| Four Poems by Hannah Stein | ||
|
Joke Today in a parking lot between a laundromat and pizza parlor I heard The Magic Flute coming from a car radio—the door wide open and a man in a plaid shirt sprawled, mending something under the dashboard. It made me happy, the way passing under a certain sycamore bleached cream and citrine in patterns where the old bark sloughed off makes me happy—its torso vaulting upward into an empyrean of leaves— Only the thin film of cirrus beyond keeps me from levitating. Did God mean anything by it, giving us a soul—or was it an accident, a joke—to break us out of the hyphen between our birth and death dates? Some comedian whisks us into the sky, knowing the sky will not save us, but swing us airy as balloonists, the colored silk belling us awake. Attention A hundred meters above the Pacific— that aquamarine, that jazz blue sky, chevrons and trapezoids skating toward a scumbled streak of fog on the horizon— we talked of I don't know what, walked without noticing past a slope where a rivering wind braids heavy grasses into undulations the colors of sacking, of parrots, lizards, lions. A grove of tall eucalyptus beyond, and falling away from those the sea. My pen lines white paper with ink, the window screen's graph strains tangles of brush outside. Second sight gives me the field's ventilating light, blown silk the slow hawks make of sky, its gloss below that wipes white arcs onto the beach. Yet even when I think I'm present, an inadvertence like the blur where sea becomes sky takes me and washes me in its ringing vessel, walks me away from there unchanged. Pact But the angels don't need souls because they never needed to choose; we who do not live in a realm of unmediated light constantly strive to reach the light, as, say, at a country inn with friends, when having driven through forested terrain to a clearing with rough benches and tables, we gather ourselves tightly inside our clothes too thin for the day's sudden chill, all of us laughing, rubbing our elbows. A waitress who speaks a foreign language brings out a tray of beer and bread and meats in the cool overcast afternoon, and all we want is to breathe deeply of the forest air, to see between the slender trees vineyards laid over the lap and knees of the landscape. Leafy branches close to our faces cut the sky into shapes. A shape like a hand illuminated from the back offers, holds something out— Say that on a certain day you're running as though you've grown inches taller in the night, the air streaming under your bare soles. A skater among walkers, you're almost at a goal that seemed unreachable, and then within an ace of arriving you realize it's not what you want at all: what if you stop; what if you turn back? We let ourselves believe we are the ones it was given to choose— everything we were to become, without corruption and without fruit. Though in fact there was no promise, the future did not exist until we put it into our heads. We hunger to transform what's been lost, we go about gathering up the scattered bits, having stripped ourselves of the calm protection granted the other animals, the forest icons in their white pelts, white deer spotted with gold. You can see them only at dusk, in the woods below the second meadow, the path's canopy darkening around your head. You can't quite believe the hushed light you glimpse through the trees can be white deer browsing. What are they, these mild animals disguising themselves as angels? We did not ask Prometheus to bring us fire, did not know how it would hurt. Oh those names, that flight from harmony— that cutting loose— The Ordinary Silk heaviness of the bed— we make ourselves languid with sun and sea and our opalescent mingling, our breath, . . . and what is it we are still trying to finish? Stay sane by imagining this picture: he makes cinnamon toast while she reads a story to the child. It's bedtime, she sits on the side of the bed. The child kneels slightly behind her to look at the pictures. One arm crooks over her shoulder; the hand resting against her cheek as though to soothe her soothes her. If dailiness ebbed away I'd burn bright white, a lump of phosphorus lifted from its water bath. Now the first nights of winter, first moments of dusk. When it was youth that pleasured me I had not the least idea what love is, it was myself I loved. And us as budding fruit trees, apricot, coming into blossom. Love filled me with the idea of love as something that could happen to me, that could unscroll from a seashell, enter like the dove of the Annunciation, its spotless wings shivering with bliss. Instead the ordinary stretches and atomizes love until it envelops everything we happen to; opens us toward the indwelling, salt stars. ___________________________________________________________________________ HANNAH STEIN lives in Davis, California. Her poems in this issue of ForPoetry appear in her collection, (click title to purchase) Earthlight, the first volume in the La Questa Press Poetry Series, released in January, 2000, from La Questa Press. Her chapbook, Schools of Flying Fish, was published by State Street Press. Magazines in which her work appears include The Antioch Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Flash, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and The Yale Review. She is an editor of Americas Review. Ruth Stone says of EARTHLIGHT, Hannah Stein's first collection of poems: "The book is extraordinary: heightened visual memory, nuances of feeling; dreamlike moving through past and present as though it had never been experienced until this moment...The language evokes a continuous miracle." |
