where the last Post-it reads: This is the place
the soul is most afraid of, on this height,
this ecstatic turret, and climbing
into the playpen he lies down with the rabbits
who nuzzle his face, their eyes half-closed,
their furry, smoky-white heads
moving back and forth
in mysterious jerks.
Katherine Smith
House of Cards
January 1871
When I was in Richmond I met a man.
I touched pulp where a sword had pierced his eye,
dressed the bloody bruise of his crushed thigh
where hooves trampled his femur and pelvis. I caressed
his fragile parts to health until his hard mouth broke
into a smile. I dream now that he commands me
to escape my father and brothers, run back
to Richmond. But before he left the hospital
for the battlefield where he died he asked me
to marry him and I refused. I don’t regret it.
I’ve learned too much belief in any man,
even a good one, can drive a woman mad.
The night when I dreamed he lay on me
and I screamed so loud I woke with Daddy
and the boys standing over my bed,
I told them it was nothing.
It’s hard to be the only woman
in a house full of men. I wept last night,
and when I opened my eyes the stars
were beginning to fade in the dawn light.
Come spring when the quince is red as passion,
I’m determined to set out on that train,
seeking nothing. I’ll never marry. For now
the quince orchard lies buried under snow
and a crust of ice thickens on the river.
I’m done looking for portents in voices,
tea leaves, dreams. I believe in the cold, real
and sharp. When I walk this morning to the coop
the hens make the soft clucking sounds
that comfort me The rooster puts his beak
under his wing and goes back to sleep.
I steal from each hen a warm brown egg
and follow my footprints in the snow
back to the house. The weight of my family
settles on me like a shawl crocheted of iron.
I head to the kitchen to boil coffee.
Daddy and the boys will say it’s too bitter.
When they come in from milking the cows,
drop the load of firewood for the stove
they labor to keep burning all winter,
I’ll add cream to theirs and drink mine black.
Bad
Spring 1870
Mother didn’t like for me to climb the mountain,
warned me of black bears, ghosts. Now she’s gone
I wouldn’t mind meeting either just to know
I wasn’t alone. Beneath my wool skirts my legs warm.
Quince perfumes the air, crimson, sharp as pepper.
The gnarled apple trees grow delicate curls,
white petals like my baby brother’s fine blond hair.
The wind chases clouds over the mountains.
I can’t imagine a world without me or the mountains.
Some folks might call it selfish, but what has come
to pass is so different from what I thought
I don’t mind what folks call me. There is in me
a flame, a fire I used to be ashamed of,
that keeps my mind from wandering
at the creek where the path doglegs right
into valley ruins, a melancholy patchwork
quilted by women’s hands and passed down
to daughters. On her death bed my mother’s
barbed look snagged me as if she knew I’d turn
from memory like a man towards reason,
run away from what was certain as the home
that once held me fast, beloved as Priest mountain.
Top
September 1870
My father helps to gather apples, little gnarled
things that’ll last all winter baked into pie.
While summer lingers I stew them with rhubarb,
ladle into a white bowl, covered with cream,
the summer fruit that slides down the dark throats
of brothers raw with weeping. For six months
the frogs’ croak from the river winds up
and stops, a toy that topples instead of spinning.
Daddy repeats time to plant, time to harvest
and his words fall short of meaning as if
something were chipped or missing at the bottom
of him that sets thought gyrating into the world.
The men and boys won’t stop looking
as if they were waiting for a miracle
but all I can do is boil the clothes with lye,
wash the dusty floors, put food on the table.
I skip church on Sundays when other girls float
in taffeta to church on Norwood road.
Through crepe myrtle’s blazing branches, I watch,
and bite a tongue of iron. When I feed the pigs
I slap the sow so hard with the rusty pail
that she no longer comes running for slops,
squints at me with knowing eyes. I don’t have it
in me to believe a thing except the secret
of silver I saved nursing soldiers in Richmond.
Next spring I’ll lay ten coins on the palm of the man
at the train depot with the tin roof that flashes
in the sun between the river and the church,
run away to nurse again in Richmond, instead
of a heart lay the rest on the kitchen table.
