The Innisfree Poetry Journal
www.innisfreepoetry.org
by Anne Becker
ENOUGH
It was the perfect summer day. The air touched her cool skin with warm and cool fingers, just as it fingered the leaves⎯of the cork-screw willow that let speckled light into the room⎯of the farther auburn maple branches which bobbed like arms with out-stretched feathery hands caressing the skin of the air. Everything rounded like that, turned and gave back what it took. Beyond the tops of the trees, the silver-blue billowed clouds, immense, delicate⎯not boats⎯edifices⎯towed the pale sky washed with sun in their wake. This reciprocity, she thought, this is summer. This perfect balance between heat and cool, between movement and stasis, every thing moving stopped as if at perfect noon. Why should the day continue to advance toward night? When it could stand here, absorb the slow, thick amber light and grow minutely bigger? As the heart learns to, to absorb all of life’s batterings and continue to beat, beat, beat; clench and relax, clench and relax as the lungs empty and fill, empty and fill. As she wished to sit in the cool dappled room, where the carpet, the rug beneath the chair, beneath the footstool padded with matted fleece, bloomed⎯red, black, green, rose, ivory, gray, olive, pink, maroon, lime, moss⎯between the dabs of gold and dusky light. As she wished to sit unmoving, except the slight rocking that started in her heels pressed down into the sheepskin and continued up through calf, thigh, hip, back, neck, so that the head nodded imperceptibly yes, yes, yes. Agreeing to this⎯all this⎯this light, this air, this ceaseless moving unmoving⎯stopped time⎯this abeyance of hunger.
FALL, 2001
What we love in common⎯the autumn light. Its particulate waves caught in the warp of air, suspended in the hush between breath and breath, a soft gauzy fabric to wrap our fears. All around us the leaves die back, wither, curl, set their blunt orange hooks in the clear blue air; tapestry our eyes gulp in, life’s wild thirst. Plum dots of beauty-berry, cross stitched, stipple a lime-green ground, dissolve in distance; weave and flicker of wing and feather nut-brown, cream, carmine, black, olive, heather. In the shrill music of cicadas, of the crickets, day ticks its final minutes, dusk shrugs off its shawl of lavender light.
THE YEAR I PERFECTED . . .
Eleven⎯the year I perfected my writing, chose a number three pencil, having the hardest lead, honed to the sharpest point, barely a dot; sure curled fingers guided the shaft, little movements of the lips and tongue, dilation of nostrils with each breath as my hand slid over and over the paper’s smooth cheek, ruled with faintest blue veins, leaving tracks
of ghost words, ghost letters, phantom silence gray gray white a blizzard of silence Ten years ago the dazzling invisible glowed in my mother’s huge closet where she saved her children’s work. Today, I only imagine those perfect
empty pages⎯blank⎯like my body was blank.
THE GREAT DESTROYER
I'm inside hiding from green life⎯ scared to be out in it, new leaves sprouting all over my body⎯from the shoulder blades like wings, like a bower at the kneecap. Everywhere out the window the green glows fueled by the sun. It frightens me this burning⎯that I might consume myself, like trees, a short flowering, then withering, drying. Gold tissue banners all winter on the beeches, their trunks smooth, silver, as if dead. Of course, they are not, they survive winter clad in their old clothes, shivering, whispering amongst themselves, gossiping⎯I'd hazard⎯ about the arrival of reinforcements of light, the day lengthens like shadows, the earth breathing its gases, warmed air, how soon it will come this year, tears of the drenchblue clouds, of the violet sky; will it be enough sorrow to rekindle the branches to the smallest twig⎯ enough joining of tender skin and free air, to burn, to go on burning all summer to be dropped and gathered in the fall⎯ corpses of living joy.
Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication
|