Poetry
Spring 2008
Colette Inez
For Sarah Hannah
Daughters of Atlas, why didn't you fly
from your northern constellation
to pull her by the hair, honey-colored, long.
She required your strength.
She didn't mean it, she didn't mean to fall.
Hercules, son of Zeus, given this labor,
you would have grabbed her by the waist,
supple, flowing into a body
that contemplated astronomy.
She wanted to hear what stars tell clocks,
news from the shore of galaxies.
She didn't mean to disappear.
Sarah. Sharah, meaning princess in Hebrew,
we celebrate her intellect and beauty.
She meant to return to us, gold rings glistering
across that arc of the unknown where we look for her,
snared in radiance.
Rachel Wetzsteon
May Poles
— in memory of Sarah Hannah
Sarah, the night I learned of you
the Spanish sunset split in two:
since then I've been looking through
blurred windows at a warring sky
where violent crimson tendrils vie
with wisps of light that madly try
to hold onto their fragile piece
of vault despite the fierce increase
of red that lacks the heart to cease.
You knew too well the frail tightrope
between grand plan and slender hope,
scanned buoy, arm and heliotrope
as fish inspect thin strips of sand;
you could not live on this parched land.
But, dear friend fallen, understand
I will not let the velvety
encroachments declare victory;
I will not let the memory
of all your strength and wild delight
be made one micro-beam less bright
by all the bullies of the night.
Instead I'll cast into the air
a picture of your frank wry stare,
a locket of your golden hair,
your poem about the salad days,
and watch these souvenirs amaze
the scarlet henchmen of sad ways
who carved such trenches in your mind
but cannot touch the brilliant, kind
and joyful trace you left behind
or find me nursing the belief
that red's a ruler, not a thief
ruthless in its lust for grief.
Vanished gorse-girl, my first urge is
to despair, but rawness merges
with resolve, and so my dirge is:
let's stare at the setting sun,
hazard an opinion
of who has lost and who has won;
let's regard her lasting spark
and tell the tyrants of the dark
who has left the greater mark.
Alison Woods
Departure
(for Sarah Hannah)
We hallucinate our mothers;
they come to us with the bizarre
offerings of ghosts — willow branches
woolen with tear-shaped buds — and they
impart in us a love of the unnameable.
So we begin: star grass, rice weed, dune grass,
oats, curly willow, eucalyptus, corkscrew willow ...
We march into the field of language,
hearts ablaze, mouths open.
There is a word between what we see and who we are;
when the botany of sorrows becomes thick, there is
hallucination, another season, a new life, just beyond.
Sarah Hannah
Bright Leaves
At the basement window —
Light and dark vying for preeminence
In a damp room below ground
In the stone encumbrance of the house,
Dim, but not viewless:
Two panes by the ceiling, level
With the grass and terrace,
And in my angle of sight: the sun,
A panoply of leaves veined and trembling,
And if I stood on red benches
I could lean up against the glass
And watch the garden, while the bees sparked
In the hostas, and the mint broadened.
I watched my father smooth cement for the planter,
My mother in a straw hat, squatting over weeds,
Turning over earth with the green-handled spade —
A high ring when she struck stone,
And when she ran the hose:
The squeal of the outside faucet,
The rush of water. To that cool basement
My mind still goes,
The gray gas meter purring in a question,
The walls now and then threading
With worms and rain.
A ray in a low room,
A house for darker hours.
Early Meadow Rue
(Thalictrum dioicum)
The species name alludes to the fact that the male and female flowers are on separate plants,
and is derived from a Greek word meaning "two households."
I am walking in the middle,
In the wood.
Dry bark,
Unbridled nettle.
I cannot see the road;
I cannot see the river,
But I know they bound me,
Side to side,
Like a father and a mother—
North-south, engendering uncertainty—
The road gray, unbending,
The river flashing in harsh brilliance,
Now and then overstepping the shore.
How I wish I could possess
The plain dispassion of the one
And the daring of the other,
And not wander in between
Along pale fringes, cast off
To thin stalks' ends.
An eternity, it seems, between clearings.
Coin, Byzantine Empire, A.D. 610-641
Across the Burying Ground (1660)
That stocks old Boston's famous lies a shop:
Stamps, gems, cloying porcelain kittens, money.
Decay made the choice — a bronze sprouting spots
Exquisite, green. Three men in skirts, above
Their heads a host of crosses: Heraclius,
Martial, and some other guy, feet rubbed clean off.
The back's all numismatic calculus:
M4y ANN over CON, speaking of,
I overpaid, I'm told, and dates can't be
Banked on. Still, I love to palm it, make believe
They're girls — Yeats's fates — in time, tune, those three;
Drop them in the slot at the gimcrack store;
They'll sing! So fret not, Willie, sail no more.
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