5 poems
from The Fugitive Thing I Seek
CONFESSION
Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell.
—John Keats
Your breath came slow, three
light notes decaying
to silence.
Then, as if your body knew
resigning life was to dive
or sing, you took a last breath
deep into your belly.
I gasped in surprise.
No, that’s untrue. It wasn’t
a taking in. It was breaking
the surface without you. It was letting
my held breath go to draw
the sweet air in.
And it wasn’t surprise.
It was a hoarse, explosive laugh
of disbelief.
No, I believed your dying.
It wasn’t disbelief.
It would be close to wonder,
if wonder can be harsh.
If wonder can also hold
the injustice of your too-soon
death, or ascend to awe
when dying proved
your body’s final act
of fully being.
It was visceral astonishment.
You took one final, deliberate breath
as if to taste and bid farewell
to air, then simply as the edge
of summer cloud dissolves in sky
your being melted back
into the world.
All day I’d been matching my breaths
to yours, measuring your body’s need.
And all at once it no longer
needed.
Over the parking lot’s palms and wires,
sunset richened its coals,
bathing the commonplace world
in consecrating light,
then cooled through
the spectrum of lavenders and grays,
diminished, diminishing, gone.
I thought your breath would fade that way to nothing.
What if you, in that last wave of your breath
heard my laugh, my expulsion—whatever
it was—as scorn
or bitter scoffing?
Forgive my violence.
Forgive me for being so delicate,
so wrung by suspense
while your body deliberately
lived itself out, laboring forth
that last surge of energy.
Forgive me the truth:
I was rushing you on.
RECOVERY
The luminous inchworm, two
thread-fine pinstripes
gilding its back, curls up
on the muted forest of my brother’s
chest, hitching a ride
on his ribs as we climb
to the top of Lantern Hill,
where my brother persuades it
to walk into his palm, then
onto a leaf, my brother
whom self-destruction
drove toward change.
I look into his green-gold
eyes, opened wide
like the astonished pupils
on a moth’s wings.
In the worn-out self’s
dull chrysalis, a rift
expands. Gradually, his face
is growing young again.
It dawns. Gazing,
he reaches beyond the ripple
of hills misted
pensive blue by distance,
for the hazy seam
where ocean heals to sky.
LATE WALK
On each side of the trestle, water seethes,
million-diamonded.
My mother scans the ballast
for garnet and fool’s gold
freckling the quartz,
placing her feet with care,
her hands clasped
companionably
behind her back.
Wafts of creosote rise off
the hot sleepers.
My girls leap from each
to each. Now they walk the rails
like a balance beam, heel
to toe, side by side, fingers linked
to form the letter M.
A distant, dull rumble.
We turn to watch
the red engine, silent
as a toy, catch up to its thunder
as it rounds the bend. My mother
catches my eye:
the sap of girlhood
rises in her still, and she gives
her radiant smile.
We stand aside,
each hugging a daughter
from behind as the machine
wails by, its wake
of hot winds whirling.
One girl puts her fingers
to the rail to feel
the shudder of tonnage
rounding the bend.
The air levels and goes still.
But the plum-tinged heads
of the shore reeds
go on rustling
and nodding, nudging
each other.
October will bleach them.
Soon they’ll hold the light
like mother of pearl,
or my mother’s long hair, which
up close
is not simple, but alight
with strands of platinum
and palest gold. A goldfinch
lands a moment, veers off again
with my mother’s
O —
in lilting — isn’t he
triple beat — glorious?
flight.
WIDOWED
An ingot of shadow skims the water.
The black-backed gull sculls the humid surge
of southerly wind, his wingspan wider
than my reach, so close we can hear the scrub
of wings and observe the turn of his neck
as he scans the shore. The crimson badge
of fatherhood flares on his lower beak.
He’s looking for his mate, struck on the bridge,
my father says. She was still limp and warm
when he lifted her, her wings unfolding to graze
the road, her neck falling back along his arm.
Her body was pristine, he said, his eyes
dimming in memory. He drew up her wings,
clasped them, then lay her gently on the waves.
QUESTIONS FOR THE NORTHWEST WILDFLOWERS
i. Meadow Rue
Your nude stamens shimmy, dangling
off some magnet, each
soot-sheathed, a green needle
passed through a flame.
What makes them
twirl, even as I hold
my breath? By breath, do you
mean wings?
Invisible fins—some
pulsing filament?
What good’s the bee
who never lands?
Burrow in. Take our gold away
upon your face.
ii. Western Bleeding Heart
Pads of a newborn kitten:
your pale lavender buttons.
When my girl leans
to the mirror, holding back her bangs
so I can name
the shape of her face
I find your heart.
A seedpod strains your sister’s lips.
You too will tear.
Didn’t you?
Wasn’t she
your seed, your self-
fulfilling prophesy?
Where can I find a mirror
small enough to enter you?
You have a mirror.
A mirror is just a face.
iii. Cleavers
How peerless you are
in your place.
Your tiers of wheels spring upright,
crisp with juice, not yet
crimped and limp from being
dragged down the path
on my pants. Did you know
we used to call you
loveman, for your tattling cling
to the furtive boy and girl?
You can’t control what you are seized by.
That we’ve given you the meaning
humility? Do you mind
not having much
of a flower?
Can’t humans love
what doesn’t have a face?
Karen Holmberg is a poet (The Perseids, Axis Mundi), essayist, and YA novelist (The Collagist, forthcoming from Fitzroy Books). Her poems have appeared most recently in Southern Poetry Review, Poetry East, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches in the MFA program at Oregon State University.