Columbine by Javier Zamora

Columbine

 

I’d never seen one like it: the flower

with its many orange cups. Dad drove me to Yosemite

the second month in this country.

He didn’t know the name of it. I didn’t know the name of it,

only that I loved the cups & that

they reminded me of the hibiscus

outside the glassless window I’d left months ago.

I hadn’t started school yet. There were many things I didn’t know,

English

the most important. Didn’t have friends.

Entire days spent inside the apartment

memorizing words, reading bilingual picture books,

comparing couch to the picture, to the couch

in my parents’ living room. In the news,

earlier, much earlier, before I arrived in June: headlines

I could not read. Could not understand. Parents

shared a fear I’d never known. Though

I’d seen guns on the way up here. Though

there had been war; I did not know the way to school yet.

The names of highways that would show me blooms.

 

Persimmons by Li-Young Lee

Persimmons

 

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker

slapped the back of my head

and made me stand in the corner

for not knowing the difference

between persimmon and precision.

How to choose

 

persimmons. This is precision.

Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.

Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one

will be fragrant. How to eat:

put the knife away, lay down newspaper.

Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.

Chew the skin, suck it,

and swallow. Now, eat

the meat of the fruit,

so sweet,

all of it, to the heart.

 

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.

In the yard, dewy and shivering

with crickets, we lie naked,

face-up, face-down.

I teach her Chinese.

Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.

Naked:   I’ve forgotten.

Ni, wo:   you and me.

I part her legs,

remember to tell her

she is beautiful as the moon.

 

Other words

that got me into trouble were

fight and fright, wren and yarn.

Fight was what I did when I was frightened,

Fright was what I felt when I was fighting.

Wrens are small, plain birds,

yarn is what one knits with.

Wrens are soft as yarn.

My mother made birds out of yarn.

I loved to watch her tie the stuff;

a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

 

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class

and cut it up

so everyone could taste

a Chinese apple. Knowing

it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat

but watched the other faces.

 

My mother said every persimmon has a sun

inside, something golden, glowing,

warm as my face.

 

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,

forgotten and not yet ripe.

I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,

where each morning a cardinal

sang, The sun, the sun.

 

Finally understanding

he was going blind,

my father sat up all one night

waiting for a song, a ghost.

I gave him the persimmons,

swelled, heavy as sadness,

and sweet as love.

 

This year, in the muddy lighting

of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking

for something I lost.

My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,

black cane between his knees,

hand over hand, gripping the handle.

He’s so happy that I’ve come home.

I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.

All gone, he answers.

 

Under some blankets, I find a box.

Inside the box I find three scrolls.

I sit beside him and untie

three paintings by my father:

Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.

Two cats preening.

Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

 

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,

asks, Which is this?

 

This is persimmons, Father.

 

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,

the strength, the tense

precision in the wrist.

I painted them hundreds of times

eyes closed. These I painted blind.

Some things never leave a person:

scent of the hair of one you love,

the texture of persimmons,

in your palm, the ripe weight.

Let the Last Thing Be Song by Hannah Fries

Let the Last Thing Be Song

 

i.

 

Memory is safest in someone with amnesia. 

Behind locked doors 

glow the unmarred pieces— 

musical notes humming 

in a jumble, only 

waiting to be 

arranged.

 

ii.

 

What is left in one 

who does not remember? 

Love and music.

 

Not a name but the fullness. 

Not the sequence of events 

but order of rhythm and pitch,

 

a piece of time in which to exist.

 

iii.

 

A tone traveling through space has no referent, 

and yet we infer, and yet it 

finds its way between our cells 

and shakes us.

 

Aren’t we all still quivering 

like tuning forks 

with the shock of being, 

the shock of being seen?

 

iv.

 

When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold. 

Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe, 

with its loosening warp 

and weft, still 

unspool its symphony?

 

Sing to me — please — 

and I will sing for you as all unravels, 

as time continues past the final beat 

of the stutter inside your chest.

 

Harmonize, at the edge of that horizon,

with the black hole’s 

fathomless B-flat.

