A Blade of Grass Made Bare By Its Own Anatomy

a Blade of Grass Made Bare

by Its Own Anatomy Maureen Alsop

a Blade of Grass Made Bare

by Its Own Anatomy Maureen Alsop blue hour press 2012

blue hour press 2012

Blue Hour Press • 1526 Kentucky St • Lawrence KS 66044 www.bluehourpress.com • editor@bluehourpress.com © 2012 Maureen Alsop. All rights reserved.

Cover art by Maureen Alsop. Book design by Justin Runge.

Poems in this collection have previously appeared in 350 Poems, Inertia, [out of nothing], The Pinch, Six Sentences, Spinning Jenny, Switchback, and Yew Journal.

Contents The Missing Person Ink Sketch, Conditions at Sea Fever at Watervliet Sacrament Birds Birthday Cake Leo Ascendant Winter Frequency [Desire It Was, Not Merely] [At The Threshold Between The Burning And Unlit] Passenger Caprice Blind Contours Upon the Sea, the Blush of Sunset Sweetheart A Pale Dog Scratching At The Foreground

7 8 9 10 11 13 14 16 18 20 21 22 23 24 25

The Missing Person You came covered in rain. Arrival was not yours to choose and least efficient was your bleak trail. Stars rang with traces of snow. Sleep walked out of your shadow. You sat in the doorway.

Somehow I let you linger. Somehow I had welcomed you in from the quiet edges of the fern. The air was your house and your farm and your garden. Horses blessed the orchard. But you were no wanderer. The pale buttons on your felt hat, the simple sheep with their gold eyes, the scuff of the sea along your collar named you. You were maiden, my waking, magnolia blossoms flame across the river. Once you, who had never been there, witnessed the words outside your voice. The passage of your long music, the flood of sunlight as it bronzed my throat.

Ink Sketch, Conditions at Sea After the passing waters fingered your cheek. After the gulls disappeared. After the lilies burnt orange smoldered into plum: then ash. After you let down your hair. After the ochre clouds faded black. After I could not laugh anymore. After winter.

Near the lake where the cottage roof leaked and moss grew through linoleum. After grosbeaks grew thick from raspberries.

After the half smile of your mistress when she stole your pocket watch. After breakfast. After the rain. One kiss to another. The day hot under my thick wool dress. After the window opened.

And ice entered us.

A Blade of Grass Made Bare by Its Own Anatomy | Pages 10 & 11

Fever at Watervliet The strawberry sun vacillates between the noon smoke of paper mill factory towers and the blanched horizon of a midnight farm. An unrealized harvest is the action of drought. Sleepers, your role is sleep. The temperament of your bed, predawn, is the dull mix of ragweed & stone; your shoulders round toward sternum as sidelong your transparent ribs repeat a series of answers—a thin grain, a blossoming heat, the pent shapelessness of a cloud. The one small thresh of the circle. Your one good leg holding its weight.

Sacrament Birds I will not sleep less than a year. My loneliness will go unlocked, the mail quickening into piles—endlessly the death that no one hears is coming in a large plastic purple canoe. This happens.

Lakes expand. Shores churn lavender foam. Ever the best cloud over the bull ox, in his soft darkness, is touching a ghost. Memory tells lies. A distant planet flares like the untroubled thoughts of someone I once loved. & I go on with my loving. Loving the translation of his eyes: two visitors from century old houses. The gloves come off & my cheek is being strangely greeted: the trembled air, skin, a furrow of birds. A tide of fire gleans & remains misspelled. Tonight sacrament birds stumble & hum under the sternum. Misguided you may think this is pulse, don’t be. The sacrament birds don’t hear us. This is the visible world in which only kinesthetic beliefs, in particular, are strength.

A Blade of Grass Made Bare by Its Own Anatomy | Pages 12 & 13

Birthday Cake In the French cabin trompe l’oeil lilacs rest on the table. Behind this, a window of seven Constable clouds and a clock tower among low hills. It is late. The Gihon River at this hour is parsley grey. I wonder if I would once in a while have liked a canoe to ride the whipped edges of stale grass. Cottonwoods exhale in large rattles my thoughts.

The saints and cockles are spread under a low arch of spruce.

Listen and you may hear them smuttering. They have appointed the great creators to work in the kitchen. But I have also seen them stand among a scatter of hubcap’s gleam in the clearing.

