A Whole Season of Lamination and Snow
It is lonely wearing a long green topcoat that falls
almost to the ground. It smells of soot
from the mills. A touch on the shoulder
was in some other life. O Lord, when we wear
each other's clothes may they not be too unkind
to remember us. Some nights the houses keep
to themselves like a hand of cards,
some nights the deer pass by the lit houses
that many nights in a row have lain dark.
Sometimes I lived in one of them. Snow falling in the dark
seems also to abide in the future, having extinguished
the kerosene lamp of me in the twentieth century.
As Guest That Would Be Gone
Clouds no longer behave the way they used to.
Or is it just that certain kinds of clouds are disappearing,
something about high carbon dioxide emissions, so how I used to think
of them as separated, named, specific kinds of clouds
will have to change, omitting certain categories while acknowledging
how much we don't yet know. And yet they still go
drifting over and across us like a language trying to explain
things change, things ever will, and that won't change,
matter being altered, other than it was, other than it will be,
which isn't very comforting. That we go on, not as us
but being on the point of becoming imperceptible.
“Ultimately," says one of the clouds, “the hope is that it will be
beautiful." I'm grieving for a friend whose passage wasn't.
Two months after she first collapsed, and she isn't here.
I don't always know how to read a face. I try replaying hers.
Imagination reinvents, and memory just shrugs its shoulders.
I'd hope her passage was like Dickinson's imagined summer.
Maybe that explains my dream, the one in which she said
she couldn't get together that night, she had plans
to meet with Divinity in the moonlight, and until I woke
I thought Divinity was some new-agey friend, and was hurt
to be replaced so easily. But it wasn't easy . . . was it?
“The inwardness of age," John Koethe wrote. I'd add,
“gets crowded." Friends leave, by dying or by living on.
All over town their faces light up on my mnemonic map,
or they wait as if in piles, face on face, unopened mail.
It happens when you live years of your life in one place
or it happens anyway, however many times you move.
Some rock star must have imagined something else
when he bought a modernist George Nelson home in Kalamazoo
sight unseen, including furniture: just the occasional visit
to write songs and “shake up my environment."
He won't seek friends but might buy groceries here.
That kind of house sits way back in the trees, so inside
it will retain its impersonally eccentric, Mondrian-esque color scheme.
Kind of like writing your dreams down in the future tense,
a glimpse of house through leaves, a bird just visible on a branch,
maybe one of spring's first orioles, then its sapphic phrase––
what am I here for––from the top of one of the trees.
So if from each other what we want is to be seen
I must admit each of you one at a time though
one way or another you dream the dream of invisibility.
Even Now We Are Glowing
In photos taken by long exposure, the stars in motion
look like trails of neon light (though really it is the earth's rotation),
the camera's shutter must stay open long enough
that the image can blur. You can ask someone
to walk across the frame and watch them turn into a ghost.
There she goes, my mother beginning to talk to herself or us
in a storytelling voice. How there was one gray bird that stood aside
while all the others chose their colors,
there was Little Tiny who stole the clothes off a corpse,
a wind that twice blew the meal from a wooden bowl
and the boy who travelled north thinking he could recover it.
Apparently even in daylight the body emits a dim glow detectable by a special camera.
The man in the first photograph from the test study had his eyes closed.
By the third photograph he had disappeared into light.
That was a good visit, my father always said on the night before I flew.
The Drift of All of You
Unanswered phone with a you inside
leaving a lengthy message,
following its own ups and downs,
isn't one half of a conversation,
it is something else, I don't know what,
I imagine a vase filled with flowers
beginning to bend down low
but that is just its own
little sad, unfinished thought.
Last night being at a party
was like wandering, or being blown along,
I could never catch on anything,
a softness, thorns in a voice . . .
standing still I could feel the motion,
attention spans that kept traveling
over each other's shoulders, out the window,
into the garden, up into the trees
as high as twilight would take us.
How I wanted to fill my own house
with flowers, big fluffy roses just over
the hill, petals going antique
from the edges in, how I wanted to talk
to anyone, maybe just about tennis,
maybe just about the exactness
of light weighing everything down
on a hot afternoon, one guy's white shirt
and another's royal blue sneakers,
green courts, the clean white lines,
polite applause like a roomful of ticking
clocks all going their separate ways.
Or what sometimes causes this misty feeling
to rise in my heart. The party
was for my friend's mother's birthday,
but turning ninety seemed just as much
about who wasn't there, we all had
someone, and the flickering shadows
of leaves on the patio, little troubles
and gossip the shadows behind our talk
take on. As if some part of everyone there
was adrift like a ghost in a white dress
holding a ghostly glass that holds nothing
but an old song, and a story about a name
and a brother who died so long ago
and my friend's mother talking
as if he were in the other room.
I'm imagining roses, too many of them,
in a small-mouthed vase,
and the blousiness of clothes on a line
when the wind tries them on
and shrugs them off again.
Sooner or later a subject is lost
or freed from the conversation,
the dead go wandering off,
fewer than, less than, the countable and uncountable,
the party flickering now like a kind
of candlelight telling us
nothing much, it is late, it is time
to feel lonely, can you remember
a sweetness like this?
Nancy Eimers is the author of Human Wishes (New Michigan Press), Oz (Carnegie Mellon), and three previous poetry collections. She has been the recipient of a Nation “Discovery” Award, a Whiting Writers Award, and two NEA Fellowships, and her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.