Poetry Magazine, Susan Terris, February 2002

Poetry Magazine

Susan Terris

USA

Editor with CB Follett of "RUNES, A Review Of Poetry ".

Immortality Of Culture

In the dream, I was wheezing as if shrink-wrapped
and wild to fill my lungs with air.
A daytime dream staccato with ravens
in branches of winter trees,
their cries tearing holes
in the thin blue fabric of the sky.

In the photos, my friend is in China
with cormorants, India with a live boa,
and there's a revolving door
and her voice mouthing my name,
yet when I awaken, only the ravens are there.

Do you ever have that feeling, a child asked me, where
the truth is coming, but you don't want to know the truth?
Or the inevitability, I tell myself, like sailors know a storm
is close when all their knots have drawn tight.

O, the brain is tightly-grooved, its mysteries
found only after death.
But ravens are crying. Earth is spinning,
and cells in Petri dishes
keep replicating — immortality
of culture. No code. The spin is

accelerating toward the speed
of light. Looking out, I see a woman falling
before she falls, with no way
to change the past. In my dream, I struggled
for breath and ravens cried,
and I told the child I saw my friend falling

before she fell and did not, did not
want to examine the knots or know about truth.

"RUNES, A Review of Poetry"

Shadow Of A Falling Bird

The shadow of a falling bird against a building
is more real than the bird.
Shadow of a glioblastoma on an MRI
is not real at all.

"It will be short and brutal," the doctor says.

She sees the shadow of her head
on his shirt, sees a framed photo of
the shadow of a bi-plane across foothills
in the Valley of the Queens.

An approximation of truth,
only one measure of reality. She hears
the doctor's voice in the hard sanity
of morning, in the gray uncertainty of morning.

"Ploughshares

Monday Is An Abstract Concept

Dog days of summer: Sirius rises at sunset,
sets at dawn. Old news, but her brain is unable
to track present tense. The glio is growing again,
forcing paperchains of days to unlink.
Now in the meadow where Willa Cather wrote,
she sits for hours watching honeybees,
listening to chuk-chuk of chipmunks
and brush of redwings. Since she's lost numbers,
one to one-hundred scallop the air in random order
along with the black-white-gold predator above
who chills her with his nameless shadow.

August, no longer the eighth month, has become
an old college friend. She and August speak of
God and evolution. They read in the Times
how the chirp of crickets has been unchanged for
fifty-five million years. Such fidelity amuses her,
yet when she turns to share this with August,
she finds it's midnight, and she is alone.
Fifty-five million minutes is more than she has,
but cricket-song in the full moon meadow coils
around her and makes her think of other old things:
how the gibbous moon brings a tidal bulge
and small moonquakes, how Venus — during
its night — looks not round but crescent-shaped.

Someone, her friend before August perhaps, has
asked about a lunch date for Monday. Or Thursday.
The days will not hold hands and stay in their circle.
Sunday is no where to be found and has, she believes,
run off with August. The remaining ones, those
open links, seem to have become colors instead of
placeholders for time. In the dark, their tones
iridesce. She will, she decides trumpeting a blade
of black grass, get someone to dial for her,
phone her friend to say they'll meet when it is
yellow and all the old, old, old crickets sing green.

"The Comstock Review"

All of these poems will be included in her new book from Cedar Hill Publications due later in 2002. Susan Terris' new collection of poetry FIRE IS FAVORABLE TO THE DREAMER will be published by Cedar Hill Publications in 2002.