Hawk Ridge
It was the gasp
of winter breath we heard
first—a steady mantra
that came from someplace
beyond us and yet
around us all at once.
Then the shadow came,
cold and black—
a strong body and a caress
of air moving against
the fog, against
the persistent wind
that came up from a place
below us. It went on
beyond us who squinted
into the gray slate of the day,
measuring it as it rose,
circled,
fell,
then rose again—
perfect and precise over
the churching dark waters.
Refusing
We don’t say it simply but
carefully and with an
eloquence we find uncomfortable.
Yet we say it and saying it
makes the day flower around
us with such beauty we think
we are either going to die
this moment or go on
living forever in this emotion.
If we die, we will die content—
whole and more complete than
we could even begin to
comprehend. If we live on,
we do so in an eternity
that lies before us with such
hope, we are unable
even to fathom
pain or loss or despair.
They have—quite simply—
refused to exist.
1959
The smell of cedar lingers,
giving up its scent like
the ghosts of these
photos. These ghosts—
this woman in her stiff
homemade skirt, a smear of magenta
lipstick framing her smile, this man
whose
dazzling youth startles and
humbles me—stare back
as though the camera held
up to them revealed a
future more pleasant than it would be.
Look how content they are
not in the aching, lingering deaths
that await them a dozen or so years
ahead of them, but rather
in the strange, all-consuming
moment of life
then in that halcyon
blur I can only
just barely fathom.
Gone, we say
So long, we say and never say it
again. Gone, we say. Good luck, we
say. All of it as though we meant it,
which we don’t.
Ruddy your skin, we say. Make it
right for that long journey southward
and let us never again see that
northern pallidness you hid so well
behind an anemic growth of graying
hair or Indiana bravado.
Good bye, we say and mean it.
This is not sorrow that escapes
me—clear and pure as
denied baptismal waters. Oh no.
It is something more beautiful.
Joy! we say. Joy! in letting it go, in
letting
it cover us with its dew-like hope.
All poems Copyright (c) 2006 by Jamie Parsley
Slash
1.
The raw-faced young deputy—
his grim jaw set just so—
says, “That’s
hatred, there. That’s
violence.” The other slashes
only mimic
this one, which
floats in its
tan background as
a storm-driven horizon
does. It glares back
white and deep
where the grooves
of his key
went in—
he, who
lurks, creeping
about like a stench
or a spreading
stain
on an otherwise white carpet.
And all of it
on this car that
is, in its simplest presence,
me, or an ikon of
me at least—
a symbol of whatever
he, flouncing about
in his Lane Bryant skirts, saw
and despised.
I ache over it
the way I ache
over wasps’ nests
or bats. I ache!
but set my teeth—
one against the other—
and wish not
for violence
or vengeance
but for… accountability?
for admission? or acknowledgement?
of what he’s done—
for the humility
wrought
unasked for
on me to be
wrought on him—
the one who
held the key
and set its grooves
not once
or twice
but three times
into the paint,
leaving scars
behind it
undulating
like the scales
of a song we sing
only on occasions we dread.
2.
I could go on forever with this terror—
this sullen anxiety that dogs me. In bed,
the humming fan lulls the sheets,
the pillows, but not me. I awake, dreaming
he has snuck up on me with a knife—
or, on worse nights, a gun—
and, still half-asleep, feel myself
go dizzy not with the pain of it
or even the shock of violence
but with the loss of my blood,
spreading hot and thick
like natal gunk around me.
My friend—the Reiki master—
tells me, “He’ll crash and burn
the middle of the Fall.” But
it’s only August. And who’s to say
the crash and fall won’t come
after I’ve been laid low and left
in the grass, grasping at that spilling
heat which pours from me with
every heartbeat? Who says I won’t be
crying out—like the voice
in my dream—to the rain, like the nun on
the sinking Deutschland, crying,
“O Christ, Christ,” in English
as dying Aelred did because he loved
the word best in English?
“O Christ!” I sing in the night
“Christ!” as that man—it’s a man!—
a man in his absurd broom skirt,
his foul stink still in my throat,
bounds for the rain-slick pavement
as deftly as a dancer too big for his tiny feet.