The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Laura Manuelidis

Indian Stars

I call them Indian stars

            that flash in the sand:

Stars that drip down kernels

Darkly, secretly

            on dune grass.

No, I have no name like Alden

Standish, Bradford or English,

No skin that is truly fair;

No hands that can be disentangled

            from toil

But I have come to rescue you

From your cold-hot graveyard

My brother.

You are dark as the redness of this autumn moon

Before rain—

I move with your thumping rhythms

Each time my feet are planted on your soil

and feel your emaciated hand digging for seed—

So I become drunk as the flowering maize you seek

Self-inseminating.

On this hill I take you, my pathfinder

As my Rebel Red

Against the gray green

Dusty miller, Bayberry dune.

Like you in the night I turn to silver fire.

Like you, I am loyal as forgotten America.

Like you, my spirit is washed

But not quelled beside this stealthy bay.

[Corn Hill, first Thanksgiving: stolen corn]

Alert

Dog eared sea's

Out again today, wagging its tail

Listening to shore

Learning to receive foam's

Animated, cold nose

Or what the clam

Cockeyed explains

Slipped between two curtained rims

Smiling with shadows of low tide

Saliva's indeterminacy

As if old claw could dig up sand

To find lost reef, anemones

Where once dreamed fish

Who rails at the edge of every wake

Where the exuberant, untamed cur

Waits

But never fully sleeps

Upon its patient, generous watch.

Rooming House, Kyoto

Fine lines appeared as her eyes

Sped their tinsel through the antechamber.

On the shelf she smiled in a photo

            beside another self:  her husband.

She told me he was kind:

I saw it in her look, the loss.

Outside a geisha, new with split plum coif1

Paused by the door:

            "No time, today, to paint."

So we stepped back through an emptied space

Except for the scuffed formica tables where she taught

Something exquisite:  Unblemished paper.

            "Calligraphy is easy if you breathe

             as poetry—Deep in.       Then out."

She demonstrated:

             "Just watch."

The numerals of lines

Aligned in perfect order

Then flowed, and stretched the black.

My paint dripped novice red.

It chopped the air between my strokes.

            "The wind is good" she said.

(But the heart—I knew—misshapen).

[split plum coif: worn when the novice Geisha is first broken,  a day when she is  excused from learning the other arts; black is the expert's color]