| Hannah Stein USA
ALL BUT THE BLACKBERRIES THEMSELVES There is the shiny beetleness of their blackness and the sun implanting roundness and blossoms belling forth even more sweetness, and the wasps insinuating. There are the first solitary notes ringing the berry pail's thin metal with a plangent clangor that soon becomes soft drumming as we advance into the patch. Its long arms barb us away, hook us close, snag clothes, bramble flesh: draw blood, mingle our scarlet with their crimson. We leave on the vine all stubborn berries that cling by one unripe drupelet, leave the tight pinched greens, surly reds, stone-seeded browns. Leave the powdery overripe berries falling or about to fall, and those half-eaten by small mouth parts. For us there are only the fat, the tender, the ink-black, full-term, ready-to-pop berries whose purples, flush with juice, flaunt lavish and sun-warmed or hide cool beneath bristly leaves, heaping the gorged container until at last there is burden, there is nightmare—that by reaching too far, trying too hard we'll upend our gleaming plunder among field stubble or its own thorned bed and end up losing it all. And although we already know that the more we have the more we have to lose, there is greed: greed of the nearly-filled pail, for the last berry but one—but two—greed for the berry not yet noticed—for whose sake the arm with the pail stretches far behind in balance—in arabesque—in pas de deux— in succulence, in stain, in rapture— Reprinted from Earthlight, La Questa Press, Copyright 2000 by Hannah Stein. First in Solo, #3, 1999. LOVING A MATHEMATICIAN The ether, or whatever's up there— some infinite glassy staircase— crackles for you with truth, with beauty—and I have never followed you even to the second rung. I used to think Pi was just a way of measuring circles. You tell me now that Pi dwells in gaseous, in liquid universes where there are no circles, where rings couldn't form if I dropped a pebble. For there are no pebbles either— no discs no balls no equators, only pure structure. It's true, you say, that Pi always turns up, like an old irrational uncle who's been traveling round the country doing card tricks. But circles are only one of his arts: Pi rolls his thumb through the ink of odd numbers; from his hiding place in square roots under square roots like a wagonload of deviant potatoes Pi shines traces beyond the galaxies mathematicians map, haunts the void between electrons, stalks black holes and red shifts. Inching like a growing crystal into cosmic chinks, Pi waits for thought to close in, waits to be pounced on with a pencil as his secrets repercuss into patient, searching minds. I ask you this: does Pi buckle the whole universe together? Can Pi be God? For the first time I believe I could follow you up and up— Reprinted from Earthlight, La Questa Press, Copyright 2000 by Hannah Stein. LAPSED AGNOSTIC I want no bargains with life, I demand
no miracles, and therefore
will not file my soul for safekeeping
among banks of lilies, among choirs of seraphim
that promise the leaves off the jacaranda trees.
Yet how I love
singing processions, moments
of transfiguration on the faces of the religious
as they kiss their prayerbooks,
love the madonnas of Botticelli
with their assailable lips, azure mantles
falling in broken scallops from room to room
as they offer the lofty, moon-round breast,
an imaginable white drop blooming at the nipple—
How I love all
who lay their gifts on altars, love
all parting with oneself for love—
following, or not, a gossamer cord
into the infinite. Contracts with gods
are not that different from those
with the devil: pay
at the beginning or pay in the end. Caught
between straight lines of the old duality—
they may be ornate, handcarved, rubbed
with gold leaf; they may frame the face
incomparably, but anyone can toss rings at you
and win a plush duck. Imagine
stringing all the birds of the mind
on a thread of belief—
Yet I too yearn
for Piero's frescoed air, his saints'
smooth limbs—the way I yearn,
standing in a field of rustling grasses,
for that sight, that sound, to fill me,
lusting after beauty as though I were a god.
Reprinted from Earthlight, La Questa Press,
Copyright 2000 by Hannah Stein.
