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Alison Luterman Page 3 Sustain
1.
My love plays piano and his
foot hovers above the pedal.
Sustain, they call it when
the note floats
like a basketball player
suspended in air,
or a question whose purpose
is to remain unanswered.
There’s only this low
keening urgency,
the sound of mourning doves,
drone and descant, murmur
and coo.
I am learning to rest inside
the word enough
its rough leathery
consonants, its f
of finitude.
2.
To bear up under
pain, or the memory of pain
repeating itself, like
scales, as if we were practicing
to never do again what
of course we will do again…
3.
I love you
the way language loves the
tongue,
the way a sentence loves its
verb,
and parentheses love
whatever they enclose.
I love you the way notes
love the fingers that play them,
the way the ear loves sound
as well as the silence that
comes after.
I love you the way a bridge
loves land,
anchoring itself to the
river banks so it can arch
over waters too rough to
swim.
I love you the way an apple
loves the teeth that bite it,
and a worm loves the earth
it turns.
4.
After divorce
we sustained heavy losses,
multiple injuries,
head wounds, trauma, shock.
But you can’t sustain shock.
You have to let it go, or move on into deeper waters.
5.
Give us this day our
stone-ground wholegrain toast with organic butter,
our fair trade coffee, our
soy creamer, our free-range eggs,
our morning paper with its
dismaying headlines,
our kissing and teasing in
the kitchen.
Let it all go on, just
another day, or week, or ten
or twenty years.
Barely enough time to slip
through this life
like a fish through a hole
in the net,
or a string of pearls
through nimble fingers,
a lone saxophone note draped
around the silken neck of night.
6.
When I was young I
worshipped the spark
of the ignition, turn of the
key in the lock,
open door, blank page, lost
maps,
deserted freeways, and
myself.
Me, with my thumb stuck out,
going for broke, coast to
coast, on shredded brakes.
Later, after the fire
had burned through and taken
with it my most cherished
obstacles,
I learned to live in a field
of ash, holding
sorrow when there was
nothing else to hold onto.
7.
I don’t know this woman
with the clean kitchen, the
watered garden,
curly-leafed kale and
immortal chard
growing around her house.
I don’t know how
she keeps it going, sustains
this note
we’ve put our weight on,
or how the trees keep on
standing there
with all the trouble they’ve
seen,
breathing in poison, giving
out oxygen.
I want to be like them,
though I am only
a flesh apple of hope and
doubt.
I want your hand in mine,
as the old world ends and
something else is born
every moment,
singing love’s praises just
a little while longer. --Alison Luterman
originally published in
Hanging Loose
Fig Tree
Offering herself to
strangers,
her ripe purple ova,
her sweet sacks of seeds
soft for the squeezing and
tasting--
somebody tell her
not to do that!
Sprawled all over the
sidewalk
for any dogwalker to finger,
any old lady, hobbling by on
her walker, gets one,
or homeless guy settling in
for a smoke,
or surreptitious single
mother
with her plastic bags,
her army of climbing kids.
Not very ladylike,
crotch open for a sneakered
foot,
a panting embrace,
and all that black honey,
oozing.
See how her heart’s left
smashed on the sidewalk
for feral cats to sniff,
her intimate goo underfoot,
pecked by pigeons, swarmed
with ants.
Should have pruned her
harder,
brought her up short
before she showed her desire
so freely
upraised arms opening to
sky, profligate
branches that could poke
somebody’s eye out:
such crazy need to feed the
world.
© Copyright, 2011,
Alison Luterman. |