Seven Earthly Poems
Terry Hermsen
Pegasus
for Christopher Merrill
The underside of the apple's leaves turns silver.
Night filters its calm over the farms.
The moon is late. An hour after dark
I climb the ladder to the black ship
of the garage roof, and lie long inside
the crush of galaxy: there's the boy
who broke his father's chariot loose from the sun,
and Cygnus, this swan, who pulled him
from the river. Sagittarius, Andromeda,
Pegasus, his great box-flank and head
above this summer's closing shop.
Long days I've watched in swirling winds
blond strands of sheaves rip upward, twirl slow
mute distances, like dreams suspended twenty feet in air.
And what reason is there for a poem to you,
except you've come back twice in dreams...
once carrying a code of inlaid speech,
your poem rayed outward like a blue cell dividing,
and later standing at the base of the stairs
past which all talk became a mountain trail.
Days of rain will soon have whittled
the sycamore bare, and for the first time I'll taste
no sweetness in their curse, tracing the dead
tangle of branches in the obverse dawn,
for the first time knowing: it may not come back,
this staff of world carved to minute reliefs,
the borer's routings under bark, all could vanish
like the code of Mayan books under singed
Spanish hands... if we stop watching.
Come then... dress the seeds' fall,
slap dust of shoe on dust of trail,
out past the chatter of crowds,
contracts and the plumes of planes,
cities sprawling with speech and bludgeoned
speechlessness... where the bold horse rises
above the auto dealer's glare. It wasn't our name up there
we wanted anyway, or a chance to ride
above the sun, but a ledge from which to watch
the grandeur, the shudder of those wings.
Sea Turtle
(Columbus Zoo)
Frying pan of pressed clay, I cannot retrieve
my head and neck, for the thick muscles
flay out my limbs like oars.
I wait for hours, motionless, a forest,
a fierce plug at the bottom of the pool.
Wait with me, entangled currents,
measure of manatee heart, veil of the ray.
I am the motor of the sea-green yearning,
head without voice, cadence of below.
When my upper body thrust
drives me surface-ward, four legs
puppet-wide, contorted, exact,
wherever I am always returns,
as now, the sea its own wake,
the passages predicated on whim
and turn, balance and refrain.
Whatever I forget comes back to me
as method, ache, reach, release,
my century a womb beyond light, my entrance
a weighted circle, my agency a spell for rest.
Slower than light, you would not mistake me
for a shining coin or a celebration,
maybe a continent, a lost range, a soldier
gone calm, barn owl of bleached memory
below the hooked face of the sea.
Mimesis: The Nighthawk
Years ago. Some mother bound it,
brought it to your classroom in a shoe box
where it hunkered, strained
the cardboard edges, cross-stitch feathers
like the fit of shadow-patternings
along the forest floor. At home,
you lifted its gray head so that its mouth
flexed as if to form words for the deaf.
We knew it nested the flat roofs of the city,
swallowed gnats, invaded swarms open-
mouthed. We'd watched dozens crank the sky
up slowly, stories at a time,
then drop wings in sharp descent
and here – such cowering, mouth
clamped to fight the dropper. That night
I took a broken sleep: child-launched rocket,
trail of wings, funnel through the aerial highway
and your dim image where the wind would be.
What were the boxed hearts of those roofs
that they once rayed all our caring – lights blurred
down a brick valley, sides sucked in
like enclosing bellows? It's been twenty years.
Yet walking last night, I heard them, their shriek
above, where the scraped-thin blue
of August darkened, knew them
almost without looking up,
as the blind must shiver
the hum of traffic at a curb,
or trace the measure of their fingers
over the hard, raised braille.
Black Cherry Trees Ripened Off of Stevenson Road
There were butterflies, hundreds of them,
along the path to the cemetery,
though at first I thought grasshoppers,
they spread so thickly under our feet
and fluttered away from the source
of their heaven: those berries spilling
from the 40-foot-high fencerow, the single seeds
cased in viscous red syrup, bitter to my tongue
but enough to draw these fritillaries back up to the heights
like a melody now caught in its upper octaves.
We wheeled our bikes through
like a small caravan, our lunch packed inside
and a blanket for sleeping
all afternoon among the graves
in this August oasis
of fenced-in reverence,
its long lane a doorway
of drunken blue wings.
Seven Earth Moments
Shoes off in the stream –
by the swing of her arms
she slips away from me, threatens
to return to the fish.
*
Words like stepping stones.
Some rock to one side, require
leaps, some take on the mask
of the river. Today I sit in the middle
of a swift Western stream, till it feels like me alone
that is moving. I am sixteen, have wandered off
through the woods. My parents
no longer exist.
