T H E
B O N E
T R A I N
p o e m s
THE BONE TRAIN
Katherine West HOWLING DOG PRESS
Ω
ΩMEGA EDITIΩNS 2008
COPYRIGHT © 2008-2009 by KATHERINE WEST ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. All rights reserved by individual contributors relevant to their contributions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, studies, and reviews. For information, contact: Michael Annis, Howling Dog Press, P.O. Box 853, Berthoud, Colorado USA 80513-0853.
COVER & TITLE PAGE ART © BY MICHAEL BERGT BOOK DESIGNED BY MICHAEL ANNIS FIRST EDITION ISBN 10: 1-882863-70-4 ISBN 13: 978-1-882863-70-9
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Trouble” first appeared in The White Pelican Review, and “Flag of the World,” “Intimacy or Death,” “Love and War and Snow,” and “The Family Train” first appeared in OMEGA, the Online Journal of Literature & Art.
HOWLING DOG PRESS ΩM E G A E D I T I ΩN S
WWW.HOWLINGDOGPRESS.COM WRITINGDANGEROUSLY@HOWLINGDOGPRESS.COM SERIES DESIGNED & EDITED by MICHAEL ANNIS PUBLISHED & PRINTED at HOWLING DOG PRESS
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T HTEH EB O BN OE N ET TRRAAI INN2 2 The Army 28 of The White Army Lightof White Light The Family Train The Family Train The Ex-Patriot’s Song Anthems The Occupation The New Land Long Time Ago Uranium Children Flag of the World Intimacy or Death Love and War and Snow Doctors Let Freedom Ring This Is Not a Pipe The Day of the Dead Fire in April Another Theory of Relativity As We Know It Echoes Star Flower The Dead and the Quick Confessions of a Fraudulent Margin of Error I Think I Am Becoming a Crone Flight The Last Words of the Witch Pets Still Life Dream State Fog Heaven In the Painting Love Poem Desire Shadows The Child’s Play Death of the Nest Momentum The White Girl Speaks of Rivers She 7
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8 9 10 12 13 15 17 19 20 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 30 32 33 35 39 41 43 45 47 49 50 52 53 54 55 57 58 60 62 64 66 68 71
The Danger of Light and Joy Awaken The Ingot The Exile Home The River Mistake Outlaws Widdershins Living with Rumi Utilities Are Confusing Learning Time Trouble Camping on the Moon Monsters Tilt The Wing Codes Painters The Raffle Divine Nonchalance Poetry The Bone Train
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About the Poet
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THE ARMY OF WHITE LIGHT The small snow that was almost rain all morning Is suddenly lit bright white from within And puffed up into tiny paratroopers To landing feet-first on some marked Some predetermined spot There are billions of them It is an invasion We haven’t got a chance and I wonder about conquest Life under the boot of the snowflake state Mandatory falling lessons and Weightlessness training Into the army of white light
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lit committed
forced recruitment
THE EX-PATRIOT’S SONG Long-necked geese fly north Salt cries call dawn and a beach They know the way home I knew the way home I could have walked Through red coffee groves and wide Banana leaves Through vultures and desert and Cinder block villages To black asphalt new and smooth as Baby’s skin home I knew the way I could have flown like the geese I was the guide The one who had done it so many times Leading my V of ex-patriots back To the mother land home I knew the way home But I did not know home A hungry infant remembers being fed in the womb my home Was primordial a place Where I was strapped onto a warm back My best friend the big heart pumping Under my ear Where I was carried until I could walk where I walked Barefoot Until my soles were shoes But wiser Always knowing where we were and Which plums Were ripening in which tree where The next lake would be if the trout Were spawning if the ducks
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Would be down for summer home Was a place I’d never been a place I felt When peeling a strip of bark off the birch Feeling the million uses In my fingertips A roof A canvas I could draw perch with charcoal I could conjure them until they slipped Out of the reeds And into my hands like lovers home Was the fingernail moon Going down at dusk Starting up like a warning: Dark soon Time to go home
the hoot owl
home
I knew the way But I did not recognize the place The smell of smoke The smell of dead animal by the side of the road The sound of emptiness bicycles In the middle of the street rocking chairs With knitting at their feet Mold floating in the bottom of the coffeepot Dents in the pillows mouse droppings In the stove The sound of creaks in the old hardwood floor but No one opens the door No one lifts the school clothes Warming on the radiator No one cooks bacon and toast No one stands in the cold Waving good-bye The bus never comes
Dark soon Time to go home
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ANTHEMS The days are getting longer The entrance to the elementary school Is lined with flags Every day since the solstice We get a few more minutes of light Teachers stand with hands over their hearts While loudspeakers blast The national anthem When winter starts we head for summer One farmer has ploughed his brown field 2nd graders carefully explain their artwork To a visiting poet: The good guy Is the one in the plane. These are his bombs. The bad guy Is the one on the ground Who dies The sun inches north In winter light The tips Of scrub maples glow coral red Blackbirds like black leaves roost At the tops of bare trees Chapped red lips sing one song Arcs higher in the sky Than yesterday
