Surety
Holiday Vignette
Seeking Air
Increased and Spread
Drainage Network
Finely
Wet Soils
Verdant
Movement
Clean As
In America, The Seasons
Poem (after Frank O'Hara)
The dog buries her nose in the sand and there is an echo in my left ear, a pressure like fluid. I have been keeping an internal catalog of the light—in the color on the mountain, in the sky, in the creosote and the primrose and the sand. Cataloguing all the ways in which I have strained to be other than I am, the ways I am not immediately legible to the people I love. That might be a slip of intuition. Like tethering myself to the repetition of a word that I know I don’t pronounce quite correctly. Something metrically off, a sliver of shine beneath gravel, or dust gathered on a mirror. Things don’t connect—they correspond, he wrote, in quotation. And I did admire accuracy. Granite sand with flecks of quartz. After our walk, the dog rolls over and shows me her spotted belly, four paws lifted, and her mouth relaxes open. Already April sends me to my knees.
Early December in Santa Fe, snowy
plaza and tiny blue lights, wet wool coats in the Spanish
restaurant, tacit acknowledgment of the way
our dynamic had shifted, reduced from two sets
of two to two and one. She is nine months
pregnant, and he sits at the table with his body tilted
toward hers, an openness in specifically her direction.
On the northward drive, the sky had been blue
and then pink through dusk to muted purple against
the Sandias, also a kind of purple, and we had thought,
had talked, about the sky in the context of other skies,
other landscapes. When we saw the snow and the ice-packed roads,
again—other states and cities, other versions of ourselves
in winter. And then? There was nothing about that Saturday
we hadn’t seen before, but I ask myself to be present to
this life I am leaving. To keep time, not to startle at its recursion.
Still ideals approach through a rendering of rains and profiles.
If not called acreage, at least projected onto vanished furrows
and equivalents of necessity. Sneezing, willful pressure.
An atmospheric pressing. Pressurized regression, tins of fish,
boxes of apples.
Then a simmer assumes a previous shape, gestures with weather, loops along,
a month with rounded corners. A quiet, problemed swell,
though reasonably well-behaved, considering.
Beneath the condensation that edged in, the house with its soft tasks, a spreading.
A day as usual, with difficult edges and interludes.
First of all: consider the space, the brick wedged in the door, the creak of the stairs.
Your neighbor moved away, finally, and left you a book,
which you accepted because its first poem moved you.
Its second did not, so you tossed it aside.
I shivered in your bedroom as though the weather were your doing.
Yield to your environment, stretch in a thin rectangle of sun. Movement
for which language has no key,
for which words will be a mute cipher. Green evening, churchbell lullaby.
The hostas have more than tripled in size. As usual, I’ve been asking
the wrong questions. I’ve lived here all these months
and still I don’t know why the deer don’t come near my garden.
Now, consider the river, and consider the fact that when you found me
I was fully convinced that west was north and that the river
was flowing the other way entirely, though this is a problem of attention, of course.
I am performing a self-reading—
that you have caught me off-guard is not your fault.
I’ve been told that after a significant change it takes your dream-life months
to catch up with your waking world.
That I should expect to dream old normals until my new normal begins to wear at last.
This is what I know more than
I know anything else:
solitude is entirely sensory.
I’ll admit that I laugh easily
now, though I will not hold you
responsible. This tangible warping
of weather touched down
near an old home while
my local wind pushed water
from air, slow and under
cloud cover. I would like to only
be exactly here, but extreme
presence bears the
cost of language.
I’ve decided to trust your ability
to manage ambiguity. You wouldn’t
know it, there’s no indication, and
eloquence is a species of quietness.
I would like to save the image
of the wet space beneath my window,
at once a dense and sprawling thing.
Imposing a narrative is key to understanding
the story—this tilting toward the literal.
I cannot cope with this literalness. I will
diminish it until I can carry it,
until it sits silently
on the page and has no reality.
I am grateful and so thirsty
that I almost cannot stand.
She wrote to me about
the hummingbird
outside her window,
locked in quiet combat
with the summer.
She has such a minor body,
she wrote.
I don’t often see birds
here, though I can hear them.
I ought to feel bereft,
and something so
simple as the spring could
have been handled with
a little more grace.