Vanilla frosting, the song of a flute, orchids, pear blossoms.

The collection of orthopedic shoes in my mother’s closet are a rough harvest of albino pheasants. Yellow eyes plucked. They

scratch. Multiplying the repetition of walls. It is not quiet to think of the places my mother has walked.

There are not many more things unfinished in the world than loneliness.

A Blade of Grass Made Bare by Its Own Anatomy | Pages 14 & 15

Leo Ascendant Intermittent chambers of weather held me. Drowsily rain. Unwashed heat. Kneaded I a sliver of grass in the bread dough. Le Por Te Bonheur. Posterity for summer’s end, which hung its grey cotton beard over the lagoon.

Last night Monsieur Bourbon spoke. His first time out of silence.

He stood at the shore in a tiny portrait of periwinkle breeze.

Among six wild geese, a woodcock, the faint scrim of a cardinal in the sumac. His bowler hat round as any egg. He loved the sinners and he loved the small flowers in lion’s mane. Three sickle shaped keys he placed in the lion’s mouth. What broken euphoria.

Ruby blown clear into light was the thick roar of the lion. Tell me. What tramped weave of stars bear the sea. What valley did he pass through. Away into the dirt. We could not ask him.

Winter Frequency Some days worse. Pulse of old wood. Quickening oak. Gold patina of unoccupied light. The etch of a woman’s thigh, torso, never quite seeing the outline of her face. The wing moves without injury against the appetites of rain. Everywhere you imagine, the swallows return, or perhaps the weave of starlings. I’ve never been ultimately certain of difference. Just as now I am not sure of the thin longing of your face. I have heard that everything returns. On that I am most definitely not certain.

Even the masses know impermanence as sole clarity.

The last line of trees are a blue-gray wish for beauty. I am bound always outward by my dazed repetition of boots into the wilding sun. I move toward your distant house. How did we begin A Blade of Grass Made Bare by Its Own Anatomy | Pages 16 & 15

relations? Beyond the bell trees there is a fresh swoon of winter in the grass. The swell of snow, a belief in love, the softness reaches beyond the whole of death.

[Desire It Was, Not Merely] He was not an assassin, but the song tucked into the death that named you. His twilight shirt told you to believe in singing; below his beard, a potential for gold gardenias in the buttonhole. Thou summary, thou love—in mid-arrangement: asters scattered the sidewalk amongst a throng of grasshopper.

He fingered you, then touched the tabletop. A slick oilcloth of scarlet and white checkerboard masked another shore. Outside the nightingale slept in the wheat field. And thou knewest tonight thou sleeps, falling into a lover who seeps in repetitions of shadow: the sound of a boat scraping the dead leaves stacked like bones beneath the water’s surface. Thou was the wave into which atoms sink. Thou lowered the lamp. In skeletal drift thou listened.

A Blade of Grass Made Bare by Its Own Anatomy | Pages 18 & 19

Thou asked him for the story of flowers, subtle blossoms awakening under snow. Thou read the book of loneliness over and over. Snow drink, soft phrases: self kept facts. He had memorized the passages marked with asterisks. Nor was I snow. Nor the pulse of snow. Darkness in the face of starlings. He recited your newly found body. Thou, in nakedness, mouth beyond voice, words that you cannot carry had come. The whisper of violets filled you. A tiny mind floated in the bottom the river.

[At The Threshold Between The Burning And Unlit] But I sing. I say therefore. I say at the center of you is either a child-flame or child-angels. I say it is your soul. Shapeless, subtle. I say paper bag and I take it. I take the crumpled pages that I love from the book of love and I must love them again and again. For it is snowing and I bid the snow to sing, but it will not. And I worship the voice of the snow for its silence.

Still, I have not learned how not to love, though I have undertaken your numerous lessons. And I wrap my bottle in a paper bag like a lamp. What I love greater than light. The thought of light. Glowing phrases of a nightingale reincarnate the sum of a river. I lurk in the drink. And I think of the torn silk. The subtleness of my undergarments as I sit on a bench. And I think how I am saved. Saved from the snow in which you are passing.