*
Strained knee. Tendons throb.
In the bowl of the valley
I lie all evening – incredulous –
absorbing the ancient healing drums.
*
Halfway, Oregon (half-way to what?) --
on bikes we coast
ten miles down, surrounded by mountains
and yellow fields of wheat.
Every road, all over again,
teaches you how to ride.
*
Here is a storm, ripping the tarp (the heart)
away. Ivy Lea (western New York) racked
by mile-high winds off the lake. Like giants wailing.
All nouns now are capitalized. Skin.
Shivering. Breaking the lock on a vacant
Cabin. Bodies on a bare Mattress.
Waking to bright, restored, cold Sun.
*
Edge of the lumbered
Appalachians (where thousands come
on Sundays as if in a revolving
sleep) in rainless wind
we hear it falling
our way.
*
In Glen Helen – five thousand acres
donated to the town in his daughter’s name –
we come, running away
from another meeting.
At the base of a tree you tell me how,
back in Oregon, your friend threatened
to chop down your favorite if you
followed through with your (self-)deadly plan.
Then you kissed me, in more
than a sisterly way, so that walking home
we nearly forgot to look up
to thousands of fireflies blinking
to the heights of the forest.
Snail Along the Allegheny Trail
Steep descent into this ghostly town
where the ghostly limbs of Pennsylvania Oil
and Quaker State refineries still scar
the flats along the river bend : in Emlenton, ferns
grow twenty feet from the Allegheny Trail
and the fence warning visitors away
from its lost industrial glory. Now winter runners
jog where stacks burst slag, a tiny stem
roots in a coagulated chunk of char, a snail
stretches out its translucent neck
to cross the asphalt. It’s Thanksgiving
and I am on my way along Route 80
to eat the feast of hospital potatoes
with my sister and her daughter
and her husband of a year. Two tumors
have been excised from her brain. She cannot place
the two of clubs upon the ace, nor sense nor see
the wall before her stumbling steps
but we will toast this day
and whatever days emerge from her
long tunnel. Underneath the ground I know,
through most of Pennsylvania, crews are blasting
massive streams of hydrochloric acid,
diesel fuel and any other blend
of chemicals and blind ego they can find
to stir a last hurrah from the Marcellus shale
you rest upon, dear Emlenton,
and that my sister sleeps upon.
I’ll sing her “Simple Gifts,”
that Shaker hymn, and we’ll imagine a valley of delight.
For now, the sun breaks through
a heart-shaped bole in an oak high on the riverbank,
crews from Texas, Oklahoma, crowd the holiday
motels along the turnpike, and all the streams
that feed the Susquehanna, Black Fork and your cold
gray river spinning its slow circles round this bend
await the taste of brine. I kneel
in the leaves, the snail curls to my touch, the runners,
circling back, thud the trail with their hulking sound,
the chunk of slag in my winter pocket thrusts up a small green hand.
Sugar Maple
Far from the voices, the tree pulls me up
into its gray evolving spiral. Here nothing need be proved,
only the wide July day, thick with ants,
their homes in the roots, their curious persistent highways
up the trunk. Out in the meadow, pairs of goldfinches, like clipped
and undulating pulsating flames
light on the gritty thin strands of coneflowers, adding
hardly a sway as they pluck the heads clean
like tiny Russian hats, leaving rows
of dark indentations, continuous sentences in braille
repeating all one word. For the finches the heights I’ve climbed in an hour
would hardly be the thrust of two
incantations. Oh why then not stay
up here? I’ve walked all the melodies, held open
the door for love, trimmed my face
in the mirrors till it’s thin as a fan, melted
the eyes of candles, turned the columns
of the glassy sandstone cities. Here
my arms are long and supple, multiple as some
Midwestern Shiva, my evil columns entwined with their redemptive
silhouettes, no head but this dark stubbly
phylum flowing skyward
and rootward, at least a half of me
webbed below the ground, so heart-hollow
I can feel my limbs 20 feet or more in all directions
ride each small breeze, shift for a furious
and sudden rain, hardly a drop winding its way down
to my ghosted inner ground.
A wildfire could sweep this meadow
and I would still stand, singular and scarred, recording that summer
like a knife in my bark I’d slowly curl
my bulk around. But here, nearly invisible, a doe
edges a few feet from my calm
drip circle, with her twin fawns who nuzzle
the dark promise between
her thighs. I don’t scare her
with my humid, human breath
now as still as hers, now nearly
as eternal.