1. |
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Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
ge can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.
When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
Then he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and goldenrod bend low.
The top of the logging road stands open
and bright. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.
Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.
A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.
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2. |
Biscuit
01:14
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The dog has cleaned his bowl
and his reward is a biscuit,
which I put in his mouth
like a priest offering the host.
I can’t bear that trusting face!
He asks for bread, expects
bread, and I in my power
might have given him a stone.
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3. |
Christmas Away From Home
04:15
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Her sickness brought me to Connecticut.
Mornings I walk the dog: that part of life
is intact. Who's painted, who's insulated
or put siding on, who's burned the lawn
with lime—that's the news on Ardmore Street.
The leaves of the neighbor's respectable
rhododendrons curl under in the cold.
He has backed the car
through the white nimbus of its exhaust
and disappeared for the day.
In the hiatus between mayors
the city has left leaves in the gutters,
and passing cars lift them in maelstroms.
We pass the house two doors down, the one
with the wildest lights in the neighborhood,
an establishment without irony.
All summer their putto empties a water jar,
their St. Francis feeds the birds.
Now it's angels, festoons, waist-high
candles, and swans pulling sleighs.
Two hundred miles north I'd let the dog
run among birches and the black shade of pines.
I miss the hills, the woods and stony
streams, where the swish of jacket sleeves
against my sides seems loud, and a crow
caws sleepily at dawn.
By now the streams must run under a skin
of ice, white air-bubbles passing erratically,
like blood cells through a vein. Soon the mail,
forwarded, will begin to reach me here.
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4. |
Fat
01:51
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The doctor says it’s better for my spine
this way—more fat, more estrogen.
Well, then! There was a time when a wife’s
plump shoulders signified prosperity.
These days my fashionable friends
get by on seaweed milkshakes,
Pall Malls, and vitamin pills. Their clothes
hang elegantly from their clavicles.
As the evening news makes clear
the starving and the besieged maintain
the current standard of beauty without effort.
Whenever two or three gather together
the talk turns dreamily to sausages,
purple cabbages, black beans and rice,
noodles gleaming with cream, yams, and plums,
and chapati fried in ghee.
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5. |
Insomnia at the Solstice
04:23
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The quicksilver song
of the wood thrush spills
downhill from ancient maples
at the end of the sun’s single most
altruistic day. The woods grow dusky
while the bird’s song brightens.
Reading to get sleepy . . . Rabbit
Angstrom knows himself so well,
why isn’t he a better man?
I turn out the light, and rejoice
in the sound of high summer, and in air
on bare shoulders—dolce, dolce—
no blanket, or even a sheet.
A faint glow remains over the lake.
Now come wordless contemplations
on love and death, worry about
money, and the resolve to have the vet
clean the dog’s teeth, though
he’ll have to anesthetize him.
An easy rain begins, drips off
the edge of the roof, onto the tin
watering can. A vast irritation rises. . . .
I turn and turn, try one pillow,
two, think of people who have no beds.
A car hisses by on wet macadam.
Then another. The room
turns gray by insensible degrees. The thrush
begins again its outpouring of silver
to rich and poor alike, to the just
and the unjust.
The dog’s wet nose appears
on the pillow, pressing lightly,
decorously. He needs to go out.
All right, cleverhead, let’s declare a new day.
Washing up, I say
to the face in the mirror,
“You’re still here! How you bored me
all night, and now I’ll have
to entertain you all day. . . .”
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6. |
Not Writing
01:30
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A wasp rises to its papery
nest under the eaves
where it daubs
at the gray shape,
but seems unable
to enter its own house.
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7. |
Peonies At Dusk
01:39
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White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.
Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance; I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.
The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.
In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.
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8. |
Siesta: Barbados
03:16
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From bed we heard
the gardener move down the hedge
of oleander, chopping out the weeds
with her long, curved cutlass
and singing. A lizard gripped the coarse
stucco of the ceiling. It pulsed;
it cocked its head; and when the blade
rang out against a stone
It flicked its question-mark of a tail
around to the other side. . . .
Sea breeze swelled the curtain,
and tried the shuttered door. . . .
and then you reached for the hem
of my red dress with blue leaves
and lemon lilies—the one you bought for me
from the woman who came to our porch
balancing a bundle on her head.
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9. |
Staying At Grandma's
03:00
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Sometimes they left me for the day
while they went—what does it matter
where—away. I sat and watched her work
the dough, then turn the white shape
tellow in a buttered bowl.
I coleus, wrong to my eye because its leaves
were red, was rooting on the sill
in a glass filled with water and azure
marbles. I loved to see the sun
pass through the blue.
“You know,” she’d say, turning
her straight and handsome back to me,
“that the body is the temple
of the Holy Ghost.”
The Holy Ghost, the oh, oh . . . the uh
oh, I thought, studying the toe of my new shoe,
and glad she wasn’t looking at me.
Soon I’d be back in school. No more mornings
at Grandma’s side while she swept the walk
or shook the dust mop by the neck.
If she loved me why did she say that
two women would be grinding at the mill,
that God would come out of the clouds
when they were least expecting him,
choose one to be with him in heaven
and leave the other there alone?
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10. |
The Bat
02:29
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I was reading about rationalism,
the kind of thing we do up north
in early winter, where the sun
leaves work for the day at 4:15.
Maybe the world is intelligible
to the rational mind;
and maybe we light the lamps at dusk
for nothing. . . .
Then I heard wings overhead.
The cats and I chased the bat
in circles—living room, kitchen,
pantry, kitchen, living room. . . .
At every turn it evaded us
like the identity of the third person
in the Trinity: the one
who spoke through the prophets,
the one who astounded Mary
by suddenly coming near.
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11. |
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The others bent their heads and started in.
Confused, I asked my neighbor
to explain—a sturdy, bright-cheeked girl
who brought raw milk to school from her family’s
herd of Holsteins. Ann had a blue bookmark,
and on it Christ revealed his beating heart,
holding the flesh back with His wounded hand.
Ann understood division. . . .
Miss Moran sprang from her monumental desk
and led me roughly through the class
without a word. My shame was radical
as she propelled me past the cloakroom
to the furnace closet, where only the boys
were put, only the older ones at that.
The door swung briskly shut.
The warmth, the gloom, the smell
of sweeping compound clinging to the broom
soothed me. I found a bucket, turned it
upside down, and sat, hugging my knees.
I hummed a theme from Haydn that I knew
from my piano lessons . . .
and hardened my heart against authority.
And then I heard her steps, her fingers
on the latch. She led me, blinking
and changed, back to the class.
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Graham Sobelman Sacramento, California
Graham Sobelman is a Nothern California-based composer, music director & pianist who loves making music.
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