Carolyn Hembree
—
from "For Today"
I linger beside a shrimp plant [image and word bract]
at the sash window of one violin house
It is the hour of the metronome
It is the hour of tuning and scales and études
the hour of songs to hum on my way home
I remember the rolling violin solo when we were sick
I remember my dad’s violin in its case I cannot bring myself to open
—One chord and I am watering the shrimp plant!—
I think fretting—of the instrument, of a baby being walked the length
of a porch next door (burp cloth over shoulder)
of balustrades, of me
Why fret?
Last week, V said she was “curious” about dying
Curious comes from “careful”
chemo port
below her collarbone
I never look
below her chin
—Listen! Ten bell tower strikes!—
my hour-long meander now two hours
—Listen! Invisible fountains overflow!—
—Listen! Bees of the invisible gather honey from the visible!—
—Look! How sidewalk gardens blaze!—
I check my pocket for pencils, pens—none, damn!
[envy cloud-gazing
poets who forgot paper
read their inky hands]
Instead, I speak names
I cannot write
“hydrangea” “gladiola” “gardenia”
“dwarf palmetto” “spider lily” “black gamecock iris”
“red cypress” “lantana” “honeysuckle”
“rosemary” “camellia” “resurrection fern”
I step over an ancient love message in concrete
Are they still together?
Do they walk by and remember writing in wet concrete?
I turn onto my street
where sidewalk ruptures at the house of infinite windchimes
mural on the side (willow-pond-pelican-peacock)
their version of home
Next door, the house of erotic cries—even now, billowing curtains
heaves and grunts
What they must have dreamed last night, dream every night!
If they sleep!
I pass the fire hydrant eternally gushing
I go around a fence-visit, any day, laundry blowing on the line
Up ahead, a torso out a dormer window smoking (I miss smoking)
I stick my hand through a gate for the shaggy head
(warm from sun, lifeblood)
My living hand under my father’s invisible hand
(I miss our dogs)
Drooping quadrupedal fans hung from a haint-blue porch ceiling turn
Uncut grasses wag as if in answer
I speak more names
I cannot write
world’s largest “elephant ears” “wisteria”
“yucca” with a twisted trunk “foxtail”
“mayhaw” “swamp mallow”
“ginger” “crape myrtles”
(smooth crotches, panicles
in breeze)
“rosemary” for remembrance grabbing my hem
“moss” draping a “live oak” I feel like moss, wanting
to touch everything, at once sky, tree, water, even
dangle a pendant of
myself to touch
a street
puddle
Here, I come to a bush I cannot name, common bush anyone would
know, I knew today
I call out for the name
I call on poets, those namers
Inger! Rainer! I call
The poets answer with a cento
“an accumulated weekday of Angelic orders”
“Every single angel is terrible. Still, though, alas!”
“seclusion and angels exist”
“But who’d claim from that / to exist?”
“the cloak of namelessness exists”
“Isn’t it your dream / to be invisible someday?”
“think like a cloud”
“Don’t think I’m wooing you!”
“think like / a bird building nests”
“of every leaf (like the smile of a wind):—oh, why”
“alphabets exist”
The word cento means “to plant slips of trees”
The poets and I, we wait
yet the name for the bush will not grow
lines planted on air
(though our version exists)
I call on angels
My ancestors answer from the unnamed bush
short-seasoned, flimsy
gushing bush
gushing and burning
gushing and burning
at once not burnt
“Daughter,” they say
I say, Tell me what to do
Tell me to take off my sandals
Tell me how to bring you back to this land of milk and honey
Tell me not to look back or you will fall away
Tell me not to look back or I will turn to salt
“Daughter, the bush is not burning”
But I hear flames lapping the leaves
“Daughter, we are not burning”
But I feel blossoms stoked by inner flames, an inscape blooming
“Daughter, you are burning”
A white pigeon with inky wings
Plucks straw from my sun hat
A twig falls at my feet
Look again—no twig, but a worm diverting my step!
Worm trying to get back in the earth
Worm a few ants crawl—
Oh, to eat dirt with a dirt-packed mouth and breathe through
my skin!
I spit on the dirt, dig a hole, drop the worm in “Good luck, friend!”
Say a secret into a hole in the ground
Proselytize to the dirt
Proselytize to the worlds below
(we’re sinking)
(two inches a year)
Whose secrets does the sinking earth contain?
Whose steps do I retrace today?
Who will retrace mine tomorrow?
The following concern “For Today”:
The poem references Susanna Nied’s translation of Christensen’s alphabet; Robert Bly’s, J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender’s, A. Poulin, Jr.’s, David Young’s, and my dad’s translations of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.
Carolyn Hembree's third poetry collection, For Today, was published by LSU Press as part of the Barataria Poetry series, edited by Ava Leavell Haymon. Carolyn is also the author of Skinny and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, winner of the Trio Award and the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. She received an ATLAS grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents and has also received grants and fellowships from PEN, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation to support her poetry. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans and serves as the poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.
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