Origin Story: Novel
Atlantic Ocean
My Uterus Teaches Me to Sing
Fireflies
Hiking Throne Hill
There are disturbances within.
A beginning, middle, and end
like glass knobs you pull
but each opens a door inside yourself
you thought you locked, never expecting a stranger
to have the large wrought iron key that slips
perfectly inside that story you refused to tell yourself
like a little play you swallowed whole, players, directors,
the lushly painted scenery of tall trees to hide behind.
You didn’t know which subject, verb, object to write first.
How strange to be written about by someone you’ve never met
and reading this not-mine novel that explains yourself to yourself.
Oh two-way mirror! Oh book of my hidden lives!
What boundaries, what borders have disappeared once
that thick front cover is turned. A font of magic, these
black small words on white pages. The words stay in place
while my heart shakes, my mouth gasps. The world is the word
repeating itself over and over. How much I have yet to read.
Atlas of my youth, ocean where the seabirds,
terns, ospreys dive searching for what I search. The tides,
low or high, my nautical pulse. Blue
atrium of wave and water, where my blood flows
near the Nubble Light House, the Owl’s Head Lighthouse,
the tiny islands of fortress and iron wait.
I, too, could churn in foamy greens, in a see-through blue, in white
crash, in-over-your-head deep.
Oh ocean of constant song, of your coming so close to touch me!
Collect me in your spread-out hands, in your searching hands.
Encode in me the messages of your cuneiform seaweed.
Anoint me in salt, in spray and I will praise the red
numinous sea stars, purple anemones, and steel strippers of your waterbody.
even when there is blood in my mouth
even when the tool’s blade twists, scraping out what you cannot
bear to create, to let uncurl inside yourself
(this being the closest I can speak of it)
even when pain cracks its kaleidoscope of red crystals
over your entire body from the pull
of a child or the yank of a tiny polyp
even when I am keening for the thick clots to stop dropping
the thin filaments of my fascia keep humming
the cascading shape of my fallopian tubes
like a Jamaican waterfall in June sunshine
the arc of my cervix like the curve of your
lips in spontaneous whistle
We are surrounded by stars
blinking their constellation of songs
to us if only we could
hear them, the sound of memory
awakening in the hippocampus
as name is joined to thing
on the tongue: Sun-speckles
in tall grass. On the side of the highway
we are speeding and these fireflies
of dappled light are lives burning
themselves on and off to sing.
Moss on granite rock.
Crow shadow, crown
on pine tree. All the grey
humming here:
tree bark and chickadee feather.
Leaves speaking underfoot
crackling in their frost-language,
a song to fear away
the wolves. How the forest keeps
itself so empty when we appear
even though my own backyard cavorts
with the three female deer. How snowflakes
bloom for only five minutes, someone shaking
the glitter now. And the rock wall,
built for a border no racoon recognizes,
goes on and on, like my loneliness
on seeing the red-tailed hawk
disappearing in flight.
Carol Berg’s poems are forthcoming or in Crab Creek Review (Poetry Finalist 2017), DMQ Review, Hospital Drive (Contest Runner-Up 2017), Sou’wester, The Journal, Spillway, Redactions, Radar Poetry, Verse Wisconsin. Her recent chapbook, The Johnson Girls, is available from dancing girl press. She was winner of a scholarship to Poets on the Coast and a recipient of a Finalist’s Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