Hymn by Marie Howe

Hymn

It began 

as an almost inaudible hum, 

low and long for the solar winds 

     and far dim galaxies,

a hymn growing louder, for the moon and the sun, 

a song without words for the snow falling, 

     for snow conceiving snow

conceiving rain, the rivers rushing without shame, 

the hum turning again higher — into a riff of ridges 

     peaks hard as consonants,

summits and praise for the rocky faults and crust and crevices 

then down down to the roots and rocks and burrows 

     the lakes’ skittery surfaces, wells, oceans, breaking

waves, the salt-deep: the warm bodies moving within it: 

the cold deep: the deep underneath gleaming: some of us rising 

     as the planet turned into dawn, some lying down

as it turned into dark; as each of us rested — another woke, standing 

among the cast-off cartons and automobiles; 

     we left the factories and stood in the parking lots,

left the subways and stood on sidewalks, in the bright offices, 

in the cluttered yards, in the farmed fields, 

     in the mud of the shanty towns, breaking into

harmonies we’d not known possible. finding the chords as we 

found our true place singing in a million 

     million keys the human hymn of praise for every

something else there is and ever was and will be: 

     the song growing louder and rising. 

          (Listen, I too believed it was a dream.)

The Three Cypress Trees by Mourid Barghouti

The Three Cypress Trees

 

Transparent and frail,

like the slumber of woodcutters,

serene, foreshadowing things to come,

the morning drizzle does not conceal

these three cypresses on the slope.

Their details belie their sameness,

their radiance confirms it.

I said:

I wouldn’t dare to keep looking at them,

there is a beauty that takes away our daring,

there are times when courage fades away.

The clouds rolling high above

change the form of the cypresses.

The birds flying towards other skies

change the resonance of the cypresses.

The tiled line behind them

fixes the greenness of the cypresses

and there are trees whose only fruit is greenness.

Yesterday, in my sudden cheerfulness,

I saw their immortality.

Today, in my sudden sorrow,

I saw the axe.

(Translated by Radwa Ashur)

Parsley by Rita Dove

Parsley

1. The Cane Fields

There is a parrot imitating spring

in the palace, its feathers parsley green.   

Out of the swamp the cane appears

to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General   

searches for a word; he is all the world   

there is. Like a parrot imitating spring,

we lie down screaming as rain punches through   

and we come up green. We cannot speak an R—

out of the swamp, the cane appears

and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina.

The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads.   

There is a parrot imitating spring.

El General has found his word: perejil.

Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining   

out of the swamp. The cane appears

in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming.   

And we lie down. For every drop of blood   

there is a parrot imitating spring.

Out of the swamp the cane appears.

2. The Palace

The word the general’s chosen is parsley.   

It is fall, when thoughts turn

to love and death; the general thinks

of his mother, how she died in the fall

and he planted her walking cane at the grave   

and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming   

four-star blossoms. The general

pulls on his boots, he stomps to

her room in the palace, the one without   

curtains, the one with a parrot

in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders   

Who can I kill today. And for a moment   

the little knot of screams

is still. The parrot, who has traveled

all the way from Australia in an ivory   

cage, is, coy as a widow, practising   

spring. Ever since the morning   

his mother collapsed in the kitchen   

while baking skull-shaped candies   

for the Day of the Dead, the general   

has hated sweets. He orders pastries   

brought up for the bird; they arrive

dusted with sugar on a bed of lace.   

The knot in his throat starts to twitch;   

he sees his boots the first day in battle   

splashed with mud and urine

as a soldier falls at his feet amazed—

how stupid he looked!— at the sound

of artillery. I never thought it would sing   

the soldier said, and died. Now

the general sees the fields of sugar   

cane, lashed by rain and streaming.   

He sees his mother’s smile, the teeth   

gnawed to arrowheads. He hears   

the Haitians sing without R’s

as they swing the great machetes:   

Katalina, they sing, Katalina,

mi madle, mi amol en muelte. God knows   

his mother was no stupid woman; she   

could roll an R like a queen. Even   

a parrot can roll an R! In the bare room   

the bright feathers arch in a parody   

of greenery, as the last pale crumbs

disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone

calls out his name in a voice

so like his mother’s, a startled tear

splashes the tip of his right boot.

My mother, my love in death.

The general remembers the tiny green sprigs   

men of his village wore in their capes   

to honor the birth of a son. He will

order many, this time, to be killed

for a single, beautiful word.

Wintergreen Ridge by Lorine Niedecker

Wintergreen Ridge

Where the arrow

         of the road signs

                 lead us:

Life is natural

         in the evolution

                of matter

Nothing supra-rock

        about it

                simply

butterflies

        are quicker

                than rock

Man

        lives hard

                on this stone perch

by sea

       imagines

               durable works

in creation here

        as in the center

               of the world

let’s say

        of art

              We climb

the limestone cliffs

        my skirt dragging

               an inch below

the knee

        the style before

               the last

the last the least

         to see

              Norway

or “half of Sussex

         and almost all

              of Surrey”

Crete perhaps

         and further:

             “Every creature

better alive

        than dead.

              men and moose

and pine trees”

       We are gawks

              lusting

after wild orchids

       Wait! What’s this? —

             sign:

Flowers

        loveliest

            where they grow

Love them enjoy them

        and leave them so

            Let’s go!

