Surfaces
Fire When Ready
Saint Jerome
Men and Birds
Little Vigil
Earthquake Archaeologies
Death Passport
Ode to Almost
The eye unaided
The Varieties of Religious Experience
With pristine surfaces
I am done. Done:
with silver dollars
shipped unhatched
in clear chrysalides,
coins no one can flip—
straight from the mint,
specie thumbprints abase—
and with cherrywood desks
at which one must write
with padding under the page.
Done. For facials
I’ve spent the last
of my patience. For beauty
give me window panes
slowly pooling, molasses
glass, and for space a counter
seat where I can write
and wreck my nails
on the formica coming
unglued. More: give me
back the backs
of my grandmother’s hands,
roped in periwinkle.
If readiness cannot vault me
from dock to lake; if, the last
to cannonball, I can barely
be trusted to clutch my knees
and bombard a raft of aunties,
how can I be counted upon
to spark cannons’ rope wicks?
I mean, say we play at strife,
at strafing, and I hang back,
how will I, winking, fell a mark?
How, party to true fusillades,
will I work a joystick drone?
I can only assume you will
have to find me unready. Panic
is the violence I can commit
to. All of my fire’s unsure.
Without recourse to lions,
the icons’ makers paint the saint
wheedling thorn from paw.
They are pets who drape
Jerome’s lap; they are beasts
who charge his desk: furious
muppet, Shetland sphinx,
a monster reared upon thin
monkey’s haunch. One artist
dilates the lion’s eyes while
the priest—hypnotist, manicurist—
pushes the animal’s cuticles
back, each snug to claw’s proximal
fold. On widows, the man had
the same effect: saucer-eyed,
they too trusted him; they let him
press their stricken hands.
Visions of Jerome: ducking
a woman’s far-away stare
in the nail salon’s carrels,
coloring in keratin talons.
Without recourse to Christ,
Jerome pictures a cousin as he prays,
the erstwhile Lord of foot baths.
If it is possible for a woman to sling an arm
around the neck of a boyfriend who put her other arm
in a sling, a bird might love the man who took
a scissors to its wings’ primaries, careful, balancing
the damage to each side. I am trying not to
compare the falconer to Ike Turner. And I am trying
not to think the super who keeps rooftop pigeons
an orphan master; not to take for a pimp
the lonely guy in the park with a green parrot
epaulet, even though, like a pimp, he named her Jade.
A birdwatcher is not a peeping Tom. Still, it seems
purer to lumber into a rope swing, to dangle heavily
all day, to be old in a weaver’s nest, a hammock
chair, and from there to remark, across a gulf too wide
for craving, the hummingbirds’ hovering.
At this window, I watch people walk: marrieds
and kids carrying piano music and old men
who tilt at spring in tan trench coats. I watch
the dutiful exercise their dogs in all weathers,
in wingtips, in bathrobes, tearing green tongues
from baubles dangling from belt loop or leash,
stooping after the animal squats.
I hear people
walk, too: patter, songs. Even with the windows
closed, I hear the neighbor’s wagon jolt
at each groove between pavers, a rhythm slower
than a train’s but as steady; I wait on its approach.
On occasion, at this window, I behold someone
walking. Yesterday a woman turned the corner
onto Aurora with a butterfly net in her hand.
She was not doing any sort of trick—not striding
atop an inch of air, not balancing the dowel
on a single finger—but she looked like she was.
The net’s mesh was that blue. You need more?
One summer I saw a kid lugging a crockpot
up the street, and the way he set it down to rest,
tucked between his feet, made me sure that what
was inside wasn’t soup but some kind of gift—
say, a koi.
So when I say on occasion I behold
someone walking, I mean I am beholden now
and then, now and then a debtor to awe.
Mantle under mantilla, dirt
restive under tile quilt:
before the earthquakes
someone took a picture
of Antakya—her light sleep
and the men squatting there,
studying the petrified swells
of a mosaic no one knew
to sweep until a hotelier
wanted the ground. The men
in that picture cannot hear
the coming convulsions,
not of earth, not of grief,
but a seismologist also listens,
stethoscope to stone,
for echoes of the quaint
quakes, millennia past,
the ones that raised hills
in Antioch’s ornate floors.
He does not hear a thing,
of course: the quaint is that
which no longer reverberates.
But if the world lasts,
he will not be the last to press
his ear to this bit of ground
and hear nothing: neither
the coming convulsions nor
the clatter of the past,
the percussion of tiles razed
from the graves’ mosaic roof.
Enough of the dead try to drown theirs
that oldtimers line the Styx’s banks, reaping
passports with pool skimmers.
Not that customs hangs on custom in
Hades. In the kingdom of death, no one is
a dual citizen, and no one defects.
Still, some sticklers in immigration
convert heights back to lengths; the two
certificates, this and birth, are alike that way.
The answer to eye color: none. Not that they
will check, of course. In the end, everyone passes
simply by writing their name in Castine.
Afflatus of close shaves
and hairs’ breadths; imp
who goads yearning
to tiptoe; the pinch, the inch
between Thetis’s thumb
and first finger. Almost:
muse of asymptotes;
spur and curb of reach,
of resignation; engine
of our restlessness;
guarantor of not-quites;
old withholder of cigars.
cannot make out the appliqué of lace dickies, arcs
overlapping, that cover algal orbs. This is chalk:
crumble of filigreed beads, iron-on tatting petrified—
not toasted—in place.
Invisible, miracle breeds.
A single spider squeezes, from a dozen piping bags,
noodles of silk; this is gossamer, oozed between Kegels
from ribbed nibs. Not that the naked eye can see
the pit of spinnerets, the spitting image
of Elmer’s caps clustered in kindergartens.
Not that she laps up strangeness, anyway, the eye.
Unaided, she does not stare. Naked prude, she must
wear a barrel to ogle properly: a microscope to tease
the snouts from starfish arms, to spoke snowflakes
with the shafts of poorly cut keys; a telescope to jiggle
the golowillions from Pisces. I do not spare myself—
the poems I have scrolled into spyglass.
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Last night I dreamed that Cora, who is two, set her hand
on my chest and blessed me. In my dream no one else
was amazed. Some thought it clever as a mockingbird
is clever. Some thought it in bad taste.
Well, I too
have called it pageantry, the grace in which I play no real
part: not the imparting, not the being blessed. When towns
fill with riders astride Harleys and lesser steeds, I’ve been
their skeptic, the one wondering which Hells Angel will buy
the farm on his way home. And for the priests who pray
over hamsters, amusement has been the most I could make
of charity.
Bless me, but I am a hypocrite. All day I have felt
the ember of Cora’s concentration, the pressure of her small hand.
Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, and--one other lucky time--UCity Review, as well as other journals and magazines. In addition, she is the co-editor of book reviews for Plume; her own reviews have been published there and in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
