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Charm for What Looks Like

imaginary hats, real plastic
purses with chains

inside them, brown suit or sailor
depending on size, and rabbit

muffs molting on pastel
colors. Exactly one

beagle. A white house witll rose
shutters too small to hold them

all, and a willow weeping
in the sideyard for the dead boy

day and night. What looks like
America in hats and gloves

is. With mother and father young
enough to be your own children, how

will you blame them now?
What looks like nostalgia

isn't. Nobody really wants to
relive it. We're all too tired

from turning the century. Is that where
your body was? Poor body,

having to get from there to here—
in those shoes! For some things

there are no photographs. A Friday
night in May, for example, when it's hard

to get a sitter. There are recipes for disaster
but you don't know them yet.

The moon lights the clouds and the clouds
race along the phone lines looking

like a train or
a story. Mother and father have

stepped out, how
can you blame them?

They have friends everywhere
in houses like yours, yellow

windows striped black with venetian blinds.
The phone off the hook in your kitchen

connects to the phone off the hook
where they are. You're supposed to be

in bed, but in the story you-never-slept-
a-wink-as-a-child, well, how

can they blame you?
In the receiver at your ear are

underwater voices, a chair scraped
back, something set down in your

head. Exactly once, twice, three
times you say hello into the mouthpiece in

whispers from low to medium to
loud. It would be a story if you cried out,

but it looks like you never cried
out. It would be a story if you hung up,

but, often as you pushed
on that phone's plastic nipples—

lightly lightly—heart
racing like a cloud at each click,

it looks like you
never hung up. Is it still a story

when nothing's happened yet?
When you stuff as many cookies in your mouth

as will fit and try on
your father's wingtips and your mother's best

strand of phony pearls and look like
someone so like you in the mirror

you could weep like a tree?
The only recipe you know by heart

is for homemade bubbles, which calls for water
and a cup of Joy.

Charm for Max Ernst

                after his painting "2 Children are Threatened by a Nightingale"

Someone's been hit.
Somebody's down like an anchovy in the running
in the meanwhile melee.

And though the gate gapes red on its hinges
and the lever's been thrown to alarum on the firebox, no one
is coming, no one will

come. Mother must brandish her weapon alone—
bust pointed forward, hair bolted back,
she's a shape of cold water where her body was—

while father goalruns their girl away,
a nacreous comma in his chromey grip, a sleeping
supple, roof-vaulting lightly...

He's a bluespool hero
in his weathervane posturing if ever tllere was
a lightning rod.

Night terrors. Child's play.
The one true faith was always fear,
hortus conclusus with no garden in it,

each lawn a choppy ocean
and a renaissance sky out every window, the usual
history creeping in.

Will the little fish recover?
will mother ever wield the knife enough to suit her?
Will father reinvent the wheel in time?

No matter.

Now sun spreads like lemon cream from the east,
and on its stain ride
smoky India, archy France.

And nightingale, like any good vampire,
has had its fill of blood for one night.
O, for a draught of that vintage!

Come, let us close the gate again.
We'd only wanted to scare them a little.

Visitation

An hour before dusk on a Tuesday, mid-November—
sunstruck clouds with winter in them,
beeches, sycamores, white with it too.
Blue sky. Also
an aroma of blue
sky, bell-clear, hard as a river
in your lungs, which is why you're
breathless again, grateful,
as if it were the banks of the Seine
you strolled on and not
the mastodon back of the Midwest,
gray unraiseable thing like a childhood
slept through, and past.
On the horizon now a kind of golden
gate of sunset. To visit
means to both comfort and afflict,
though neither lasts long.
That charm of finches lifting from a ditch
can surprise you with a sound like
horselips, and paddle toward the trees
beautifully, small,
brown, forgettable as seeds,
but they, too, must sing on earth unto the bitter death—

Kathy Fagan is the author of Moving & St Rage (University of North Texas Press, 1999), winner of the Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry, and The Raft (Dutton, 1985), a National Poetry Series selection.  Her poetry appears in the anthologies Under 35: The New Generation  of American Poets, The Geography of Home: California and the Poetry of Place, The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, The Breath of Parted Lips: Poems from the Robert Frost Place, and American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement.  Fagan has receved fellowships from the NEA, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.  She is currently a Professor of English at The Ohio State University, where she teaches in the MFA Program and co-edits The Journal.

The above poems are taken from Kathy Fagan's The Charm.

Click here to read Jacqueline Marcus' review on Kathy Fagan's new collection, The Charm.

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