Sympathetic Magic (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) - Softcover

SYMPATHETIC MAGIC

The stray dog limped through traffic,
tugged by the invisible leash over miles
and years and griefs to rest her head
in your lap, trusting you with her sleep.

Sometimes what is needed comes to hand-
a book fallen open to a page of benediction,
the balm of song from the car radio's dial,
a pocket-laundered dollar to pay the toll.

In distress, you wish for an apocryphal Veronica
and she arrives at your side, offering
her only tissue, dabbing at your actual eyes.
But darkness still comes before day is yet done.

Like a dowsing rod, you lean toward
whatever is coming to you, the waters
of loving, the sump of loss. Lean in.


PENMANSHIP

Opening the shoebox of my grandmother's letters
is to receive again the pillowy words she wrote
to the girl I once was. Those portly loops curlicue
across her pastel stationery-silly, yet I still love
how the sturdy girth of her Rs and her bosomy Bs
carry their prodigious pocketbooks to town
with the chubby vowels somersaulting after.
I practiced my cursive when I wrote her back,
using gray sheets from the Big Chief tablet.
At school, my teacher, whom I otherwise adored,
lassoed my letters with red ink, tried to stanchion
my hand in the lines of Palmer Method exercises.

Since then I've made a study of it, the slant
and weight of a pen stroke, this dying art-
the means by which we might come to know
one another, how we wish to be understood.
My mother's writing, pin-neat, is a steady stitch
sewn into grocery lists and valentines, ending
each line with the snipped thread of a sentence,
while my dad, who rightly prefers to type,
has a style that looks like somebody dumped out
a drawer full of forks and rubber bands,
his signature jouncing down a mile of bad road.
And the seismograph of my brother's notes
scrape the page with a series of halts and peaks.

Years of grading student essays have taught me
to decipher crimped print that embosses thought
on paper; slashes, both erratic and brash;
girlish, licorice twists; and briary marginalia.
My friend sends an inscrutable postcard from Greece,
and in the library, I squint over the great poet's words,
so trembly and faint that graphite seems to evaporate
into pure essence. My own script, fluid and elliptical,
is a visceral pleasure, given the momentum of the pen.
The last upstroke, a scarf unfurled in a gust of wind.


A BRIEF HISTORY OF BARBED WIRE

The horizon was traipsing away west
and that vast land did not know it was owned.

Acres were platted and plotted and plowed.
The fly-vexed cattle of the dominion

were herded, made to graze given pastures.
Now a deputation of starlings alights the fence,

which does not hold snowmelt, pollen or smoke,
not the hawk, not the shadow of the hawk.

Evenings the strung wire thrums a hymn of wind.


SISTER ANONYMOUS

They discover the dead girl
in a culvert, blood corsaging
her white fluttering blouse,
an embarrassment of bloated
limbs, broken teeth, a face
gemmed over with scabs.
Nearby ants scribble their hill,
beginning a campaign
for her last moist places.

Some say it began in a truck stop's
glass-spangled parking lot,
the hum and fog of the rigs' exhaust
muffling the shouts that followed her
this far down the state highway,
where a V of geese drags its shadow
across winter's brittle pastures.
Of course, who can know for certain?

Dear sister anonymous, dead
on the side of the road, where
is your coat? The one your mother
buttoned up to your chin,
sending you off on that errand
from which you never came home.


GRAND MAL

The aura comes on, and your face,
almost becalmed, dims and strays.
It begins with a twitch, your head
quirking to the side, and then
an electric arc spasms the body
into gnashings and flailings
and thrashings, and she tries
to keep you from falling,
but you do fall, an ugly thud
on the floor, where she kneels
to blunt, as best she can,
your self-punishing fists
and fitful kicks, saying your name.
And from your mouth comes
a primal, torn-open sound,
and like a thunderous day
with little rain, your contortions
begin to quieten and quell,
and at last you lay slack
and insensible with your shoulders
bruised and a bloody tongue.
But mercifully you won't remember
these halting minutes when you go
so deep into yourself it seems to her
you might not, might never, return.