Poetry Magazine, Featured Poet: Grace Grafton, January 2002

Poetry Magazine

Grace Grafton

USA

Grace Marie Grafton has two books out, ZERO from Poetric Matrix Press, and VISITING SISTERS from Coracle Books. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including third coast, syllogism, convolvulus, Poetry Flash and Xanadu. Her poem, Her sisters' proximity, won first prize in The Bellingham Review's poetry contest, and she has been a finalist in Nimrod's poetry contest. Her work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Grace Marie Grafton grew up in Reedley, California, graduated from UC, Berkeley, and NYU, Manhattan. For many years, she has taught in California Poets In The Schools, and has been awarded numerous CA Arts Council grants for her teaching program, which introduces elementary school students to the writing process. In 1998, she was awarded Teacher of the Year by the River Of Words youth poetry contest, co-sponsored by former US Poet Laureate, Robert Hass. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, has two children and two grandchildren.

Telling the story

"Clink" under the window
brief music unaccountable
no spider played an opening note
nothing broke

but sound. What can a person
do? Things unknown,
unknowable, in one's very room
at the time

of trying to know, to catch
the details of a morning,
why? The many red roses framing
the room you

insist you live in. As though
the un-hinge of heavy
scent could balance the sharp horns
of the bull

you must toreador to cross
the threshold into the way
your story's to be told if it's to
mean enter.

The thing is not to question
how to do it any of it.
Into the click-clack flamenco you
remember

from Seville. These colors were
surely there, a time back when
your thoughts surrendered to
your hipbones

that carried you through the passion
of a black beast's breath like a bull-
dancer of Crete, accompanied only
by body

focus, you knew that, heard it
in flamenco chords: the way to tell a room
so everything gleams, small people
fishing in

a past scene, blue couch on the far
wall, soft red chairs, self-
portrait, all seen before yet
strange enough

even you begin to
listen all over again. Are there
windows in the red and yellow room?
Do they open?

Woman and her white shadow

1. The Woman speaks

Consider my face a mimicry,
body begun and sung
by the dark sketch of red
leaves bending quickly
into cipherless wood, impersonal
altering light. Only by grotesque
erasure, even to binding
my hair in tonsured gold -
substance that addicts men,
that siphons away their essence -
only by reducing lineage and stature
to an actor's blank stare, do I begin.

2. The Shadow speaks

She has erased herself,
refused hair,
everywhere is virgin land.
Water, grass, buckeye butterfly,
sticky monkey flower, trout, frothy lichen
reflect and slide off her.
They exist in their
flutter, reach, swim, spread.
She exists as
empty breath
and the bones of the toes.

3. The Two

form the fear that breaks
into the body at unlocking.
Sisters that no longer need
look at each other to know
what remains,
what changes.
Even the one still clothed
wears on her shoulders
the place she sprang from,
the place she goes,
where her shadow
always is at home.

Their seriousness but the release
of the requisite laugh,
they are the feeling in the meadow
when weather rises around you in
the hover and swarm
of sunstruck gnats.

Why is this woman important?

The morning orange juice in
her thin-newspaper kitchen clean floor
toothpaste-colored linoleum, even her air
cannot have a grubby chin.
She has always wanted
it this way, trim, well-laundered fingernails
but her hair keeps sprouting
even after she's shaved her skull,
keeps sprouting that carroty
color, in her dreams she's writhing
in a mess of it matting her bed,
each time she tries to yank it
out from under especially her buttocks,
it jerks her head hard, pulls it
down toward her skin, the generous
milk-pails of her breasts
unbrassiered, swelling
to ghastly proportions within the
hair net within the sheets
she's stolen from the confessional
stalls and pieced together her
dogless evenings under the 60 watts
with the windows open
she hears feet walking and
children's bicycle wheels
turning against her window glass,
she hears the last plane leave
a pink vapor trail across the lost-light sky.

Mountains near the eyes

Swinging on the bars
by her knees, under the playground's cottonwoods
turns up down
empties head
like a saltshaker

Opening the heart
must have a structure
to allow wander to
change the articles
around and around
cracks in cottonwoods' trunks

Somewhere lightning
shivered leaves next to the knees
birds by the feet
hands in sand

Snakes' twist gives what
she could not otherwise fit
into moon-cycle order

Lizards dance
and ladies
line up their red heads
in reassurance

Did she fall on her back to earth?
Breath knocked out, steel pipes
of the play-bars dividing
sky into squares
above breath-deprived
flashes in her eyes

Put what she can't control
into black and white
so the colors and fluids
loose in the foreground of her body
skip hop jump
cartwheels around the uncontrolled
worship at her core

The Dragon and The Phoenix

Neither male nor female, both lovers have
wings. Still believe in
the moon's animal-like
shift through trees
as the basic wood of reality.
How the Pacific surf gnarls
ears and noses into the sandstone
it washes, day and night.
How the turtle hides under the glyphs
of its shell and sings
mud into being.

    Don't explain yourself, Lover,
    I don't want to see your teeth.
    You have admired
    my pomegranate lipstick,
    the scarlet tear painted on my cheek,
    I have admired the harlequin pattern
    on your breasts, thrilled
    to your claws' scrape
    on my featherless hide.

    We won't think of the future.
     I won't think of you losing your
    feathers or growing the stone
    in your craw.
    You won't hear my dry night cough
    or notice the peeling patch
    on my skin.
    Let's drag the folding chairs
    out to the mushroom field.

How the epiphitic Spanish moss
snares the live oak trees in the canyon,
how the hoarfrost congeals
on the wild oat stems
to break, finally, what it regales.
Seeds have fallen.
Beauty is wanton.

All the poems in the book, VISITING SISTERS,
were inspired by the artwork of
various contemporary women artists.