then blow across the road the sun
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THE OCCUPATION Armies In my head Big boots March march march the miles Of interior landscape Where every mesa is a myth Lizard Woman Lifting her flat head From the desert floor to search The horizon For the beloved Boots Don’t care they are not Anthropologists My cultural Characteristics For the book no They march march march Through my sacred sites Crushing evidence Civilization a cosmology Highly developed before Had even opened their eyes Their laces For the march march march Into someone else’s life They called the new land The new flag Crowned With a weather station Monitors Information Beeps squeaks screens Graphs and March march march
charting
of an advanced Boots tied
wife daughter Lizard Woman gauges
Boots onward
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To another conquest With commands Standing orders For the occupation Dressed in fatigues Goes AWOL You can’t trust them at all
leaving me
Lizard Woman
native troops
To march march march When you tell them to she Sneaks out to meet the beloved Behind the stockade they kiss Measure the planes Of their faces the high desert The sage Of love the hot wind Blows up from the south Boots sweat Moan wonder What there is to kiss about they burn Ancient scrolls For the cook-fire use funeral urns For latrines they march March march Into the canyon Of my heart execute The beloved On charges of treason Heresy Love Lizard Woman Decides it is a good time To dream the hot wind Sweeps the sand clean and she sees The beloved Standing on the horizon Making the sun wait
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LOVE AND WAR AND SNOW War is declared and the Snow Goddess Howls out a spring blizzard Six feet of snow cities Closed down one After the other I go to work but the doors are locked the halls Dark We drive through tunnels of blowing snow Like space travelers moving so fast Stars blur we look for food We listen to the war news we arrive Home With a movie and a chicken happy As if we had hunted and plucked it ourselves We watch Doctor Zhivago Love and war and snow clumps Thump on the roof when the wind blows Somewhere The moon is full and lights the night Like a dim lamp pale Gold we must Go out into it We must stand in the middle of the blowing and the gold We must listen To branches cracking like gunshot To the Snow Goddess keening Over the-not-yet-dead we must hold Each other We must not let go
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THE DAY OF THE DEAD In Patzcuaro I remember a woman with gold lizard earrings and a blue-black shawl Telling me the rules: children Were the most vulnerable to wandering spirits Dress them as ferocious animals dress men As women women As men then the homeless ones Would never recognize home she sold me A devil Who played a happy saxophone-lizard With whom he simultaneously made love Kites The size of ships In Santiago AtitlĂĄn To the ancestors Floating downstream
I remember
messages of love rising candle-boats I have marigolds
Still blooming in the yard The color of leaves Corn and squash Food of the dead year The color the dead prefer For the decoration of graves A signal fire A guide we could use
yellow harvest
a flame
A lighthouse or two I could find my way back to me you Could find your way back to you we Are considering a pumpkin And long teeth a demon For the front porch a beacon For those who can’t read the stars Call like owls This way This way It is not too late
wicked eyebrows
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DESIRE A three-quarter moon Blurred by clouds but still bright As a Chinese lantern hanging from the prow Of a black sampan gliding Over a black river – It is the only light By which we can see Desire Wandering from room to room Naked and white as another moon Desire tries A locked door Listens To the snores and the rustling Of sheets Desire steps outside Examines the window from below Desire hears the moans of nightmare Coming from the room above The moans shiver and sway in the wind Like bamboo Desire rides them to the room above And slips into the dream There is one monster Very large With only a red mouth where the head should be And two small children— The moans are coming from them Desire follows the moans
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And slips into the children Where she finds two adults Two lovers The moans are coming from them Desire slips into them They shiver and sway in the wind They ride to the room above Blurred by clouds They ride the black sampan Over the black river They are the only light
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THE WHITE GIRL SPEAKS OF RIVERS When I was three years old my mother Sold me downriver Missouri was a slave state Didn’t she know? The Mississippi A traitor Who sold her girls to the greedy Gulf of Mexico A mother her velvet beauty A trick of light Every day Went to her
my sisters and I to play
Skip stones swim until Brown scum lined our cheeks and chins Huck Finns all of us With dirty girl-toes in the mud How old Is old enough for slavery?
