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Spring
Mother tried to take her life. The icicles thawed. The house, a wet coat we couldn't put back on. Still, the garden quickened, the fields were firm. Birds flew from the woods' fingertips. Among the petals and sticks and browning fruit, we sat in the grass and bickered, chained daisies, prayed. All that falls is caught. Unless it doesn't stop, like moonlight, which has no pace to speak of, falling through the cedar limbs, falling through the rock. |
Dress Rehearsal
Branches etch the film of ice on the studio window. A crow looks in, hopping and shrieking when I dance in my black tutu, trimmed with silver. The ballet master says, you are its mother. But in a crow's sky-knowing mind could I be so misconstrued? Out of the blackest cold-wet air, the crow seems molded. The stars will not wake up to guide it back to the creek of shadows where it was formed. Practice, practice. I am smoke in darkness, climbing away from a burning hut, in an otherwise empty field on which the fire is slight and low, and the rest of it is snow. | |
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------------------------------------------- Hello Friends, I love that these two poems by Chloë Honum appear side-by-side in the November 2009 issue of Poetry magazine. The first line, "Mother tried to take her life," escapes with the suddeness of a genie that can't be put back in the bottle, and "Unless" hangs with an awesome sense of vertigo over a stanza break, giving a reader that glimpse into the moment of a child's terror, staring down a fill-in-the-blank, the abyss of what didn't happen. It's the line about daisy chains that perhaps give us the best sense of the age at which the narrator is confronting this terror — that make the narrator small. And yet it's that same line that sneaks a bit of comforting into this poem with that tiny two-letter subject "we"; this is not an "I" alone. As for "Dress Rehearsal," being side-by-side with "Spring" infuses the ballet master's line "you are its mother" with that extra emphasis on the ignorance of adults who know not what they say — what "mother" might mean to this girl. The title "Dress Rehearsal" gets to take on shades of meaning a girl practicing to become a mother, a mother trying but not succeeding at the performance of an act. Falling, falling, practice, practice. It amazes me, in the face of a work as widespread and vividly iconic as Poe's "The Raven," another poet in English can come along and write an entirely different poem about a crow appearing to her at a window — that is the magic of poetry; I just love that. And don't even get me started on the perfect rhyme of that final tableau... Ok, it's late, and that's all for now. Best, Ellen | ||
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