The entire town shows hail damage.
We were built for roof-life
but this undoing is still
so sincere and in goodwill.
I have the wrong vocabulary
for describing the color of this day
but I can tell you
that I dreamed of so many bees
and took this to be a good omen.
The sod has come loose,
the pesticide truck has already
been by twice this week,
rain too heavy for anything to stick.
It seems autonomy is an extravagant expectation.
Downstairs, a girl stamps her foot
and declares that her cider is not cider
and so she does not want it.
I understand this, for I also
have never been good about keeping
things nice or clean.
I had planned to control myself this year
but instead have abandoned myself to impulse
the sun cutting a high silhouette
at the reedy scent of cut grass and
fields at various stages of growth
I stop watching and pale
at these vowels
and when I catch my reflection off-guard
I am so
sorry at her bewilderment
Just beyond countyline I found chicory,
stopped to pull at stems, held this neat
blue tangle until Omaha where all but
one bloom had closed. We go forward
or we go back. Such processes reasonably
well understood, though not
sufficient enough impetus
for change. I’ve missed you,
imperceptible as some progress is,
this slow wasting.
Wildfire smoke from Canada yawned
beneath the sun for days and I knew
that if I saw it then you, hundreds
of miles north, had too. Only a string
of coincidences would validate
such flux. We could not palate
this shortsightedness,
but wished to.
We must be thinking in the same kind of pattern again. I seem
to remember heroes, typically not one figure but an example
signifying a larger whole. Taking a view of a larger whole.
Performing that view. I would like to write a series of definite
statements, though I worry over my own absence. [So] I have
abandoned myself to impulses. An emotive pronoun moving
about with such a motor attached. I will not cope with this
literalness. I have waylaid a series of statements. I thought I might
write myself into a formal conclusion. Instead, a trail without end,
muddied; or with an end but not one which is probable to articulate
precisely. Attracted [attached] to brevity and the need not to prove.
And what does it keep concealed. And why, with a willingness to be
partial. Back on that platform between exhaustive and selective,
where [no][every]thing is under attack.
False starter, regretter of turns. Do I enjoy the classroom? I do.
Yesterday the larches along the Blackfoot beginning to turn.
A difficult color. The girl next to me had listened and copied
down the quotation, but syntactically transposed. I said no [to my
burden] to my hurt. To the ice rooted in my chest. A sudden wind
looses yellow leaves from their branch. (What I caught of the
reflection in.) To a quickened bareness, prepare for other minor
ices. And anyway toward dusk the autumn follows. Anyway
westward the momentum of my inquiry, opposite the wistful pull
of the harvested. Necessarily set against. To lace my shoes
with no need to double-knot. To pull at a necessary snag.
In September ladybugs may not bite, but they will come inside
(the windows closed against) and the species has a hurt, this one
feisting between the wearing sleeve of my sweater and my skin.
We haven’t had time yet to establish a shared lexicon or a tonal shorthand, so I’ve been verifying
idiomatic expressions before using them in messages to you, and this desire for precision
draws against my impulse toward play. In other ways, I have attempted to bypass my body.
And my body has protested, asserting itself. Away from you, I settle into myself and strain
again for language, but my descriptive muscle fails, or falls short. I don’t know what purple
the mountains of my new home are, or at least what their purple should be called. Then a blue scrub jay,
a shape against the yucca. I note it as information. A private signature.
Then you’re here. After dark we sit inside, at the table, wearing thick socks and listening mutually.
You cover my feet with yours. Now I pay attention to other sonic habits, what animals at dawn,
what patterns of listening. The wind asserts itself, the pitch of it in the shade sails. It shudders
the creosote. In the morning, you fit a blueberry inside a raspberry and present this to me, appreciative
of the scale of each berry in relation to the other. A complementary image and a simple exchange,
I don’t mention it as innuendo. Where could the idiom land that verifies this, coffee in the press, creases
in the linen, berries in water, and your fingers with mine, magnified by breathing.
Anna Zumbahlen is a poet living in Joshua Tree, California. She holds a PhD in English & Literary Arts from the University of Denver and an MFA from the University of Montana. Her first book, Surety, recently won the Hillary Gravendyk Prize and is forthcoming from Inlandia.
