, the oceans and strung garnets, too,
kneel, they all kneel,
the city, the goat, the lime tree
and mother, the fearful doctor,
kneel. Don’t say it’s the beautiful
I praise. I praise the human,
gutted and rising.
I come to you without wound
and in the strength of my life.
Heaven cannot touch me; neither can the earth.
In this clear field, the stripped birch does not represent me,
thus I give back the respect I once stole.
I give back its own life trying to break through
the low canopy draped like an abandoned wedding tent.
I am without wound, but this is a small slat
I speak through and briefly.
By the end of these words, strength
might be gone, new pain come, old pains returned
as elderly selves grown quiet
with the knowledge of what did
and did not happen.
Long live such confidence as I have these five minutes now.
Long live the primate’s human eyes inside of the cage.
Long live the surgeon steady enough
to examine the bloody heart beating in his hands
before the minutes are up
and it must be put back
inside.
Some things qualify as silence, but wake us
like the disappearance of birdcall that kept us asleep
because we took it as dream-stitch
or the early steps of the beloved lighting the stove
until we wake only when the stove
remains unlit against the day
now bewildering each hibernation,
each lightly drugged feather, each stun and lie.
Morning opens with the comforts of my unbeaten body
a tinkerer’s stack of quiltings and cannings the cloth finch
half-attached to a mobile of warblers and wrens
in the meantime my country sends post to mothers and fathers
back again fly a trinity of boys
with their throats cut out
simultaneity drinks twig tea and stitches
a hidden seam
I take a string to a bittern’s back and tie it
to the looping newborn delight
then read of each strangulation no bone or larynx
for proof maybe each part was tossed to bay
a medieval saint was asked what would you do if you knew
it was the end of the world
I’d dig in my garden he said
oh saint it’s a good answer
but here the end is torn out
one by one.
[We’re here because we’re here because
we’re here, because we’re here
We’re here because we’re here because
we’re here, because we’re here
I hear the young scouts a-singing.]
I was trying to remember the songs of the valley
shouting to the hilltops, streams and meadows rushing —
but something banned me from such songs. Something
wanted me to resign from praise,
perhaps for my whole life,
perhaps past my life
into the banishment
of the far, blind eternity.
What can I do? I have seen vineyards and orange groves
rise after seasons of sudden freeze.
The markets in my town burst with avocado, grain, ale,
sweet alyssum sold in handfuls. Yet gratitude
is not allowed me, not without offense.
Not in my country.
If we are at war let the orchards show it,
let the pear and fig fall prior to their time,
let the radios die
and the hounds freeze over their meat,
let the balconies crack their planked backs as we recline,
let the streets of stock and trade split open,
let the horses pulling at the fields
wither beneath us.
Let each year decay and each decade:
to receive report is not enough,
equations of the mathematician must
each come wrong, strangely, inexplicably, the remedies
must run dry,
the violet must let no more tincture
and the waters no more cool.
When, at mudtimes, we trek to the waterfall,
there it should no longer be —
nothing should fall where the guidebook says,
not orchids, not taro,
not the market, not the fishmonger thrashing carp against rock
where once we bought it bloody on the board.
If we are at war with a holy book in our hands
let it shrivel to slag; its teachings
cannot survive the drone
and will not gleam while villagers drink the ditch.
If we wage it, let the war breach up
into the light, let it unseam our garments
where they hold fast, let each button and string fail
until we run to hide ourselves
in alleys where at least rats and refuse
and the sleeping poor show some partial ghost
of what’s abroad.
If we war there ought to be a sign.
Our lives should feel like cut-outs of lives,
paper dolls drifting to the ground,
ready for chalk outlines.
But still our horses ripple their flanks
and the orange grove shakes green in the warm wind it loves.
We laze on the balcony with clear water in the glass.
At the newsstand stacks of cigarettes
with their sure wrappings and that little red pull, candies and juices
made of wild thriving corn.
In winter we ornament fountains with Christmas lights,
in spring more falsely, and more falsely,
the scent of heather and sedge grows rich through the transom.
Before the war
the soul
spoke so clearly
we took it for an imbecile.
But now the war can’t know what it wants:
we make meals, pay a tax, and dream nothing
hard enough to wake us.
Not once have I dreamt of the war.
I forgot it quietly, unwantingly, and because
there were peaches everywhere, peaches
that shouldn’t have happened,
nor the idea of blessing at sundown,
the orchard lit into an avenue
of torchlight.
Down by the pond, addicts sleep
on rocky grass half in water, half out,
and there the moon lights them
out of tawny silhouettes into the rarest
of amphibious flowers I once heard called
striders
,
between, but needing, two worlds.
Of what can you accuse them now,
beauty?
Chalky as white spruce
in hill fog pressed away from Sacre Coeur,
not one in seventy tongues
that make love acute and possessed are speaking now
their dozens of faiths and doubts. Just chrome whisperings,
endearments. Still, the priest of these wards must know
which voice, which prayer,
which he finds eases. Which unfolds
a rope ladder from this housefire, which will not
sleep but comes into the metal bed
after the nurses go and chants your own secret
incompletion into death. All I want, I said,
is to know this.
Visit the sick, he answered.
Night —
the common hours
for loosened souls
to be hastened into the kingdom
of unspecified light.
Admit coming upon the fallen horse at evening,
now asleep but withered, now reducing as you near, now
a dell pony at your feet beneath the alder dead,
admit it is too much to both see and bear. You must
either not see or not bear, or see and bear
some quickened portion, the portion allotted to say
this is simply the field
of what occurs on earth.
The Lord is a man of war
I read by window and wick
and for once I believed
the book of Exodus true
the origin of our points sharpened
with fire our axes bows our pikes
and finally I could see
the cooling lava pits of their eyes
their giant gingko ears
their bellows of desert pain
how elephants became elephantry
how the woman who fevered with pox
became after death a weapon
a contagion to catapault over fortified walls
and finally I knew
why in this theater
the missiles are named
Savage Sinner Scapegoat
Peacekeeper and Goblet
Herren er en stridsmann
my descent is of the Vikings so
man is a Lord of war.
[Here is the board, here the water.
Baptism is as bad as they say:
you must renounce the devil
you never met.]
Comes August, comes December,
then April thinned of its birds.
Again August, ten times.
Fathers forage the bombed chemical plant
for barrels to carry water
from the lime-bright pools to houses
leaning inside hot wind.
To think a war might give a gift:
a pool, a clean bucket.
The soldierly ready
of human sadness: it must, by nature, hover.
I water the date palm at dawn in the desert acre. I can see
it’s not alive; the landscape doesn’t need me. This is May,
May should riffle pollen toward another,
women should weave fans of stiff reeds
to sweep air palm to palm, but my friend says he just tries
to keep his body busy. Sunday a horror movie,
Tuesday the opera, Thursday tea with the reclusive poet
who comes out just for him. He is an audience to the arts
of extremity in the apartment that gilds itself
a mean irony of light.
Time passes, is the early summer squash.
He asks the farmer how he cooks it —
I scoop the seeds and cut butter and nutmeg
into its little boat —
but at the end of each living task
there is a fringe of loss.
The heart works hard at the apprenticeship
of a diligent hand learning to pull
wet porcelain into a thinness of wall
just prior to what’s brittle. We talked of remedies
last week on the phone — can you swim the bay,
I ask, take in the cats, put up the Japanese shades,
trace your life in pins? The loss of love will
try it all.
Dear merchant of a twice-stolen boat,
when surgeons cut deeply
into the dark matter, you said, I believe
we can be made whole again.
What did you mean,
again?