Evolution’s wild ones

        saved

            continuous life

through change

       from Time Began

            Northland’s

unpainted barns

       fish and boats

            now this —

flowering ridge

       the second one back

            from the lighthouse

Who saved it? —

       Women

            of good wild stock

Stood stolid

        before machines

           They stopped bulldozers

cold

        We want it for all time

           they said

and here it is —

        horsetails

          club mosses

stayed alive

        after dinosaurs

          died

Found:

       laurel in muskeg

          Linnaeus’s twinflower

Andromeda

       Cisandra of the bog

           pearl flowered

Lady’s tresses

       insect-eating

          pitcher plant

Bedeviled little Drosera

       of the sundews

          deadly

in sphagnum moss

       sticks out its sticky

          (Darwin tested)

tentacled leaf

       towards a fly

           half an inch away

engulfs it

       Just the touch

          of a gnat on a filament

stimulates leaf-plasma

       secretes a sticky

          clear liquid

the better to eat you

       my dear

          digest cartilage

and tooth enamel

        (DHL spoke of blood

          in a green growing thing

in Italy was it?)

       They do it with glue

          these plants

Lady’ Slipper’s glue

       and electric threads

          smack the sweets-seeker

on the head

      with pollinia

          The bee

befuddled

     the door behind him

          closed he must

go out the rear

     the load on him

         for the next

flower

     Women saved

        a pretty thing: Truth:

“a good to the heart”

     It all comes down

        to the family

“We have a lovely

     finite parentage

        mineral

vegetable

     animal”

        Nearby dark wood —

I suddenly heard

     the cry

        my mother’s

where the light

     pissed past

        the pistillate cone

how she loved

     closed gentians

        she herself

so closed

     and in this to us peace

        the stabbing

pen

     friend did it

        close to the heart

pierced the woods

     red

        (autumn?)

Sometimes it’s a pleasure

     to grieve

        or dump

the leaves most brilliant

     as do trees

        when they’ve no need

of an overload

     of cellulose

        for a cool while

Nobody, nothing

     ever gave me

        greater thing

than time

     unless light

        and silence

which if intense

     makes sound

        Unaffected

by man

     thin to nothing lichens

        grind with their acid

granite to sand

     These may survive

        the grand blow-up

the bomb

     When visited

        by the poet

From Newcastle on Tyne

     I neglected to ask

        what wild plants

have you there

     how dark

        how inconsiderate

of me

     Well I see at this point

        no pelting of police

with flowers

     no uprooted gaywings

        bishop’s cup

white bunchberry

     under aspens

        pipsissewa

(wintergreen)

     grass of parnassus

        See beyond —

ferns

     algae

        water lilies

Scent

     the simple

        the perfect

order

     of that flower

        water lily

I see no space-rocket

     launched here

        no mind-changing

acids eaten

     one sort manufactured

        as easily as gin

in a bathtub

     Do feel however

        in liver and head

as we drive

     towards cities

        the change

in church architecture —

     now it’s either a hood

        for a roof

pulled down to the ground

     and below

        or a factory-long body

crawled out from a rise

     of black dinosaur-necked

        blower-beaked

smokestack-

     steeple

        Murder in the Cathedral’s 

proportions

     Do we go to church

        No use

discussing heaven

     HJ’s father long ago

        pronounced human affairs

gone to hell

     Great God —

         what men desire! —

the scientist: a full set

     of fishes

        the desire to know

Another: to talk beat

     act cool

        release    la’go

So far out of flowers

     human parts found

        wrapped in newspaper

left at the church

     near College Avenue

        More news: the war

which “cannot be stopped”

     ragweed pollen

        sneezeweed

whose other name

     Ambrosia

        goes for a community

Ahead — home town

     second shift steamfitter

        ran arms out

as tho to fly

     dived to concrete

        from loading dock

lost his head

     Pigeons

        (I miss the gulls)

mourn the loss

     of people

        no wild bird does

 It rained

     mud squash

        willow leaves

in the eaves

     Old sunflower

        you bowed

to no one

     but Great Storm

        of Equinox