MY HUSBAND’S CHILDHOOD

Every hour is an orphanage
where the children have been turned
out. My husband climbs
through the window of the house
where he was born. The house
a dark vase in which plants
are held like swimmers
from breath. He leaves behind
the small body in which
he was delivered. Infant loneliness.

Dreams dropped on him in sleep
like dead seed. Once,
when I was a girl I got lost
in a blizzard in the schoolyard.
Voluminous, rich with blinding
beauty, I entered the storm
as though it were the blue abandonment
of childhood. When it subsided,
the schoolyard returned, like a book
left open at a certain page.

The page remains marked: on it
are the blind words of your boyhood,
your house, steeped
in its dark sorrows, is banked
by blue delphinium tall as seahorses
in a murky sea. At the high windows,
an inward boy, whose hand is flat
against the pane. 

SCATTER-SHOT BLOSSOMS

I once gathered pebbles in bottles
shaped like curvy ladies.
Each last one was soon broken.
I remember how luminous and green
the glass was, how my son’s face
is like the shine of those hours
spent gathering, how it lingers, mounting
like stairs in darkness.

How could I have known
that my son would one day be pushed,
like a blue swan, out of the deep
pond of my body? As he emerged,
birds aired their snowy wings
on the branches of trees wrestling
with wind in vast estates.

Beauty loves loss in an atmosphere
of things drawn down like shades
in evening. Once dreams fell from me
like mercury in a thermometer.
Now I stand in the garden with my son
and the blossoms are blowing and
the air is a present we could  keep
if only we knew how to open it.

Before my son was born, the stars
could not stop weeping and there was
a swallow trapped inside my left breast.
At night I could hear the sad
beating of its wings. O how I longed
to slice off that breast, clean away
the blood and see that bird stretch
its thin body across the sky of my wound.

All birth comes from wounds. Now
our dreams sink in the scatter-shot blossoms
of the garden. Birds speak in musty tones.
My son talks to himself, his voice
like a gold worm boring into bloated
pears. His shimmering tones
bring me into the legacy of lawless gods,
that sweetness beyond the self.

My boy kneels in a confessional
of flowers, petals wing-tipped
and bold while a solitary angel
grows inside him. Fenced in ash-christened
beds, he waxes like a Blakean vision:
first day, last day and
everyday in between.

FROM DARK TO FARTHEST DARK

 Hieroglyphs of frost on a moon that imbues
my view of hemlocks which line
the rugged peninsula where boats float
like heavy toys.

Even the stars, churlish and bright,
throb inside as do clouds, surfed
by snow, skittering above rock-
beaten shores, long woods,
black ice, wind chimes
which drip blue music
all over the home
beyond me.

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Copyright, Elizabeth Kirschner.
All rights reserved by author.