4 poems
from “The Asking Pool”
Bridge (they think I am Dutch)
They think I am Dutch here: another caramel-something picturesque in this Netherlands city park amidst the weaving bicycles and willows weeping over the duck pond.
Because eventually diaspora relocates origin. Because mixed ancestry mixes it up everywhere. I am addressed in Dutch as much as in English. In French. In Spanish. No one can guess how to speak to me.
If I could speak all the languages, still I will always be most afraid I will never be able to say how it is. The world moves through me. I learn to copy the voices of others and live within their masks.
The truth is I’m nostalgic for a beingness unmarkable. A bodyscape un-delineated. A landscape unmapped. Unmappable. Recognized simply, by tree, by evening light, by direction of wind in grasses. A landscape intimate with secret monikers, known only by the one who utters the calling. Precious as it sounds when I cup my palm before my mouth, when I speak into my hands my own name.
Bridge (to an empire)
At first, all I can think and feel are how far away the lands of worry. How juvenile, the US of A, fractured by its rampant loss.
Look how clean and simple this white cup and saucer by comparison. How long an afternoon spent at a cafe on the square.
I admit there is an ease to which I stretch my days, a matter of factness in procuring diversion, one task at a time.
Now, I am wandering the curved street. Now, I am taking a hot chocolate near the park. Now, I am watching the canal move its water.
How languid a land can be when blood is secondary: the fruit for this warm drink cut from bodies far away, soaking an earth just as fabled into distance.
But not this dirt beneath the wire-footed cafe chair.
And not my body. For once, not my body.
It is so easy to believe it. Effortless as time built on another continent.
I love it, I do-- the chocolate creamy enough to thicken my tongue.
Bridge (of longing)
I am leaving autumn in Belgium. I am coming to autumn in New York. I am dropping with the cool air, leaves of light fluttering to concrete. Then goes the hope for the year, the high heated possibilities of spring and summer pass away on this train to the airport.
Did I get close enough to the sun this time around?
The grey mist outside the train soothes the edges off the city.
Yesterday I went to St. Baaf’s 7th century abbey and saw a photo exhibition of refugees from every place in the world.
Medieval tabulatures of prayer. Dust and plastic camps in valleys of nowhere. Sanctuary. The ripping reach towards it.
I am here, on the rock of this train, wishing for a place to lay my head. Rhythm. Warm earth. Quiet water. Hands to cup the round of my skull. Thumbs to stroke my forehead from eyebrow to temple, calm as clockwork.
Will she always be with me, this small tremoring behind my heart, this dull ache to be cared for as a child?
Be lost, I want to tell her. Be sorrowful. Be set upon by longing. Let it be a bridge we can speak across. Let it be the longing that carries us forward.
But who is saying this and who is listening?
I don’t know which land I am writing from.
Bridge (of blood)
I will tell you the truth: I came here looking for ancestors. I came here in this black body with white ancestors, this white body with black ancestors, this brown body, to find an apology within it. I am responsible for them, don’t you see? We belong to each other.
A lover of the earth and wanderer of lands, Lisbeth White is an alumna of VONA, Bread Loaf Environmental Conference, Tin House and Callaloo Creative Writing workshops. Her writing has been published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Rumpus, Kweli, Apogee, Blue Mountain Review, The Fourth River, Yemassee, the anthology Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California from Scarlet Tanager Books, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of the anthology Poetry as Spellcasting: Literary Conjure for Personal and Collective Transformation, forthcoming from North Atlantic Books in Fall 2022. You can find her digitally at www.lisbethwrites.com or Instagram: @earthmaven.