6 Poems by Janisse Ray

 

Grace Will Lead Us Home

 

I’ll pay more attention.

I’ll write down glimpses

of coyote and emerald-backed insects.

Every January a new bird list:

Carolina wren, chickadee,

O beautiful arrow of cardinal

glanced at the apple.

I’ll build a blind to watch

wild turkeys, deer come to salt.

Mapping, I’ll leave places

unnamed. I’ll memorize binomials

of the grasses. And buy

a ring gauge to collect sinking sky.

I’ll sling a hammock and read

more, maybe kill a deer

one fall. I’ll plant rosemary,

moonflower; I’ll go outside

summer nights when heat lightning

rips open the pink-orange

clouds. I’ll look for moons,

and plot Jupiter’s, before bed,

desiring patterns. First frost,

last. Sandhill cranes passing

overhead, and the mating of anoles.

I’ll walk deliberately, more quietly,

discover more of what rises

and falls. Length of night.

What a year is like.

What better to be

than a particular body of knowledge,

dancing the branch, dancing

pine and field, dancing

this laboriously hallowed ground?

 

---

 

Before the 2003 U.S. Attack on Iraq

 

Let them have their oil.

Let them have their mosques and holy books,

and the sun gleaming on the face of a woman

kneeling for the fifth time to pray.

Let her have the baby in her arms.

Let her bring from market the lentils, the lamb,

the bouquet of cilantro, piquant and exciting,

that tastes like the dusty grain of house-walls

bordering the street.

Let her have the woven rug red and blue

beneath her real feet.

Let her have the pot, and the wooden ladle,

and the quiet, happy ticking of a clock she no longer

notices.

Let her have the common bird singing from the olive

and the sound of a door opening as it should.

 

And let me have my farm.

Let me have small clouds of breath

as I rise into the winter house.

Let me have a fallen maple for firewood

and the fire itself an eager bed of coals.

Let me have bowls of oatmeal and cups of tea

sweetened with honey

steaming on the enamel table.

Let me have my husband pulling on boots

to plant potatoes, while the moon

rests in the sign for roots.

Let me have brown eggs

still warm from the hens.

Let me have the common bird singing from the oak

and the sound of a door opening as it should.

 

---

 

On Traveling

 

It was an evening after hard work all day.

My love wanted to walk through the pasture

past the bog

looking for dewberries.

 

Pitcher plants were blooming – blooming!

and in a scrubby copse, a newborn calf

lay in its leaf-creche, being licked

alive!

 

The dewberries among thorned vines

shone darker than nightfall, they

were sweet.

He fed me and I him.

 

When we stepped into the far pasture the dog

went chasing after the herd of cows

that before her stampeded this way

then that

like a cloak of cedar waxwings

lofted into sky.

We hemmed the woods,

toward the watering hole dug before I was born.

 

Behind the hole the woods open

to a bottomless head, where the creek

braids through quick-sand:

my father once plunged a cane pole

 

twenty feet.

I never go in but stand under the water oaks

Listening to bullfrogs

squawk and plop into dark water.

 

This particular evening

a skein of meteors spun

through the red maple and the tulip poplar,

entering, burning out, reentering.

 

Fireflies! Hundreds! Like I hadn’t seen

since a girl, barefoot

in skirts, even then paused

 

at an edge.

They carried their tiny blinking lanterns, searching

high and low for beloveds

who waited in the dimness

without announcement.

 

Any other woods we might not

have seen them. Or any other night.

The secret dwelling place of fireflies

has been found!

 

Above ground that could swallow a truck

and not a bumper left showing.

            A curtain between two worlds opens,

two people stand, mouths strong

with extract of dewberry,

looking into unenterable woods, knowing

they have at last arrived

as far as is possible to go.

 

---

 

Butterfly

 

Where does its fire go

when a monarch dies?

Does it vanish

in smoke,

or turn suddenly to rain?

Does it lay dead

against a mountainside

transforming placidly

to dirt,

which will harbor in its richness

millions of small burning ships

sailing a deep-green forest,

never to be seen?

Or does the fire seep

into the ground,

running in rivulets

toward the blazing core

of the earth,

one day to return:

a volcano spewing wings?

 

---

 

Endless Summer Waltz

 

The strange third step trips you

and how the weight shifts from foot to foot

until I squat and plant them for you, counting

one two-three, one two-three.

You grab for the refrigerator, then for the stove.

Watch my feet, I say.

A magnificent violin sweeps the house

with music that ties wings to my heart

while you lurch and pull in my arms.

I’m stepping on your toes, you say.

I told you I can’t dance.

 

If every day that passes I search ceaselessly

for one beautiful string of words

that is the call of passion, not reason,

it would never match the soaring grace of cello,

thousands of little birds fluttering around us,

And so I drag you past the table

where we eat our meals, you on the left

into the space beside the sofa,

where we sit perusing maps.

I hold you tight in an aviary of harp.

Let’s don’t count, I say,

forget about the feet.

Look me in the eyes: There.

 

In that moment you are waltzing with me

waltzing as if our bodies have been dancing together

for a sadness of years without our knowing it,

maybe in sleep, or in some life not this one –

or as if everyman I ever danced with

guided me around an immense and confusing hall

until I came to you.

In that first waltz are the years to come

and our precious allotment of nights,

tiny flares of lightning in the sky before daybreak,

and a yellow stripe of butterfly

gliding below the window.

In it too an abundance of pears

and long shadows of tenderness.

One more thing we thought impossible

Has been proven so.

 

---

 

Site Fidelity

 

Bright with history, the birds

Nest in the syrup shelter, in woodshed,

 

In coral honeysuckle

Enwinding the gray fence.

 

A nuthatch enters the oak that spilled

Last summer’s storm, collapsing the smokehouse.

 

I am torn between saving the corn crib

With its powdery, peg-ended logs,

 

Or starting anew,

Wrens in a rusty coffee can.

 

Pileated, your head inextinguishable

As the spark of my grandmother:

 

Can you tell me what this land

Was like back then, before the world began?

 

Towhee, your bib a clod of earth –

This earth, these fields –

have your wings fanned each day

aflame?

 

We think history ends

when the elders die: ask the woodpecker to hush

 

her laughing. Nothing belongs to us.

I have tried to keep what I could:

 

in a shelf-tin, between chunks of fiddle resin,

flint points my uncles brought in from the fields.

 

Tell me, kestrel, how they got there.

Surely you know by heart.

 

I am the middle daughter

of my grandfather’s silence.

 

 

Swallow-tailed kite, you who keep

account of the generations.

Pass down their lost stories:

the sun and the forest,

 

the boredom of the creek, all things

intended to last.