First in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Vol. 49 #4,
Summer 1999
REMADE I have never gotten over it—white globes ripening for milk, strange linea nigra penciling itself down from my popping navel. Longing of every part of the body to release what it carried. In my dreams, I wobbled in a bag of brine, thrashed. Dragged rockweed and bladderwrack onto a dim, uncharted coastline. I turned myself over to the body— its throbbing piston—until a full-moon night when I lay panting and splayed. Ground between labor's stones, crushed up and thinned out against cordons of pain, I could only submit as this wisp of protoplasm: untried spirit, unstoppable velvety head— forged an exit between pubic symphysis and ischial spines. No way out but only through. From his pulsing fontanel my kiss took in a softness that vanquished me, a hunger that fed me and made me one with lioness and wolf-mother licking slurry from their young— sister to every she-whale who ever trawled a calf by the teat through ocean depths. Reprinted with permission from Calyx, vol. 19, no. 2, Summer 2000. BEAR DANCE Like an aphrodisiac the whoosh of highway sound brings them rushing out: four brown bears knocked into my dream by a hit-and-run, by a streamer of blood Death spun from a nostril. Tied them up, held them down on the hot road's shoulder. I'd have liked to dig my fingers into your deep brown thatch, bury my nose in your rich zoo-y soup. I recognize your daemon as my own, hidden one, eluder of dreams, who rears on hind legs— and invite into my life a bestiary of bears, quadruplication of all my fears of death, the torn fur gouted and mired. Reprinted with permission from Grrrrr: A Collection of Poems about Bears, 2000, Arctos Press. THE DISTANCE TO THE OCEAN 1.
It is summer. She holds
her brother's hand, they walk slowly
the length of the driveway, edged with lemon balm.
They have been sent out with a game of jacks
to the concrete near the fishpond. I have
a companion, I who have been
a cloud, a stone, a drop of water.
A child tries to memorize
the ball she clutches,
the gravel driveway, yellow with sun,
the words balm, morning, brother.
She hems the words in, not to let them
sink into the water or ignite
in air. She must keep them
from now on, while jacks are being scattered
by a dog chasing a squirrel, and while rain
begins to fall on the concrete
in dark pennies, and onto the fishpond
with a sound of plucked strings.
2.
Huge brown and white cows
bump softly against each other's flanks,
their pink bags shrunk with early milking.
In the wood beyond the brook the neighbor children
stifle laughter. They will never,
till all of them are grown, tell her
what they've been up to—though she
will ask again and again. Too
scared of the slippery plank
to cross with the others, she stays
with cow-haunches and cow-smell
till one of the beasts lifts its horns and bellows
and she sees for the first time
her own empty shape, arms outstretched, tottering
on a narrow beam.
3.
Beyond dry fields, a gate
cut into a hedge. She pushes
against the gate. Bleeding-hearts glimmer
among fringed leaves. At the edge of a pond,
under willows, women wash their hair. Sounds fall
from their mouths into the water.
Is that all I missed? But the garden
is full of artifice—stone deer, shrubs
in the form of urns. This may be only
a version of loss. Here in this garden
she puts hands on the nettle, feels
the unfolding of columbine
in the burrs of late August.
4.
We move from the interior over straw
and animal droppings, the low sun
binding us in its amethyst bands. She suspects
that none of this is innocent.
But you,
my partner, my ally, who are you
to whom at certain moments I turn as though
to retrieve what I so eagerly
gave up, as though you
hold it safe. She has reached
the ocean. She lets the tide carry her out.
What shakes beneath her feet
as she pulls herself back through the surf
is neither earth nor water.
In the night sky
a knot loosens;
birds drop out of the moon.
One by one
trees are felled
and stars attached to the roots
descend in fading arcs.
The trees must know
what is happening.
On the cliff over the sea,
a black cypress: to name it
is to charge it with irony. A wave
hurtles over itself, glittering, lethal.
Beneath everything, the black, pelagic water
that never sees light.
Reprinted from Earthlight, La Questa Press,
Copyright 2000 by Hannah Stein.
First in Prairie Schooner, Summer 1989.
© All Copyright, Hannah Stein. |
