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finchar@muohio.edu

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RUNNING IN CHURCH

                        for Marie

 Then, you were a hot-thinking, thin-lidded tinderbox.
Losing your balance meant nothing at all. You would
pour through the aisles in the highest cathedrals,
careening deftly as patriarchs brooded.

You made the long corridors ring, tintinnabular
echoes exploring the pounded cold floor,
forcing the walls to the truth of your progress:
there was a person in this church's core. 

Past thick stained-glass colors wafted and swirling
in pooled interludes that swung down from the rafters,
cinnabar wounds threw light on your face, where the
pliant young bones were dissolving in laughter.

INSIDE THE VIOLET 

Beside the long hedge on my parents' drive,
where the gravel waited daily for their tires
to crunch it open, in the narrow band
of earth along the hedge that kept the loam's
thick secret from the shifting sun, I knew
a purple violet. It always grew there,
hanging its knotty shoulders in the shade
of large, more splendid leaves, its crumpled head
releasing toward the earth.  

                                                            One day I crouched
to find its eye much closer than before
and stared inside. My own eye was lost
in the echoing hold of the raw deep I saw,
though my hands held back inside the driveway world
that slowed its pulse around me as loud sun
shattered all the gravel into shade
and stroked the earth.  The middle of the violet loomed;
its heart was peeking into me to hold
me like a violet, too.  As its yellow, strong
throat turned to me and opened like a door,
interior light poured from a silent sun,
flooding my face and choking my eyes, until
I stopped looking in violets. 

TRIBUTE
"You'll find--it when you try to die--"
--Emily Dickinson


Of all the words I cannot live,
I have elected hers

to haunt me till my margins give.
around me, web and bone.

Her voice has vanished through my own.
She makes me like a stone

the falling leaves will sink and stay
not over, but upon.

The Woman On The Beach
for Wallace Stevens


She could cliff and order waves, if they could climb
over to feed on her touch, or listen near
in a frieze of drowning fingers. But it's time
to open herself to drowning now, to hear

phantoms come tooling over shale in roars,
rooting with waverings and singing air
out of her hands until she plants and pours,
learning the music. It makes no difference where

her seeds go out, her harvests in. A rack
of dark waters nears her questioning, till caves
curl under her noticing shore. They double back
noticeless, stilling her undertow in waves.

Spiralled with dreams, nourished and bound and woman,
she gathers to green, listening, shaman and human.

(WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL)

Letter For Emily Dickinson

When I cut words you never may have said
into fresh patterns, pierced in place with pins,
ready to hold them down with my own thread,
they change and twist sometimes, their color spins
loose, and your spider generosity
lends them from language that will never be
free of you after all. My sampler reads,
"called back." It says, "she scribbled out these screeds."
It calls, "she left this trace, and now we start"-
in stitched directions that follow the leads
I take from you, as you take me apart.

You wrote some of your lines while baking bread,
propping a sheet of paper by the bins
of salt and flour, so if your kneading led
to words, you'd tether them as if in thin
black loops on paper. When they sang to be free,
you captured those quick birds relentlessly
and kept a slow, sure mercy in your deeds,
leaving them room to peck and hunt their seeds
in the white cages your vast iron art
had made by moving books, and lives, and creeds.
I take from you as you take me apart.

(NOTRE DAME REVIEW)

Landing Under Water, I See Roots

All the things we hide in water
hoping we won't see them go-
(forests growing under water
press against the ones we know)-

and they might have gone on growing
and they might now breathe above
everything I speak of sowing
(everything I try to love).


(PARTISAN REVIEW)
Running in Church,  and Tribute were published in EVE
(Story Line Press, 1997). 
© Copyright, Annie Finch.

ELEGY FOR MY FATHER

HLF, August 8, 1918—August 22, 1997

                        “Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
                         Is answered in the vortex of our grave       
                The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise.”
                                                   —Hart Crane, “Voyages”

                        “If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand it”
                                                 —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly

past the long edge of the last human shore,

there are deep windows the waves have not opened,

where night is reflected through decades of glass.

There is the nursery, there is the nanny,

there are my father’s magnificent eyes

      turned towards the window.  Is the child uneasy?

      His is the death that is circling the stars.

In the deep room where candles burn soundlessly

and peace pours at last through the cells of our bodies,

three of us are watching,  one of us is staring 

with the wide gaze of a wild sea-fed seal.

Incense and sage speak in smoke loud as waves,

and crickets sing sand towards the edge of the hourglass.

We wait outside time, while night collects courage
around us.  The vigil is wordless.  Once you 

saw time pushing outward, the day in the nursery
when books first meant language, as your mother’s voice
traced out the patterns of letters.  You saw
words take their breath and the first circles open,
their space collapse inward. They sparkled.  Your pen
would scratch ink deliberately, letters incised
like runemarks on stone as you heard, quoting patiently:
Wittgenstein, Gutkind, Gurdjieff, or Weil. 

You watch the longest, move the furthest, deliberate in         breath,
pulling into your body.  You stare towards your death,
head arched on the pillow, your left fingers curled.
Your mouth sucking gently, unmoved by these hours
and their vigil of salt spray, you show us how far
you are going, and how long the long minutes are,
while spiraling night watches over the room
and takes you, until you watch us in turn.

He releases the pages.  Here is the mail,
bringing books, gratitude, students, and poems.
Here are kites and the spinning of eternal tops,
icons, parades, monasteries and boardwalks,
gazebos, surprises,  loons and unspeaking
silence.  Pages again.  The words come
like a scent from a flower.  Geometry is clear.
Language is natural.  The truth is not clever; 

lions speak their own language.  You are still breathing.
Here is release.  Here is your pillow,
cool like a handkerchief pressed in a pocket.
Here is your white tousled long growing hair.
Here is a kiss on your temple to hold you
safe through your solitude’s long steady war;
here, you can go.  We will stay with you,                       loud in the silence we all came here for.  

Night, take his left hand, turning the pages.
Spin with the windows and doors that he mended.
Spin with his answers, patient, impatient.
Spin with his dry independence, his arms
warmed by the needs of his family, his hands
flying under the wide, carved gold ring, and the pages
flying so his thought could fly.  His breath slows,
lending its edges out to the night.  

Here is his open mouth.  Silence is here
like a huge brand-new question that he wouldn’t answer. 
A leaf is his temple.  He gazes alone.
He has given his body; his hand lies above
the sheets in a symbol of wholeness, a curve
of thumb and forefinger, ringed with wide gold,
and the instant that empties his breath is a flame
faced with a sudden cathedral’s new stone.

 Elegy for My Father was published in Inside Grief,
edited by Line Wise, Wise Press, 2001

© All Copyright, Annie Finch.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.