ARS POETICA WITH MOREL MUSHROOMS
Put a solipsistic poet in close proximity with any
dead thing, and she’ll find a way to metaphor a love.
For instance: I pace beside a fallen sycamore
with swollen bark peeling like a dampened scroll
after warm nights and afternoon rains with rumors
of summer unspooled this swift thaw.
I stoop to part the grass, comb the creek bed,
and look and look for sprouted mushrooms—
their twisting sand-colored folds, their conical
comical heads, their creamy stems…
Maybe this is the part where I write into that bright
vibration where image and feeling converge,
that tectonic shift in seeing which has always felt,
to me, like a kind of forgiveness.
Maybe this is when I suggest the lore of morels
is like a man’s vulnerability, or that sometimes
you might look at him every day for seven years
before you see the cruelty he’s capable of.
But it’s hard to think straight. And I’m just trying
to like living again. I’m just trying to find the soft center
that once rendered me unbreakable,
as I draw lopsided infinities in loamy soil
with a broken stick, then take the long way around
the sycamore’s spindly branches, praying softly
to these mushrooms—which may or may not
have even sprouted yet—that this practice of looking
will lead me back to myself. I press my stick against
a sloughed-off sheet of bark that sags and sighs,
breaks off. I sink it into the forgiving ground,
and the ground gives and gives until it doesn’t.
ELEGY
in memory of D. L.
Already I’m losing track, memories tumbling
like the perfect word that skirts the mouth and fades,
like the rot-sweet leaves falling from a maple tree
where, beneath its spangled canopy, a woman slows
and tips her head back, looks up as if to listen,
and for a second, from the opposite street corner
where I stand, savoring the smell of rain-wet earth
and decomposing foliage, I mistake her for you—
pale-gold hair curling toward her chin, black petticoat,
leather purse slung over a shoulder, papers flaring out.
She adjusts her bag and resumes walking, heading
to her car, perhaps, or her office, oblivious
to the false relief she’d given me, to the renewed grief
spreading in my chest like a web of hoarfrost.
I conjure you from memory as I continue on,
remembering when I was 17, and you’d slowed
by my desk, head tilted down, eyes fixed
where my textbook should’ve been—instead,
Bishop’s Complete Poems—how I turned red
and shrank into my chair, fearing you’d scold,
confiscate the book until the end of class—I’m 29
and looking for you beneath an orange maple,
its chattering leaves bright as molten glass.
I swallow your name like bitter medicine
and walk home, where I pull Rilke’s Letters down
from the shelf, snug between Rich and Roethke,
and open to the page where you’d signed, trace
the swooping cursive as if I can summon you.
Someday I’ll visit your grave, return the book you slid
down the bar, saying I needed it more than you—
Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Rilke.
Already I’m losing track, memories a decrescendo
of ripples, flattening into the smooth glass of a dark pond:
I’m 21 and you’re ordering my first chardonnay, saying
one day I’ll grow into the good, dark reds;
24 and you’re waving from a table at a busy restaurant,
hair short, face plump—the medication rounding
your cheeks, you tell me, while I stare up
at fluorescent light fixtures, as if their hum
and pulse were prayer, willing my eyes to dry.
A woman slows beneath a hot-bright tree
and I wonder what poem you turned to that day
you lifted Bishop from my desk and nodded—
you nod from across the table in the bustling
restaurant, while I shake my head in anger
as you tell me about the tumor, the bully in your brain,
its rigor and tenacity—I look for you beneath a tree
whose leaves shock the gray-blue sky with citrus—
and you lay the book back down on my desk
and nod as if to say—what? As if to say what?