Farfaraway’s Neighborhood

Foxglove Purpurea

foxglove curves like a spine

vulpine floribunda

purple cups

look nothing like fox gloves

that little bit of dark fur

on the paws

only looks like a back bone

with fluted vertebrae

digitalis in the nectar

every part a poison

I keep it away from my daughter

so tall, it tops the fence

and waves in the wind

paralyzing beauty

she reaches out a hand

to touch the purple

that she can't reach

drawn to taboo

look! two have joined

spines entwined

rapture

stem to stem

Lucy Simpson, Seattle, 2009

the serpents in her hair

I am her audience in this hour

of dim day – sun's daily death

singing bones of winter elms

I have waited for her birch fingers

to unclasp her taciturn bun

for her auburn currents to fall

loose with red tinder fish

swimming the light of day’s low tide

where she sits brush clutched in hand

torturing her scalp with one hundred strokes

till her hair shines voltaic

till I hear hissing from her head

She gathers in the coils

and wraps them tight

snapping the lock of the clip

For one half hour

she and I were free

Lucy Simpson, 12./2009, Seattle

The Girl Who Waits

(after Abbott Handerson Thayer's painting, Virgin Enthroned, 1891)

A mother with two children is strapped

on a cross of disturbed night

weary of midnight walks with babies

The soles of her slippers are thin

One child, the strawberry blond girl

offers her a sprig of rosemary

for remembrance, for waking up

but she is too tired to see

The daughter will wait patiently

for the mother's eyes to open

a sheet of ice cracking on the creek bed

in the early thaws of March

Lucy Simpson, revised 12/2009

432px-Virgin_Enthroned_1891_Abbott_Thayer

Memoriam

In lawn chairs under stars.  On the dock
at midnight, anchored by winter clothes,
we lean back to read the sky.  Your face white
in the womb light, the lake's electric skin.

Driving home from Lewiston, full and blue, the moon
over one shoulder of highway.  There,
or in your kitchen at midnight, sitting anywhere
in the seeping dark, we bury them again and
again under the same luminous thumbprint.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.

There stones are salt and mark where we look back.
Your mother's hand at the end of an empty sleeve,
scratching at your palm, drawing blood.
Your aunt in a Jewish graveyard in Poland,
her face a permanent fist of pain.
Your first friend, Saul, who died faster than
you could say forgive me.
When I was nine and crying from a dream
you said words that hid my fear.
Above us the family slept on,
mouths open, hands scrolled.
Twenty years later your tears burn the back of my throat.
Memory has a hand in the grave up to the wrist.
Earth crumbles from your fist under the sky's black sieve.
We are orphaned, one by one.

On the beach at Superior, you found me
where I'd been for hours, cut by the lake's sharp rim.
You stopped a dozen feet from me.
What passed in the quiet said:
I have nothing to give you.

At dusk, birch forest is a shore of bones.
I've pulled stones from the earth's black pockets,
felt the weight of their weariness - worn,
exhausted from their sleep in the earth.
I've written on my skin with their black sweat.

The lake's slight movement is stilled by fading light.
Soon the stars' tiny mouths, the moon's blue mouth.

I have nothing to give you, nothing to carry,
some words to make me less afraid, to say
you gave me this.
Memory insists with its sea voice,
muttering from its bone cave.
Memory wraps us
like the shell wraps the sea.
Nothing to carry,
some stones to fill our pockets,
to give weight to what we have.

Anne Michaels

My Friend Bathes in Rattle Snake Lake

I watch the words appear

in her clean holy skin

sins writ therein

tiny crow's feet

small sparrow tracks

in tan expanse

I watch her slowly take

her second dip

in the dark lake

She bends waters to her will

The silent pines

strange witnesses

to the consummation

of opalescent fish

between her thighs

which have let forth

a boy fresh as

spring fallen snow

Lucy Simpson, Seattle, 12/2009

There is something
in the hieroglyphs
of her face
I cannot translate

There is some formation
in the topography
of her hands
I do not know

She hands me
the tea and smiles

It is the season of bone
china and platters

Still at thirty-nine
I am no better
at reading the portents
in tea leaves
or the paths
in the hair-line cracks
on a china cup

Lucy Simpson, Seattle, 12/2009

He loved them so much
he ate them up
the little piggies ten
the salty eyes

Ops' womb was sore
split like a pomegranate
Milk fever nearly killed her

The stone he had swallowed

Had been bitter

Dyspepsia all his days

His other swallowed children

were tiny blue and comatose

floating in his belly

Now a child rolls back to him

The tight-fisted burly boy

Saturn shakes the dust from his hair

And digs his fingers in the rocks

Iron and sweet caramel of his blood

drips in his mouth

“Look I can give you this!"

He bargains.

 "Let’s play catch!

Let’s go fishing!"

It is too little too late

Like the husk of a seed

His old flesh is destroyed

And the new gods

Greenly grow

Lucy Simpson, Seattle, 12/2009

The Damnation

Before the adamantine gate, I clear my throat
To summon resonance, collect my epithets and gird my bones,
Prepared to talk my way into Hell.

I beat at the gate till my knuckles turn to cheese.
Rhadamanthus, Minos, Aeacus, I hammmer with little words
That thrum in my old, gone pulse, that sting of Tisiphone.

"Let me in!  Let me leave air,
Inhale your sulfurous steam-pits, be massaged with staves.
Best of beasts, I want to burn.  Singe my bones!

"Let me lose the shape of self: where is the rack
That rids us of abominable skin?
I want to hear my sockets crack like kindling.

"Can I bend my bones, touch crown to talon in a perfect wheel
Like ancient snake with tail in mouth?
Beset my flesh, its choices.  Spend my blood!"

In language stripped from tongue as I with hot meat from bone,
Verbs active as my standing hair,
I crowd the judges, kneel before the keepers:

"Teach anguish so outrageous that known pain
Will seem as trivial as an ant with one leg gone
Laboring up the mound with a dead fly.  Amputate my whine

"So the sound is of wood being sawed in the farther orchard
Mixed with the smell of asphodel, fresh shavings,
And apples tumbled on spongy ground.

"Solder lips shut, melt my north and south.
Distribute my precious organs impartially among the larger dogs.
Rake my remains, to smoke away their age,

"Delivered at last from my thought and my things,
My net weight, my engorged heart,
So humbled that my purposes grow grass.

"Oh sink me as germ, a seed,
To Tartarus, where worms are gray..."
The sentence rains on my upraised fists" "Away!"

"Here carrion birds swoop down at dark to feast.
Some bulb or bump is left, the prey of love..."
I hear a shape that sucks about the gates

Calling its own name, answering itself;
Then, in a chink, displaying its torn grin
As it preens its pulp.

The old men say, as they turn with clang of clothes,
"A soul without a self? We've selves to burn!"
And after, only vapor drifting up.

Carolyn Kizer