USA

parsonnesbitt@earthlink.net

Isaac speaks again

I know this place.
I lay hog-tied on these stones
wrists and ankles bound
behind my back. My father
held the rope for God.
The knife’s silver
heat curdled my sweat
and sanctified this dust
they say

for five thousand years.
But that is a skip of time for me
a nothing snap
after watching my father’s fist rise
heavy as centuries
up and up
until it became the sky and stopped
my breath.
A lamb-soft breeze
stroked my neck.

This holy ground
smells of dust and spit.
Here God’s voice
scorched the prophets’ ears
deaf to the laughing
things of earth, a boy’s shouts
a woman’s morning tears.

Holy men come here.
Here, massed and angry
men and women and children
swarm

explosives
or dusty stones in hand.
Between blade and skin is nothing.
Between bullet and bone
even less.  I remember
here

by the rough traveled road
Abraham knelt
teaching me to trap
the quick desert lizards
in the hot sand

my skinny wrists
cradled in his
hard hands.

Previously published in Whetstone

Milwaukee River Poem

I give back
to the weeds of Milwaukee
to a solitary morning of church bells
and a bristling skyline of sirens
arched against the blue Wisconsin night

I give back
to that afternoon when the street was silent
with maple trees burning in spiky air
and bumblebees drunk in the marigolds
sweet and rotten past their season

to that season of late summer light
of Milwaukee weeds, or wildflowers:
sky-blue chicory
boneset flowering by factory lots
where bindweed leapfrogs the iron link fence
and goldenrod and late purple aster
parade among broken-necked bottles

I release
the midnights nauseous with desperation
into the slap and song of the girls jumping rope
and as for the dizzying days of secrets
I slip them under the rumble of car radios
when the teen-age boys drive by

river and weed and streetsong
I take as absolution
like the craving for mint in my mouth
for the grit of sugar between my teeth

I give back
I give back
and I offer
other entry into this world:

the marshy margins where the river recedes
and old trees step out of the water
in an undertow of wind

or to any world, shining or dark,
dark or shining.

previously published in 
Stories From Where We Live – Midwest 
(Milkweed Editions, 2003)

Song of War

I lived in cities where men’s blood sang
its song of war against women.

He catwalked the narrow ledge above
colonial streets and the revolution.

We stood at the edge of rain
or steep kisses.

We crossed in narrow boats
not meant for pleasure
we crossed

arrows and palms and hearts
open wide as snake-tongued hibiscus.

He cooked medicinal weeds
with names from an ancient language
he sang as he chopped
and the soup nourished us.

We made no pacts
knowing

love
like the blade
that is dull
kills.

History rumbled through our dreams
like the conquerors’ Spanish horses.

He woke me with such
kisses, I

laughed 
in my sleep.

You are the one who names us all

When the phone rang

I was out among old crusts of snow 
cutting the first green miracle stems of
daffodils, the hooded blossoms 
wound tight as silent bells.
Coming inside to take the call
I put those yard flowers into a clean glass jar
			    and brought it with us to the hospital.

A clean impersonal room 
where you talked to us for hours
remembering road trips half a century old
and the boys when they were children. 
You named the lost children some became
and their children, calling them to us there 
where a hospital window framed 
the tentative spring sky. We loved you
and when we said good-bye

		we never meant good-bye.

You are the one we turn to 
for stories:  to tell us who we are and have been 
who we come from, and where to go next.
To scold, instruct, remind, comfort us, and make us laugh.
How can you leave? We still need scolding, still need comfort.

			           In church

the photo showed you leaning back, your grandson
in your lap, his eager hand making a grab
for the future. After service, loved ones flocked 
together in noisy relief, the kitchen simmering 
with casseroles and pots of greens, the house packed 

with uncles, friends and kids, your students, 
godchildren, yard cousins, all your boys and girls, 
the ones you sheltered when others 
turned them out, all of us 
you built into women, built into men.

In that human heat the daffodils opened hungry mouths 
like grief. And already				

	           we’ve forgotten

what kind of car you drove to New York in ‘47, 
what hat that uncle wore, and that second cousin,
where did she go? We need to hear again 
the journeys, the births, the couplings 
and uncouplings.  Who else will name 
the grandparents and the great-grands and the babies 
one by one, and who will tell us
why you went, who will describe that journey
who will tell the stories now.
					
We are planets flung out of orbit
the largest of us, and the small.
So we hurt each other. 
Forget to call.
Stars circle in unreachable sky.
People we love keep dying
while the rest of us stay busy.
			
	                         There were ditches of wild asparagus

where now prefab houses line the asphalt streets
and you are silver wind through deep green rows of cornfields
forgiving all the roads we call home.


for Rozell Nesbitt

First published in Power Lines: A Decade of 
Poetry From Chicago’s Guild Complex (
Tia Chucha Press, 1999)

© All Copyright, Julie Parson-Nesbitt
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.