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idwendt@msn.com

We've learned where the big ones grow,
to harvest not from the tops of rocks where shells
fill with sand

to follow the tide out to the farthest reefs we can reach
and still not get wet, where last time we found
giant anemones green-sheathed and dripping under

the overhangs like the cocks of horses, we laughed, or
elephants, having each come to the same conclusion,
fresh from bed and married long enough

to say such things to each other, again
to remember the summer we first discovered mussels
big as fists protecting Sisters Rocks.

Just married and ready for anything, even
mussels were game, black as obsidian, stubbornly
clinging to rocks, to each other, their shells

so tightly together we had to force them apart
with a knife, the meat
inside a leap of orange, poppy-bright; and when

three perch in a row took the hook you'd baited
tender as liver we said we must try them ourselves
someday, if they're safe, which they weren't

all the years we lived down south: red algae in summer
tides infiltrating our chance to experiment, food without precedent,
how would we know what to do?

Counting at last on friends who had been to Europe and now
are divorced, we waded waist deep to pick some,
scraping our knuckles raw on barnacles

none of us knowing to soak our catch two hours at least
to clean out the sand; the sand we took in with butter and lemon
cleaning our teeth for a week.

Now we can't get our fill of them.
Weekend vacations you work to the last, cooking
one more batch to freeze for fritters or stew.

Now we harvest them easily, take the right tools, wear boots
we gave to each other for birthdays so we don't have
to remember to watch out for waves

to feel barnacles unavoidably crushed underfoot
like graveyards of dentures waves have exposed, although
sometimes now I find myself

passing over the biggest, maybe because
they've already survived the reach of starfish,
blindly prowling on thousands of white-tipped canes,

or they've grown extra barnacles,
limpets, snails, baby anemones,
rock crabs hiding behind. As though

age after all counts for something
and I've grown more tender-hearted,
wanting you not to know about the cluster

I found today, for the first
time in years having taken time off from job
and housework and child care, sleeping so late

my feet got wet on the incoming tide, unexpectedly
talking aloud, saying look at that one, bigger even
than Sisters Rocks: a kind of language

marriage encourages, private as memories of mussels,
anachronistic as finding I miss you
picking mussels to take home to you

not the ones you'd pick if you could but fresh
as any young lover's bouquet and far more edible,
more than enough to last us at least a week.

from Singing the Mozart Requiem (Breitenbush Books, 1987)

my own forever, my mother
asked home to lunch each spring,

each spring someone new:
Miss Bloss, Mrs. Kuk, Miss Michaelson never
suspecting we waited for blossom time,

hoping the rain would hold off long enough,
counting the days like notes of that year's recital piece
always I played for her, practicing

hours longer than any
hundred years' sleep any child could ever imagine:
the princess, the castle awakening, parting

branches blossoming over that aisle of tulips and lilacs, bright
promises I didn't know I was making someday
to become that same teacher each spring

on the last day of school surprised by a girl planting
instead of a secret next to the ear bent low
a kiss, so quick she never could hear what running

all the way home, crying, she all year
had listened for: yes, she was
yes, a good girl

a good
girl
a good girl.

from Questions of Mercy 
(part 4 of 14)

4.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Father of Jürgen, lost
wherever your submarine went down:
your son has become an architect, working his way
up, from stage one. If only you could see his own home,
angled just so, so the sun, precisely at noon, will shine
through one small window: high, high, just under the roof.

Father of Olivia, lost
who knows where: your daughter's
a teacher, she can't forget finding, when she
was twenty, your photo, your Wehrmacht uniform (so it
was true!), your parents, insisting the ending was wrong.
When she can, she asks poets and Jews to speak at her school.

Father of Volker (professor of
Geography): he learned at twelve you fell
with the SS in Hungary. Every Sunday the family
dinner: the East German question, your absence everyone
skirted around. He's taken a photo of where you fell, a flower.
He speaks this line from a poem: What we seek for has no place.

Fathers whose names must not be spoken
Fathers we don't know how to mourn
Fathers who may not be in Heaven
Fathers who didn't come home

Father who did, who lived,
for your son's first six years, behind bars
of a Russian prison camp, your son--named for your
best friend shot down over England--your son has become
a pastor, the father of four, a concert organist. Big man.
Jolly man. All his life he has hated his name.

Varenna, Ravenna, Verona: listen!
Each day the same call for vespers, the same
church bells--five, or six, or seven--shifting
places and rhythm, the way each name

(Carerra, Ferrara, Volterra) can be
rung like a chord--dominant, tonic,
subdominant--each village diocese
superimposed over the lake. Phonics

(Bellamo, Milano, Lugano) like beads
on a rosary; hallowed, the sounds the tongue
makes of experience, echoing. One needs
practice, though, and alertness. What

if Augustus (Assisi, Brindisi, Frasassi)
had tried to exchange Ichia for Carpi,
instead of Capri? What if you, trying
to get to Merano, its castle, started

out for Murano? You (Cortona, Cremona,
Crotone) would enjoy the museum of glass.
Perhaps it's the same as with fauna
and flora: that one subtle accent--

glossy or dull black cap (Arezzo,
Tremezzo, Bomarzo)--telling us Marsh Tit
or Willow Tit. Hidden, the presence
of gills distinguishing Amanita

from Puffball. It's serious business,
this verbal bouquet: each village, each town
(Geranium, Chrysanthemum, Delphinium)
proud of its own unique chromosomes.

Each village, each town, a place (Laglio)
that just might (Menaggio) try to elope
with your heart (Aureggio). Learn to
sing its name. Love it well (Bellagio).

Britt, had I been driving, I wouldn't have stopped the car
where you did. Right then my own
focus was far over the rise: finally surfacing, this
top right edge of northeastern Norway, higher up even than

Vardø (that dot on the map, that scar
retreating Germans once burned onto the thumb
of the left hand of Finnmark): this
rocky shoreline flat

up against the Barents Sea, magnified
beyond imagining, here where the world's largest
bulldozer finally came to the end of the line, how
could my camera possibly capture the size of that rubble: Titanic

after Titanic slabs frozen all
the way to the northern horizon in that
impossible angle all history books show.
But this is where you stopped the car,

and with the children, clattered down the steep
slope of the shoulder, bent over a cluster of rust-
colored stones: rounded, smooth, small
fists a river could have left behind (except

this was the side of a mountain), their surfaces blossoming ice-
green, almost chartreuse, and yellow and orange; white; black;
scab-like; infinitesimal spore-prints of distant galaxies;
sea spume, petrified: this unexpectedly beautiful

lichen, surviving eons of Arctic winter (and now,
all those miles in the trunk, on the plane), and blooming, still,
in this still life of stones gathered together on my
coffee table like lilac petals, geraniums--flowers within

flowers--because you said I should take them back to Tromsø,
thousands of miles from home, where I never expected some days
to feel myself adrift and close to sinking under too
many impressions, the whole wide world

off-center. This sun,
where I never have seen it before.
Those truant stars, my sense of direction.
Myself, at the end of the birds' own migration.

How to make sense of it all?
This borrowed apartment five stories over the ground.
Picking me up, each time I look back at that image of you,
looking down. Before me, these treasured, hospitable stones.

© All Copyright, Ingrid Wendt.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.