Which passes over you who are deep within the pages of the A Blade of Grass Made Bare by Its Own Anatomy | Pages 20 & 19

ice- story. Yes, you cannot hear me. For you plug your self-made fingers into your self-made ears. Outside the newly fresh. We are right, we who ask for the singing. We who can’t ask. We who can’t sing. We are glorious in our belief. We believe in the story of asking. Snow under your wing. Snow upon your unseen sparrow. We believe flowers bottle themselves into tiny startled blossoms. We unfold paper from your bread.

Passenger When the body was left among shags of wild crab grass, I loosened my hair and reflected on the hands crossed over the grey wool suit, the tie balancing the heart, the day’s currents, it’s new silence.

I wondered for awhile, if I’d been viewing the scene through the window of a train. I saw ordered rows read the sky’s vertigo, years shining up like eyes through verdigris plains. By morning the sun’s wide desire and the under-wing of a grosbeak greeted indigo streaks of soil. Noon ended the real mind. Still, I think of you as if you might return. Then I remember that view: autumn’s contractions expelling the last stubborn leaves from the oak, the field dizzy with dusk weather.

A Blade of Grass Made Bare by Its Own Anatomy | Pages 22 & 23

Caprice In the shade deep vale, sleep, a globe of bees, the faded stain of touch. What took us. The dark iris’ kiss and your fever notes fell among the still black folds of snow’s hush. The silent dim of a new song snaps the meadow.

We hear each other again, as if for the first time, in these dreams that follow death.

Our voices, now, made bright by the sun—

Blind Contours I never met you, but between us a valley strums a breeze of lilac and honey. I never said the body was a condition. Unbaffled, my nakedness was constant. My name round over the slowheat of your lip. So made I a nest among the blister of walnuts and burl of ribbons curled among hickory. Paper trees thickly overgrew your lung. I mocked the food that words might feed. All potatoes, small potatoes. Waited I in your want for home. The deer loping through your brother’s backyard were long mirrors of twilight. Nothing gave me more of you. It was vast work and near to the child. Later, the old piano twisted dry notes into a smog off the river. To this day I am apologetic when I sink in the grass, and rub with my cold hands, your disappearance.

A Blade of Grass Made Bare by Its Own Anatomy | Pages 24 & 25

Upon the Sea, the Blush of Sunset I did not take to the ocean. I did not call the woods into my skin. Still, as it is now, a layer of ghost milk burns. A white fire: moth and lily dust. Noon flares in the needle trees. What did I make of the soft blood, the slow smolder of my family’s disappearance? Does the tree brim with watermark? Is the wisp of my soul touched? No. Not by sun. Not even by the call of the willow at the gate of my house. And not by my body as I hook my breath to the braided mane of a horse descending into a bruised goldenrod, soaking it’s throat with gray florets of tumbleweed. Grandmother, the me, the not her, the hot touch of old ghosts, who is wanted? Days have been asked. But it is only the trees that answer, their wet speech billows as they break into flame.

Sweetheart The cool field of grass, once where you loved. Watermark.

The sky never left your mind. And out of the hotpink sea each boat had gone. Doves among the surefooted parakeets and finches shivered and sang.

Goddamn.

Where in the weedgreen traces did you go.

A Blade of Grass Made Bare by Its Own Anatomy | Pages 26 & 27

A Pale Dog Scratching At The Foreground The lilac doors shudder. Crepe covered windows, porcelain birds, glass bottles, mirrors on the nightstand. Your gold stippling of shade in the orchard. A reversal of death. What was absent from the body. That slightly lazy gesture. A whisper in the self- portrait. Your composed thought was a pale dog scratching at the first landscape. Amid a thick winter book wrapped in linen, a cigarette sears through another planet. Scapula’s imprint.

Holy grease under the sparrow’s wing, the ground sprinkled with myrrh. Another page from a song of the clay colored sea.

Your cedar box lined in ash or feather. Another detail torn open to silverfish.

About Maureen Alsop Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag), and several chapbooks. Maureen is an associate poetry editor for the online journal Poemeleon and Inlandia: A Literary Journal. She presently leads a creative writing workshop for the Inlandia Institute, the Riverside Art Museum, and The Rooster Moans.

She is the winner of Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. Her recent poems have appeared in various journals including The Laurel Review, AGNI, Blackbird, Tampa Review, Action Yes, Drunken Boat, and The Kenyon Review.

blue hour press 2012