Altar
Richmond 1880
I was just a girl, could never hope
to make the sun rise and set by milking cows
My body wouldn’t chant the silent prayer
of broom-work and feather duster. There was
a hardness in me better suited to dressing wounds
or stopping the flow of gushing blood and pus
than to mopping floors. Years after I ran off
I knew myself flawed as if by making me God
had left a chink of doubt for men to slip
through to nothingness. Twice, though I knew
it meant wearing the men’s rage till death
like shame at the flesh that cloaked me,
I almost went back and didn’t. I went to work
in hospitals nursing the sick to whom I didn’t belong.
I still wonder at night what happened to my kin,
but wear my concern lightly as a crust of thin ice
that melts in the April sun. Sometimes I think
with what I’ve understood I could have borne
to stay except I’ve learned that mother love
left behind that day the train pulled away
from dwindling mountains isn’t enough
to keep anyone at home.
Red Sea
It was just me and the bleak world
of scrub pine, red clay, rattling husks
of dead sumac. It was just me
and the massive earth and the stone house
no one had lived in for a long time. My life
a fact, without illumination. I followed
the yellow dog up the overgrown path
to where the bare Virginia mountain
crouched under the grey sky,
turned to walk the three miles home
down the same road I’d come.
The Blue Ridge turned red, then
a pale yellow without the usual
crescendo of dusk. I heard a laughter
like the bones of winter sun.
My daughter had been gone months,
her childhood like a sea
and swallowed up half my life.
What was I doing alone
on this mountain? The grey sky
let go of snow as if releasing letters,
an alphabet of wordless understanding
that fluttered through the remaining light.
Good-Bye
Good-bye third-floor room with maples leaves,
green seedpod that taps the window,
morning mist swirling over the James River.
beautiful light, thunder on the mountain.
Good-bye ash tree, sumac, wisteria.
Good-bye blackberry bramble.
Good-bye yellow dog, Maizie.
Good-bye peace.
Some say peace is carried within,
but can I fold up valleys
and take them with me?
Can I fold the James River,
the light, the blackberry bramble,
the yellow dog, and the maple tree
like silk dresses I slip into my suitcase?
Can I unpack a mountain?
David Sloan
On the Rocks
It is a rare snapshot. For one thing
We are together; I am so small,
No more than four or five,
Perched on the ledge of a rock face
Below you, and I would be afraid
If it weren’t for the single loop
Of rope you secured around my waist,
If it weren’t for you, standing
A few feet diagonally above me,
Holding the rope that wraps
Around your back and spools
Out into your ready hands.
Even though you aren’t looking
At me, even though your gaze
Stretches into the distance,
Like a man haunted by vistas
That would lure you away for half
A lifetime, even though I cannot foresee
The years ahead when I would still climb,
Roped up and hoping you would return
To hold the other end flapping
Free somewhere above me,
Even though standing there dwarfed
By the cliff face and by you,
I could not know that finally
The son would find a way
To reach the end of the abandoned
Rope and dangle it gingerly down
To the father who had fallen
So far away, and hoist him up,
At this particular moment,
Four or five and high up
On the sunlit rocks, linked
To no one else but you,
I know that I feel safer
Than I have ever felt since.
Skidmarks
The accident itself was almost a relief,
the tumor that blooms benignly,
a blighted elm that finally falls beside—
not through—the roof. No gasoline-fed flames,
no glass-imbedded bodies stuffed head-down
into a crumpled car, no blood pooling on pavement.
One son escaped with a twisted back,
one with a lacerated cheek and a few days
of jittery dreams. My brother hobbled away
on an ankle that swelled like a snakebite
when he slammed down the imaginary brake
on the passenger side right before impact.
Just after midnight the call came that every parent
dreads and half expects. I outwardly grieved
for the car and the boys’ shaking voices,
but privately, knowing we had once again cheated
the bringer of plagues and curses, I exulted
with the gratitude of the undeserving—uneasily—
as one who dreams himself awake lying
on a dark road, squealing tires an overture.
Blanket Indictment
My parents gave me Indian names—Thumb-in-mouth
and Blue-blanket-boy, but I couldn’t stop, dragged it
everywhere, nuzzled silky edges against my cheek
so I could breathe in trapped scents
of my six-year-old world: Rocky’s
wet fur, apple cake and cocoa,
eucalyptus, lavender.
