I thought you were my victory
though you cut me like a knife
when I brought you out of my body
into your life.
Tiny antagonist, gory,
blue as a bruise. The stains
of your cloud of glory
bled from my veins.
How can you dare, blind thing,
blank insect eyes?
You barb the air. You sting
with bladed cries.
Snail. Scary knot of desires.
Hungry snarl. Small son.
Why do I have to love you?
How have you won?
Anne Stevenson
Somewhere nowhere in Utah, a boy by the roadside, gun in his hand, and the rare dumb hard tears flowing. Beside him, the grey-headed man has let one arm slide awkwardly over his shoulder, is talking and pointing at whatever it is, dead, in the dust on the ground.
By the old parked Chevy, two women, talking and watching. Their skirts flag forward. Bandanas twist with their hair. Around them some sheep and a fence and the sagebrush burning and burning with its blue flame. In the distance, where mountains are clouds, lightning, but no rain.
Falling to sleep last night in a deep crevasse between one rough dream and another, I seemed, still awake, to be stranded on a stony path, and there the familiar enigma presented itself in the shape of a little trembling lamb. It was lying like a pearl in the trough between one Welsh slab and another, and it was crying. I looked around, as anyone would, for its mother. Nothing was there. What did I know about lambs? Should I pick it up? Carry it . . . where? What would I do if it were dying? The hand of my conscience fought with the claw of my fear. It wasn't so easy to imitate the Good Shepherd in that faded, framed Sunday School picture filtering now through the dream's daguerreotype. With the wind fallen and the moon swollen to the full, small, white doubles of the creature at my feet flared like candles in the creases of the night until it looked to be alive with new-born lambs. Where could they all have come from? A second look, and the bleating lambs were birds— kittiwakes nesting, clustered on a cliff face, fixing on me their dark accusing eyes. There was a kind of imperative not to touch them, yet to be of them, whatever they were— now lambs, now birds, now floating points of light— fireflies signalling how many lost New England summers? One form, now another; one configuration, now another. Like fossils locked deep in the folds of my brain, outliving a time by telling its story. Like stars.
Today’s poem - available as a cheery poster :-)
Some of the poems I post first came to my attention because they were featured as Poems on the Underground. Here’s one such, in its original livery :-)
