August 29-September 4, 2005: Amanda Auchter and Ruth Rice

Amanda Auchter and Ruth Rice

Birth Poem .for Kathryn My body built you a home”-swell of skin and heartbeat Inside, you were a bird I cupped, or a bright fig hung in my cellar,  swung into that darkness by one long cord I imagined your mouth,  how you would call for me at night,  a small tug that ended at my tongue I am thirsty, you said, and I drank I am hungry,  you said, and I ate The slow tide of your breath rose from your throat as though it was a sea slapping against my ribs You pushed through the door of my body, wild, arms like sparrow cries It was as if I never ended at all, but you,  lips open to the white lights, began to breathe Your shallow stutters of air grew moist at my throat I sang to you so you could remember my voice when the nurses came,  when the social worker came, and then you were gone I imagined the residue of this old house: my long arms, leg stubble, swollen breasts,  tangle of hair, rush of milk was one you would only consider in passing, as though you had never lived here at all Gutenberg at His Desk, Remembering a Dream Oil burned in the room I stacked blocks inside the fire line, cut shadows along the table, stamped fingerprints in soot, smeared my name into the wood squares When I pulled away, I left stains in ash, a flip of words I lifted my hands, imagined a hammer blow, the soft copper press of moveable type I walked in the circle of gray moonlight, my fingernails black as the night’s edge On the desk,  I rolled letters across paper, watched as the backwards L and the fat mouth O became a relief in reverse,  a mirror inside a dream, the way I once raised my left arm to a window,  but instead saw the right previously published in The Hurricane Review Variations on a Red Bell Bloom A bell-rope leads to a bell hung in the arch Here, light winnows a border of red peonies, extends east and west from the apple tree The air is livid with bloom Crown anemones bud; red tongues lick the ragged fence The garden is a suitcase of blossom unpack this slowly, one bulb for each inch of earth A finger topples the bell, blushes the hand with red stain, residue of the bell-metal ore Bell: bloom type Describes a single, African Violet A tricolor: small leaved trailer Red bloom with black and yellow stripes,  bell-shaped calyx The heart is a red bell-bloom in distress Touch the stem,  the root system Lay down and thread the sky like a sash, the belled cup of the bloom Work and hack in wilderness The blood is a sunset. Clyde Tombaugh on His Discovery of Pluto .February 18, 1930 All night I’ve orbited this room around tables and telescopes, cup of coffee in hand It is not night everywhere, but inside this stretched plane, black is not enough to describe the landscape Tomorrow, fire may leap from a shell of starlight We may burn in our houses Women may hang their linens on the line and come away charred Tonight, the galaxy continues to expand I stand in the backyard and wait for the moon to rise over a hemline of trees Somewhere a supernova is born, a planet folds in on itself,  absorbs its own dust A distant body spins in these badlands of rock and ash, approaches the cusp of our own blue air For years it has hidden in darkness, far reached from the sun, an echo of forgotten twilights If I were this hermetic, I too would offer myself in shadow, continuing as if never stirred from slumber, pushed along by the wind swirled tide of a solar flare previously published in Crab Orchard Review and The Eleventh Muse The Therapist Said to the Patient as She Left .for David Dent Let me give you this: a fist full of pens from Paxil, Zoloft, Zyprexa: those towns dissolved under your tongue, entire villages drowned On your first visit, you carried off the map I drew for you in your pocket You returned with bottles in your hands, held each one up to the light, asked, .How will this change me? I watched your shadow-slung body, knuckle- deep inside the couch, your wilted shoulders, your red pill mouth, your ellipsis voice Your eyes made small rooms of our silence: lampshade on the desk, my Styrofoam cup,  my nervous shoe, the wallpaper print “What did you see”– your finger-painted childhood, fragments of your mother’s German songs, the air filled with your father’s highball glass? I wanted to touch the hair on your neck,  pull your hands from behind the torn pillow (its cheek-high scroll, your ardent blush) Now, your body hooks the doorway like a question I have forgotten to write down My blank-paper palms run through your charts,  pull open the desk I hand you the pink carbon bill, a pen Inside your familiar scrawl,  I find your legs, your fingers, your ink-blot stare, and myself tangled inside. Dragonfly on Blue Agave Dusk broke against your lips You slipped through the whitewashed fence with both arms at your side, face pointed toward the blue agave Light washed into leaves,  your sunburned body, shin bruises Earlier, you considered flight the absence of your mother’s letters, her voice on the line,  her perfumed neck, how she would disappear inside herself to a shell of bone and skin,  smoked in the bathroom Now, gone again,  you had the entire yard to fill with yourself: invisible armies, a ball smashed into a window,  sticks and mud At night, the entire world was the shadowed hand in front of your face,  your mother’s photograph under your pillow,  or a radio somewhere in the kitchen, a low slumbered note That afternoon, you watched the dragonfly on the blue agave, the half- beat of its wings, its subtle song When you caught it, you imagined your mother inside your palms, walking over your fingers, her hair glancing your wrist, where the dragonfly leaned into you and bit, took away skin,  as though blood was the equivalent of love.

borax town (life among the desertbillies) I was raised on the precipice Of the largest open pit mine in the world In the towering shadow of the teamster’s union Among mining men and mules Friday paychecks at the silver dollar, Where lucille attended barstool courtisans In a tinfoil tiara and time stood static still, This was the edge of the world Every leap year, just about the time The miners tired of his neighbor’s borrowed wife, Contract negotion called the faithless forward To a collective vacation, a good old fashioned Cross torching, car scorching, downhome strike Men running bear chested in midday heat, building snare traps from broken pallets of paranoia and burning down houses in worship Oh, these were the days of spoken tongues, when the wind walked the desert on stilts of abandoned reason and fervered release Arbitration, the final ritual, returned the denizens To homes of forclosing mortgage, glutted And sliding back toward the silver dollar, Where lucille takes up her scepter and stool Offering benediction, as time concedes Once again an uneasy truce to stasis On the edge of the world. train there is nothing but the false womb curve of the subway walls holding my skin on they too, are molting posters and pictures of jesus prophetic words thin as the skin of an onion pulled away by the track this is where my life will end or begin the bible poster says the choice of change one stop to silence and I step onto the platform ritual summoned at the altar with the host of wine and flesh she lifts her lace and lights a votive waiting for the voice el dia de los angelitos esta pasado this night belongs to the dead unlike the spanish from her mouth that drowning soft unloosened song, this hymn marches on agave feet feeds her body peyote dreams while the forbidden words of a forgotten language sund her eyes with spirit tears condemning, cajoling, questioning, the souls gather a flock as birds thrown across the moon madly twining the night into stars she sleeps safely beneath the altar, smoke seeping from her hair.