Tide of Your Coming

The Tide of Your Coming Carmella Braniger

Hidden Heart Drum

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Tuning the Line

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Training the Ear

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Lost Wax Cylinder

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Geometry of Saints

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Maternal Instinct

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Pandemic Transport

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Prairie Shadows

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At the Fencepost

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Hidden Heart Drum Early you come with grace, in a dream, faceless, point to a distant forest.

Then rise from heavy golden plains, like misty morning haze, and my hidden heart drum, rhythm of hooves, beats hard.

A quiet, neverending strumming.

Until you belt forth a carol, and purple crocuses inside me turn up.

Your song burns like fall leaves aflame.

Even the sun cries with dark joy.

Not for me, but for the winter ahead.

I lean in, removing all vestige of you; rise from the fire, pull a curtain against the tide of your coming.

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Tuning the Line after Elizabeth Bishop’s "Little Exercise" Think of the power lines at evening dusk, their quiet hum like a possum in deep sleep, birds snaked in circles across the skyline.

Think of our daughter, swinging reckless in the balance, like a monkey lobbing from branch to branch. Listen to her scream.

Think of how she would play taut strings vibrating along the bridge of mourning, joy-filled melodies floating from the sky.

They are singing now, the swaying cables, low hanging among stars in every horizon, longing for ground, the birds to be gathered.

Then our daughter spins out again large, graceful arches across the lawn, each one another little bit of something.

Think of her walking along a tightrope tuned to a violin or to the undertone of a comment; think of her as unstoppable, barely bothered.

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Training the Ear Even before she comes to know sorrow, she stands before a full-length mirror, violin tucked under her chin, plucking, strumming, running a catgut-strung bow across rosined strings, reaching for the pure sound she cannot match.

Hand slides with care along its neck, seeking the right combination of notes to pull from its hollows the unheard.

Face strained, eyes barely closed, limbs lashed against shiny ebony until they burn, wrist poised to break, she presses down, stretching for a tone to arrive faster than her fingers allow until the familiar pitch cries release painting the walls a new shade of dolor.

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Lost Wax Cylinder You didn’t exist, I know, before I thought of you, swaddled in hospital sheets, or was it my bridal veil, or a copy of lost news, or maybe an unwanted package out of which, just in time, your shadow bursts forth.

Long-awaited night howls, reverberate across the river, silenced only by my own strident moans of abandon.

The lost wax cylinder spins just one song at a time.

Those loud sweet scores turning down church aisles as you waltz in knowing there’s more than one way to cut a groove, turn vibrations into deafening sonances no one may hear, hushed-like the sun, or earth rumbles, or a sperm whale’s cry-or your violin when it shivers in place, nerve pulse of strings-its story almost ready to snap.

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Geometry of Saints I listen to her reading a story about monks who dwell in the Swiss Alps and their Saint Bernards.

Who wouldn’t love a dog warm enough to thaw a face frozen in snow, each lick of his tongue bringing him closer to the surface of things.

The smell of wet dog permeates the air.

Not so concerned with the holiness of bodies, what saints know by instinct— the way a bee gets back to the hive, or camels find water in the sand— she turns the page to the next rescue.

What patience it takes to train these enormous, slobbering beasts who elate at making grown men blush with delight— reminding us to love not just out of the corner of an eye but without abandon.

Ever forward, gazing out over the edge of snow drifts, a cliff, the sky, her eyes— what endless capacity in each silent constraint: light snowfall covering the tops of their heads— the bright glow on a blue face at pool’s bottom— the shape of her bow lifting up, a circle before finding high A. Even our saints cannot promise salvation the way she does: sitting on the edge

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of a half-broken stool in front of the geometry drawn by her song.

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Maternal Instinct Patterns vary—watch how great-grandmother crochets afghans for hours on end with no end in sight, they keep bringing more yarn and pills, and she continues on, no longer in any more pain.

We weave and unweave our burdens: glistening birch in the dead of winter, light shining through onto snow— summers spent on our stomachs drifting in the late afternoon sun entirely broken save a few postures of integrity moving us through our days— still, we swirl back in, and then out again.

The story changes each time we tell it.

This time we follow from a distance: she stretches out an arm from beneath the awning— a daring bold gesture for a Midwest prairie girl— to turn oceans of grass into salt, inlets of respite, out of sight, not in view— another cool pillow on which to rest her tired head.

And what about this story, daughter?

The one where I give you a mirror to look at your own vagina, mistaken bit of nomenclature, what a stranger cannot touch.

You are only seven, and you call it your baby hole— I silently try to help you see the power the pleasure the pain the deep deep love— oh, what love comes from such holiness and you, your luster ablaze,, asking “how can it be so ugly?”

Oh, Bishop, and those horrible breasts and every woman who’s been repulsed

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by or attracted to her own boy— Oh, Dove, and the pink within us all— these voices rush in on me as I stand in my bedroom holding the mirror, watching your eyes take it all in: you will learn in time of inflorescence.

You beam, new rings already starting to spin out from your lucid center, my chest filled tight to aching.

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Pandemic Transport Late afternoon violin practice— sun dripping through fetters of half-open blinds— and I wonder what the dog perched on the chair hears ears half pricked, watery gaze drawn toward your steady strokes; or how the dashing pulse of dancing squirrel tails outside the window fractures her reverie; and why, without reserve, she turns a brindled back to the now forgotten muffles of strings.

Except you keep bowing, from tip to heel, up the scale and back again until the room falls to a hush and the horses roam free at night in boundless fields flooded with moonlight and music.

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Prairie Shadows Even then, I thought it was you ahead, rising up from the tall prairie grasses, pointing the direction of my next turn.

It was your motion in the still dew, a great sward parting, forms emerging: your love rumbling, again, in the bush, summer soul hanging from low branches: your great gusts rolling foamy crests, lapping waves absorbed by the shoreline In Van Gogh's “Wheatfield with Crows,” it was you who stirred that whole flock into a hard lift from strokes of amber waving in solitude along the azure sky.

I doze for days, dream of great harriers nesting in low-lands, long, white tails flashing bright in the sun; then, you sink into the geography of afternoon shadows, and my flaming center lightly whispers it was never you nor a murder of crows awaiting my return. It was another me.

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At the Fencepost Each time, it opens out away from and back into the present moment turning this way and that like the winds of a hurricane ready to shore— those waves, tidal, sweep across the screen where my cursor points to some offshore islands opening out onto a window of sound, vibrations pulsating through the womb— those golden oaks again and grandpa’s apple tree, opening out onto bees slumbering in late summer on yellow cosmos blossoms before the harvest begins— a quick glance at the monitor, the uterus suddenly a doppler radar map, ovaries flapping wildly like ponytail palms in the storm opening out to blue waters where she glimpses a man pulled up from the deep before we can shield her eyes from his blue face, opening out onto a field where we stand at a fencepost waiting for the monument— this poem stretching us to love more deeply now than ever before.

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