My blanket got soggy
when I draped it over baby’s face in the tub.
He turned a shade of blue and churned
water everywhere. It hid with me
under the bed when I heard
high heels clicking down
the hall for a spanking
I always deserved.
They would try to yank it away for the wash,
but I would wail and fist it as if it were
my own skin. They marveled
at my banshee strength,
bought another I left
untouched. At night
I swaddled myself to prevent sneak attacks.
Sometimes in the layered dark it would
shield me from graveyard sounds
of scraping shovels. I thought
they had given up.
I never heard the nightly shear of scissors,
one shred at a time, never suspected,
as it dwindled, first to the size
of a hand towel,
then a dollar, that early on I
would learn how,
imperceptibly,
everything is snipped away,
down to the nothing
I still clutch.
What Matters
Does it matter that I never intended to stay,
never wanted to enter, touch, upset her?
But there’s no rest from the doling out of pain.
The necklace she wore when we first met that day
invited a twisting. Her throat was a delicate bird.
No matter, because I never intended to stay.
My hands itched to hold her, not to betray
the whiteness, only to feel the flutter, the purr.
Can nothing arrest the doling out of pain?
She praised my hands, believed that I could play
the cello, read Rilke, caressed the words.
I mattered, and she intended for me to stay.
I patted her soft-sweatered back, tried to pray,
heard myself say not too hard, too hard—
but nothing could arrest the doling out of pain
For a moment under bruise-colored skies we lay
serenely. It passed—Oh, the voices I heard.
She’s just matter now. I never intended to stay.
No arrest will ever end this doling out of pain.
Fathers’ Hands
Carving a bow for my son, who wants
a weapon to terrorize squirrels
and deliver the world, I snag the blade,
fumble the whittle stroke and slice my finger.
The cut oozes. My hand is sturdy,
scarred, nothing like my father’s—
unmarked, maple-colored.
His hands stitched gashes without a flinch.
They mortared rock walls to hold a hillside up.
On the violin, his fingers flew like wingtips.
Once as a child I saw sparks spray
from that smoking bow. He tried to teach
my hands how to drive a nail straight,
which spans would bear a load
and which would snap, how to follow
the grain of things, how to hear notes first,
then pluck them as if out of a peach tree.
A single feather in his hair, my son stalks
the squirrel, holds the bow steady,
draws back the shaft, aims, lets fly.
Target and archer are unruffled by the miss.
He bounds over to the arrow, takes it
in his nimble fingers, so like his father’s
father’s, and nocks the end,
eager to aim, miss and aim again.
Al
exandra Smyth
Exoskeleton Blues
I.
It’s that time of the month again—
the moon is bulging out of its socket.
My fillings shriek with pain and everything
is an insult: the skirt that no longer zips,
the door that says pull that won’t open
when I push it, the coworker who insists
on ending my name with an ‘i’ like some kind
of porn star when my email signature clearly
shows I spell it with an ‘ie.’ I want to be
Alexandra, the patron saint of not giving
a fuck, but the creatures with shells are
suffering and I can’t take this anymore.
II.
I am one with the invertebrates, hoping
for chitin and barnacles, armor of my own.
I walk with my belly to my enemies, the only
barrier between softness and the world is
a pair of Spanx one size too small, waistband
chewing a ring around my middle, telling
my lovers “look how small I made myself for
you,” while the tell-tale stomach roll flaps
smugly in the breeze. We are all crustaceans
in the bedroom, and when I am in front of you
I feel too big for this skin, wishing I could molt.
III.
The moon, that big old slut, pulls at the tides
and in turn the tides pull on me. My body swells
and deflates, bellwether of blood to come.
I am always surprised at the elasticity of my skin,
the network of silver stretch marks across my hip
a map, literally, of how far I’ve come. It’s the human
body’s largest organ, and every seven years
years it regenerates into something new. A lobster
lives for seven years, and will shed its exoskeleton
twenty to twenty-five times. The things that I could do
if I was given fresh armor over two dozen times.
How to Make Him Love You
First, you must wait:
desire will become dilute, inoffensive,
the last dregs of a drink on the rocks left
to sit and melt. This isn’t weakness; this