Tuesday poem #68 : Hillary Gravendyk : four poems

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