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Poems by Marcia Lipson, 1948–2001 Notes on Everything At the very least, we go from one thing to another, until the latter obscures the former we thought paramount, how to prepare a lecture, say, until one day you can't pick up a pen for the pain — so things shift, the sunset’s pinks and oranges take on a new importance, as does a walk down the road where a crow, beak open atop a sandstone totem, sits like an acolyte, and doesn't stop to reconsider or is that what he does as we pass him in the daytime field where a chickadee snatches a sunflower seed and swoops over a hedge, mockingbirds dive around pokeweed ’s red stems whose clusters of purplish– black berries droop poisonous to the ground, white–faced heifers hunch over blankets of buttercups they float above by moonlight. Jupiter rises and someone explains the compatibility of Cancer and Capricorn. Day after Day a spider weaves a web across a path to the pond, but we forget and break its threads. A black exclamation point, she hangs midair waving her legs, ready to begin again. The Vole I almost step on a vole lying dead on its back along the prairie trail, its tiny pink paws extended, mouth open so the front teeth protrude. He looks asleep, tucked into his grey fur, thought it’s early, in the morning, cranky red–winged blackbirds already on patrol. I wish the vole would run off, reveal where he was bound in grass crowded with black–eyed susans, downcast yellow cone flowers, periscopes of queen anne’s lace amid weaves of violet bee balm. I got up this morning to wander, to watch the cattails sway over the nests of the blackbirds, but the birds’ apprehension rekindles mine or is it the reverse, theirs no greater than mine, though they have young to protect, while I've come to walk off what can't be named, down through the dry prairie, up through the wet, to the Skokie River, sluggish in summer. To measure the speed of a stick bobbing in the current, I could count the beat of my pulse, more irregular than a musical measure, but all I have along with the river’s ebb and flow. The suspension bridge sways as I cross, rises and falls with each of my steps toward trails shaded by elms, where orange day lilies lean together like marionettes. How simple it seems from here: the boldness of the blackbirds, the friction of the current in the bed of the river, the vole going back to the body of the earth. At the Funeral According to Jesiwsh tradition, amputated limbs are buried in the future grave site, to be reunited with the body at the time of death. I paid a hell of a lot to have those legs buried, but when I shoveled in the dirt, they weren’t there. Were they deeper than the reach of the shovel, deeper than your coffin waiting for fistfuls of earth, for the last prayer, or had they walked off, outraged by their plight, determined, as in life, to go their own way? Were they lost on the road to the cemetery, traveled by each in the course of a year, or buried in someone else’s grave, or thrown out with trash after each amputation by hospital workers who blundered, then pretended that each leg was preserved and trasnported, awaiting your body and inseparability? Charge What I have to do is waiting, silently, for me to pick myself up and begin to do it. What I have to do is waiting for me to begin, even if it means getting smacked as I did at seven, bending over to kss the back of a boy I loved who was tying his shoe and stood up suddenly hitting me squarely on the nose. What I have to do is waiting silently for me to stop hovering over kisses in memory, to stop hovering over what’s close at hand, and to end the waiting for what I have to do. all poems © Marcia Lipson | |
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