Our House
you know there must be sound
when you rub your thumb and finger but
it’s like the sound a germ makes.
Microscopic. that’s the kind of scrap
we’re piecing into our days: loosed ribbon
of the present tense, household debris,
radio
programs you saved to listen with me,
secret
circuit of our small, warm animal.
This softest coin, uncountable. Mirrored
moonbrow, moonface, something we’ll say
we don’t notice. Meaning, anyway, a cache
of dry leaves, blowing.
I’d like to examine you, tend the red penny
on your cheek: splatter burn from the night
we fried plantains. I guess I’m the
cared-for
canary, I’ll sing out when there’s no more
air--that’s my one job. But I’d like to
carry you up the stairs, draw you a scented
bath. Feed you persimmons, tea, a slice of
bread.
Your eyes slant down when you wrap my foot
in gauze.
It’s easy, you say, but you look
away. Not from my wounds, but from me.
Forest Floors
for Claudia
Folded inside
the word is the wood. Tree totems, patch
of earth, bird sound. Nothing is quieter than a wild place in our chests. The
word for “air” in an avian language. The fir needle’s fresher wick pulling
blood to the surface of the hour. Our betrayers grown into the scenery, taut
against the skin. Some tithe with
grasses, the pinecones piling up like drifts of dry snow. Some swim in the colder water, falling on
rocks, picking reeds apart. Redwoods ring and gnats swarm and the deep lakes go
dark. We’ll all come to concluding
phrases, full of river-washed stones, full of soft moss. Forever bound to our bodies. Which falter,
which spring up fern-laden groves, which flower and fail.
Hillary
Hillary
You
creep through the air, a voice calling my name
in
this dimmer winter where keels freeze to swells
I
was lost in the delicacy of your warning, at sea.
Held
myself against the roll of your tongue,
the
door open like a mouth and the air falling
through
more air, a hole in the light—
You
carry each pinprick of rain and lay
me
in fragments on the counterpane,
you
circle the room, a quieting crow.
The
window slices absence into segments
the
door slaps the side of the house
and
I’m ankle deep in clouds.
The Woman in White
Hung a piece of white flag from the
shoulder. Clump of grass sprung under a
pointed boot, creamy and spattered with wet road. The white white ankle, the bandaged knee. You
kissed the letters of a tomb. Error in a
cloudy language, a red warning someone wrote across the sky, folded into a
pocket square, left fluttering in a splintered post. There was a light rain in a churchyard. The
moon a blue smudge on a soft black cloth.
Locked away they grow wild and anxious.
At the crossroads, a long story, half-told. She was a tall woman dressed
like a little girl. Some say patient,
some ghost. Landscape that refuses to
forget.
Hillary Gravendyk (March 1, 1979 - May 10, 2014) was
an Assistant Professor of English at Pomona College, where she taught American poetry. Her poetry has most recently appeared in
Lana Turner,
Sugar House Review, and
Like Starlings. She
was the author of
Harm (Omnidawn, 2012) and
The Naturalist (Achiote, 2008). She received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and was working on a manuscript tentatively titled Understory. She lived in the Southland.
the Tuesday poem is curated by
rob mclennan
