The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli

An Evacuation Helicopter Near the Cambodian Border, 1966

            after an Associated Press photograph

The body seen from below floats in the air
as if suddenly it has found itself free
and nothing, no flurry of rain nor swaying
branch or beating rotor, can disturb the relaxed
nature of its floating.  If the eye saw only
the flat shapes of this world instead of the rounded
edges, the volume and eye-measured weight
to which the mind assigns direction, then gravity's
deliverance would not pull every body back
home to lie upon our chests and conform
to our ribs, a return to its first place
of departure.  For the body seen from below floats
both away from us and hurls itself downward.  
We suffocate in the leaving.  We die
in the returning.  How can we bear
the burden of what we can't carry, the absolute
surrender of this body being lifted, arms open,
legs parted, the head like a weight being pulled
last and finally through the waving, stripped
branches of the jungle's canopy, lifted
by cord and hook into the furious silence.

October Field

            after a photograph by A. Aubrey Bodine, 1950's

Bloody Row Antietam lifts
plots of corn cracked
and dried bone-white.
Already someone has cut
a path halfway across the field
gathered the stalks
then tied and stacked
the leaning sheaves
next to the road between
a fence and two stone
markers where overhead
the skeletal tree limbs
gleam thin and sharp
as a surgeon's knife.


The Club—South Side, 1957

            after a photograph by W. Eugene Smith

The door wears eyes—
two metal holes
sunk in wood.
A lock plate rubbed smooth
by oiled hands
and a pane
of dirty glass textured
as a winter storm
where beneath are scrawled the words:
Members Only
Show Your Card
and overhead
two silver threads
tremble a nervous tic
caught inside
the yellow light bulb's
soot rinsed mouth.

 Meditation on a Drawing by Paul Klee, 1940

What you have loved
is poured out
between black lines scratched on cheap white paper
drawn in the second floor rooms of the small house in the Kistlerweg—

Where to walk
the blunt walk of the nub's charred point
is to stay
in the one thought
mulled over and over.  

One line marks where the skin had been stretched.
The metal ring pulled on and clamped
to cover the emptiness—
Then, drawn beneath, two lines
make a tripod for bearing the kettle.

With two strokes, the drummer's legs kick out.   
And with two more, the arms find
at their end
two fists, each grasping a stick
that lifts— until one fist falls.
And then another.

How to make from wood and fire
the sound of what is disappearing?—
How to enter this blank paper
as if it were the body holding
what in you must be silent—

and let that silence
find sanctuary within
the drawn line
of a river
drummed into thundering currents

until you will have made the one perfect circle
that remains closed
and bears what stays inside
quiet as heartwood
unclenching in you
dread's oversized hands.