she
Made that decision for us Swept us away Beached us In the slave place Where one body Was slave to another
her current
a place
bodies
Broken Bone by bone
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And reset So the body would never walk again Listening to their bones knit Into the wrong socket Niche The marrow leaking
bodies
the wrong
the heart
Helpless In its rib cage And then the auction The display babies now Rolled out In our strollers
flailing and lame
Legs broken in ten places Will never escape
these girls they only want
To play Perfectly intact
here is the plaything
In short The perfect slave
we gave
And gave We tore We healed We gave
we listened
To flesh Rip In the night By morning
to wounds close up
Scar-less
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And new
by the light of the sun
We saw magic We grew back Our bones By bone
bone
Then we stood up and walked away
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OUTLAWS A vulture lives in the skinny fir tree Across the street he Might be skinny too he certainly Cuts the sky like a blade that tilts This way and that with the currents
but seldom
Closes only When flapping into port the sails Halfway down like sagging pajamas Filling folds like a bellows sheets Snapped on the line thus The vulture heaves home From my bedroom window Through the lace curtains Pirate ship Rocking with the quiet night waves
wind
I can see him black a place
To swim to through ink A place to sleep With only the groan of old wood-bones Of water a place
and the laughter
Without dreams that don’t end When I wake a place For you too are you pirate Enough To wear an eye-patch and black boots The truth? can you be
to tell
A blade? That would make two we could cut The clouds to pieces let the stars Fall through And land on flat leaves like drops of rain
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Or mercury Mars Might dive headfirst into the sea like a torch Might take his place in space wearing Defiance and flying The Jolly Roger
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we
MONSTERS In the movies Come from the head They’re under the bed In the closet Behind the shirts In the attic The space Under the stairs In the belly Out of the corner of the eye At the back of the neck Hackles rise Monsters Are masters Of disguise Your neighbor Is a reptile from Outer space Your dog A spy For another race compiling A clone code For the intergalactic slave trade Your spouse Is an extra-terrestrial shrink sent To complete the file On the human Heart He has a time-piece Theory He’d like to support He believes He can turn the heart back like A clock Re-create
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The whole history of humankind Find The trauma hour Set the alarm Wake up love He believes He can then wind it up again Set it for The present and wow! Have a party A spree The whole universe In bed together ticking With glee
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THE BONE TRAIN In the meadows are bones Jawbones Teeth Femurs yesterday Two vertebrae still linked Like cars of a toy train white As wildflowers tucked into the grass
the meadows
Flower with bones we are lost In blonde grass cacti Open pink parasols flower Straw hats the creek Calls us down to sleep On a flat rock in the sun while she Rushes by Cliffs breathe back the river air we breathe With some organ the wind has loaned us Or the sun we have petals We have bones your bones Bloom next to mine night After night our vertebrae Curve in a concentric embrace carrying the soft Flesh of the soul along steep Mountain tracks To the tunnel mouth the dark Throat that thrums its one note until all the passengers Close their eyes and sing
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THE BONE TRAIN is Katherine West’s second collection of poetry. She was raised in the Midwest, then attended graduate school in Colorado receiving an M.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Colorado at Boulder. After finishing her degree, she spent the next thirteen years living near an Indigenous village in the western highlands of Guatemala, during the ongoing civil war. On September 16, 2001, she returned to live in the United States. The poems in The Bone Train were written during the following period of re-entry into U.S. culture, between the end of one war and the beginning of another, and reflect all the love, compassion, disappointment and horror attendant upon such a homecoming.
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To order Katherine West’s THE BONE TRAIN Follow this link: http://issuu.com/howlingdogpress/docs/purchasebooks
“West weaves an intricate web of meditations on war and awareness, complicity and innocence, conflict in the human and natural world. West’s poems invoke not so much the horrors of war, but the ways in which those horrors are normalized. West’s skillful use of line, space, sound and silence deepens her exploration of our engagement with difference…. The pauses and line breaks force us to read and re-read our relationship to Time.” —CALYX
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