2 poems
The Vertical Looms
When the men finished construction of the loom
the girls began the weaving—and it began to bloom
like a very tall bush, and the building was overt,
but the weaving viable, half-rational, a ghost
at dawn, of dawn: verdigris, gray-green,
and verdigris, green-gray, and jacinth, moderate,
And citron, sky-orange, and the ghost
Was the half-constructed, gentler-mighty object;
And the patterns with the zig-zag and the thunderbird,
The rain white noise and nonsensical preceding
The voluptuary hail of monsters.
None of these were needed in Year Zero,
In our Year Zero’s trial by paradise
Where the apple worked its fleshly wonders
Like a rose, overt and viable, a slattern.
The braves and virgins, asleep in the cool cliffs,
Under the ghost things, the blankets
With their threaded pictures of the insect world,
So that someday every fixture
In the bedroom of a whale-shaped hotel
Can be made of gold, or gold-covered copper.
Outside, a number of bridges, the boats
with engines of pink crystal. Every hour
a new agreement comes in over the circular
pike in the corn, calculated at intervals,
And in the cigarette field, the egg of peace
Is buried in the hay among the melons, humming softly.
We must all pull our own weight,
like the small boats pulling break-bulk carriers
between the harbor lights at sunset toward the sea,
Must push native fruits further into alien territory.
Then at day’s end you can spend all week in bed
with a book of magic spells—and a regular
Spelling book, as well. Outside, the plants
Of winter in a ring of virtual fire,
One twig facing the volcanoes of spring,
Which are breathing out gasses only toxic enough
To shock the bushes into early flowering.
The giants are here. They have rung the bell.
There is no need to be cynical—resist that.
Just smoke your pipe, one of fiberglass or briar:
That’s right—now watch it turn into a rose.
Under the Great Catalpa Among the Willows
Mirtle makes my request, my request is crown’d with a willowe... -Sir Philip Sidney
On Apple Hill, under the great catalpa,
the governor’s office lay in sunlight; the teletype
machine and a long scroll of paper
sat beside the wire-rimmed spectacles
and faded maps showing the territories
and the holdings of the state. And Governor
Josiah Willow and the entire Willow family
were similar to other willows: with long,
limp, pendant twigs; lance-shaped leaves
of a cloudy green; natives of China
and tolerant of smoke and grime and easily
grown from cuttings like the weeping willow;
like the black willow, found along alluvial
banks and streams and uniformly green
on both sides, used for boxes, barn floors,
toys and baskets: all things where strength
does not matter, as it neither ever warps
nor splinters; they flourish in the riverside
thickets like the sandbar willow—they
are scintillant among the common stones;
found on prairies along water-courses
like the peach-leaf willow; weeping,
weeping and mourning, Mrs. Josiah
Mary Hadassah Willow, burying one more
child in the shade of the catalpa:
astringent, like the blue persimmon,
only reaching excellence after frost,
dull-orange and tinged with yellow: a small
statuette carved from the hornbeam—
falling asleep with such unknown force
among dark fragments.
Geoffrey Nutter is the author of several poetry collections, including The Rose of January, Christopher Sunset, Cities at Dawn, and most recently Giant Moth Perishes. He lives in New York City, and runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars, information for which can be found at wallsonglass.com.