By S.D. Lishan
Prelude:
Ah, here we are, wild puppy eyed in the far flung of us.
Like the others, I, too, fling me sad-eared to the one we talk to,
And asked for a healing wind in the once of my needs.
“Let me have a week, just one, of true-work,
Before the precious baby flutters away, leaving me sadder,
Soul-sorely emptied. For I am hungry-hungry. Let me lesson
These tiny creaky heart bones capering under the whispery moon.”
So I prayed in the help rain one stodgy, mongering morning,
In the not far off, before I came here,
Day 1:
This morning, I watched the lozenged, throaty, horse heavy sun
Come up. I felt like a done don’t in a bandaged wailing.
After breakfast, I scurried to the studio, to the tribe
Home of spiders and wasps, and worked, and the hours made way.
And the snakes hang here from the trees in your sleep quietly
If you want them to. Ask Robert if you need to borrow fear from,
If you have to. For the snakes sneak from the trees
To mice and insect in the mist clover.
And if they find you, watch out! And the fox skimpers,
And the valley breezily flutters like flapping shirts,
And I feel like fluted laughing again.
Still, the night swoops down like hungry stares and swallows.
It stalks me shuffling home in a body bagged
Loneliness, and I wait with the rest of the pilgrims,
Day 2:
Thick clouds awning the mountains.
Thunderous boom-blames score my hutched heart.
Lightning, as the coffee club clusters in the morning,
Before their art gets hugely done. I’m excited
Too, but still I think of my hurt donned honey wife I did
And think, “think of me before the summer gods decree
Our time as over. Remember me, as I remember you, my love.
In the studio I blizzard work, until Poem Mother says,
“Haven’t you cleaned your plate of a page yet?
Well haven’t you? Go sit with the squawkers.
Isn’t it time to? I’m tired now, tired…”
“Please, Please, I’ve not squeezed empty,” I say.
“I don’t want to simp and tuck my heart black yet.”
But she makes me trucked-faced into the quickening afternoon.
She’s finished her tinkering of me today, and I’m finny
From sitting with this sinking cap on, and my hands
On this capsized keyboard of a bobbing tub of words.
After dinner, after the walkers have gone their ways,
I stray under the piss-pot moon to where
My teacher sits in the sumac waiting.
“Tell me, kestreled cardinal bright,” I ask,
“If I die right now, before the backhoes
And plows spindle me other the underground,
Can I say I’ve groped right, sweetly and honest on this earth?”
Cardinal looks right and left out of leaf shadows – “No” –
Then flies over the mother red barn a stubbled field away.
Day 3:
Comes the coffee klap of a wake, and the hot day’s needling light
Pricks me stupid saying, “I’m here.” Seven hours
In the studio clambers by, and I wade out, punk-faced,
Finally, under fern trees, hundreds of lines and pennies richer.
Dinner comes in this middle time in a colony stay,
As it comes to all the fleers here finally. Afterward
The tavern man takes his tennis racket and wickets, watching,
As the black snake lengthens from the ash tree like a lacy horizon.
Then we walk around in artist talk about paying dues
(Merchants think us queer to do so). And after going
Bloated-eyed and slop-faced from ping pong happiness,
There’s sleep after yet another day at the colony here I am.
Day 4:
In the hug taught air, along the flourishing
Mist on the mouse cobbled way, I climb the pink picket
Castle and look across the highway of lunging
Cars and turreted trucks, to the thimble steeples
Of the outside world.
I look back at the tined ford of river
Happiness that flowers this place around,
And then at the lake where the brother died,
At his flooded ghost who sits along the bank lifting
His sheet at me. I’ll leave this place, soon, too, I assure him.
At lunch we talk about last night’s movie,
About the pretty pin woman and the adventurous men,
Their life of kill triumph, these Spanish dolls kissing
In satin capes. I like the woman who fixed
On the matador’s bones, until she punctured him
Where his spirit ended.
And so all endings come whether we wait or not.
Coming home from a swim, I hear the hated
Words of the outside news. “Myanmar is a poor pool
Of a country hurt,” the report seizures. “Light let
The people rule, but the generals colded in the her,
The people’s leader, as the bells played,
And the century’s flame burns slowly down,
Like the afternoon’s.
In the studio I take hold of my tongued beard and trill
The purple woods one more time in this place
Where the looms of flowers join and the skulls grin.
My time at the colony has almost ended.
I’m thinking of winter now, and the thin branches
Outside my window, how they witch-broom across
The early morning moon. Like them, I hold open
My hands, and these few words, tenuous as wisps
Of clouds trailing bits of night-leavings,
I proffer to you: You who are the stay-heres
And the leave-soons, and the ones who can’t and ever
Leaf away: May whatever true-work you do
Flower in the hush our bodies arc towards
In their ending; greenly growing, serenely sweet.
S.D. Lishan is an Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University, where he teaches courses in creative writing and poetry. His poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Bellingham Review, Barrow Street, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Chicago Review, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Journal, In Posse Review, Mudlark, Arts & Letters, New England Review, Versedaily, and other journals. His book Body Tapestries, a winner of the Orphic Prize, was published by Dream Horse Press. He lives in Delaware, Ohio, with his wife, Lynda.
Issue 2 | Winter 2013
Come Find Me
Emily as a Mango Hitting the Ground