Kim Roberts
BOTANY
Soft dusk creeps up my windowsill and perches there, a little bird.
It is the moment of turning on the lights. Troubles are like birds:
they can fly.
The Rose family has many turnings: it includes almond trees, strawberries, apples. Kinship is a funny thing.
Who would have thought an apple was cousin to a rose? It is
the moment of turning on lights, but I haven't yet, watching the sky purple.
I am watching the shadows climb the pages of my open book, where an
apple tree blossoms. Apples--"American as apple pie"--
are native to Asia and Africa.
The fruit of the tree of knowledge in Genesis was not an apple, as I was
taught. Botanists believe it was an apricot. Troubles are like birds: they can fly. I am dreaming idly of family.
I am dreaming about my family, holding my botany book open. This is
what they say in parts of East Africa, about kin: Troubles are like birds. The book resembles two pale wings against a royal sky.
THE FLOATING WORLD
Ukiyo-e Wood Block Print
I will find you here. Amid
white cherry blossoms bursting from ragged limbs
or perhaps on a raised wooden walkway
between terraces, where your wood sandals
clop like a horse's hoof
among bursts of early morning bird song.
I will find you here, in sheltered pavilions
against rice paper screens,
indoors and out at the same time,
outlined in black,
in a picture frame yet floating free,
a screenprint and a longing both
in delicate pinks and fading blues,
that, five hundred years later, remains as acute
as this winding stream, those craggy rocks,
our meeting place,
the tea house at the end of our graceful bridge.
DELPHI AT EAST HADDAM
On the lower slope of Mount Parnassus
in Connecticut, I await
the Oracle.
Just as in Greece, there's a rock here,
and as in the time of the priestesses,
I am ready to pay my fee.
I invoke the alphabet,
all the useful signs:
the letter A
repesents the head of an ox,
D is a fish,
K is the palm of the hand.
The source of all the words is here,
but under a spreading maple,
the Sibylline rock
does not speak.
Left here by the retreating glaciers
of the last Ice Age,
it guards
the entrance to a meadow
of goldenrod and stickerbush,
massive and obdurate.
If the rock were to cleave in two
and emanations rise from the earth,
revenants of ancient Greece,
who in all Connecticut
could interpret the signs?
I place both hands upon the rock
where the sun
alights each afternoon, sifted
through the emerald leaves,
making patterns
along the boulder's
rough sloping sides
that resemble
the shapes of letters:
sometimes a fish, sometimes an ox,
sometimes a snake--
if only I had the laurels
and knew how to read--
and sometimes a B like a house.
TWO STUDIES OF A BEAR
The larger, darker, hairier one
has such a huge hump,
his bearness
seems to be carried
entirely in his haunch.
The other, paler (younger? female?)
is too flat-backed, too elongated.
The realer bear
is too little bear:
she's bland and pale and flat.
While he leers darkly,
paws the yellowing vellum
with his vicious crescent claws,
she remains empty-eyed.
She remains a sketch.
Pisanello drew this in the 1430s,
and it is still the truth:
the grand gesture, the exaggeration,
the coiled ferocity,
the suspicion,
its hirsute and towering shoulders,
will always crush, will always conquer
a waggish fidelity
to fact.
Kim Roberts
Kim Roberts is the author of a book of poems, The Wishbone Galaxy, and editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission on the Arts, and the Humanities Council of Washington, as well as writer's residencies at eleven artist colonies. Her poems have appeared in journals beginning with every letter of the alphabet.
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