Poetry | June 01, 2000
Poetry Feature: Katherine Whitcomb
Featuring the poems:
- Chorus
- Separation
- Puzzle at 30,000 Feet
- Matchflame of the Ego, Moth
- Departed Cordelia
Chorus
a man in Canada has the aurora borealis all rigged up
he tells the radio reporter that he engineers
and records sound in the universe
the northern lights clamor down at him
they hurl what he calls “hissing whistlers” at the earth
he says the chorus always sings to him in the wilderness
a cacophony of swooping colored wings
and maybe you do have to be in the right place
at the right time to hear what is being sung to you
for my painter friend Werner that was his bedroom
the night his apartment building in New York City burned
in those slowed-down moments when the smoke was thick as Jell-O
he knelt on the floor to get more air
but the smoke was coming up from between the boards
and he could not breathe
he said he heard a voice tell him
he could lie down then with his pet cat in his arms
there was nothing to fear and dying would be all right
or said the voice he could stand on his cold windowsill
five stories up from the street and dive across an eight-foot gap
headfirst through a plate glass window
dive into a lit portal in the building next door still holding his cat
and that is what he did
he jumped across back into our world
where he can tell us this story
and show us his shoulders scarred with his choice to live
and mostly we do want to live
it may be that no one is truly safe but it does not matter
the chorus is singing
and the songs they sizzled and hummed over the radio
brought the deep calm of Quetico to me again
when the sky rippled with lines of phosphorescent laundry
and voices on the wind sang arias so beautifully
voices of my grandmothers and great-grandmothers before them
when they reached over to me singing don’t be afraid
and all those hosannas swam together
into the one music that sounds within everything
Separation
There are blows in life so violent . . . I cannot answer!
-Vallejo
After it, I live alone
across the country. All the photographs
of him turned face down
under piles of folded clothes. An astrologer
reads my planets to me over the phone,
very late, moths sputtering at the lit window.
She says here Saturn squaring Saturn
means everything is changing. She says
look it’s all at the top of the chart go into the world
and make a life. I hang up thinking
a life is full of pain and it is hard to know
what we need. Hard even to inhabit our own bodies
each night, hard that morning comes again
no matter what. On the best days I remember
to be kind. My father calls more often,
worried, he asks are you safe
do you have friends? His voice warm at my ear.
I reassure him. I am swimming I say
you know floating. I can barely form the words.
All statements seem questions, all tenses changed.
I am, I was. When I try to picture my husband
everything suffers, I see him swaying
in the living room, my mail in messy stacks,
dust thickening, the house, a shrine
to what is lost. The three cats search and search
but never find me, The old gray tom sleeps more
each day, nose between his forelegs. How long
can this burn and still leave me alive.
How late can it get and the phone still rings
a voice dropping words
into my answering machine. A recording
of rushed intensity, projection,
oh I can see him. He speaks
to a whirr of blank air. And I push my hands
deeper into my pockets and stand there listening,
repeating: not now, not you.
Puzzle at 30,000 Feet
When the insurance salesman seated next to me breaks
my concentration pointing out a circular irrigation pattern
below in Kansas, giant green polka dots against the brown,
I’m grateful. And stuck on a term for malt liquor yeast, ten letters:
(blank)(blank) E (blank) N (blank) RU (blank)(blank).I’m getting
a headache. It had been easy before that, sort of. I needed
a five-letter word for right now and filled in TODAY.
Then a four-letter constellation animal and BEAR didn’t work
because 71 down is TORK for one of the Monkees.
But I stared out the window a minute, then wrote URSA.
The insurance salesman can tell me the number of the interstate
we’re both flying over, but he doesn’t know the parts of the eye
or the author Saki’s real name. The interstate looks like yarn,
far-flung, tangled in the hills. 79 across wants an apt family name
in The Wizard of Oz, GALE. Mr. Curious-Next-To-Me says
ask me another. My heart is weightless, cut free, hurtling
through space. Mr. Curious begs ask me again. He gets the four-letter
Kansas town IOLA, no problem. Deep summer swoons Kansas.
I’m far from my beloved but beloved nonetheless. I say all right then
four letters for happiness, five letters meaning joyous hymn.
Matchflame of the Ego, Moth
that is love.
Remember the cautionary tale
of how to kill a frog? If you put him in boiling water,
he will jump right out. But if you surround him
with water of a comfortable temperature and gradually
heat it to boiling, he won't notice what's happening
and he'll die.
Merciless nature.
After twelve years
with my husband I couldn't tell you what
it was like to live with him, now that I have left him
and moved far away. I stripped my touch and taste
from the rooms of our house. I don't recall
one thing about the journey westward except
the speed of travel, reaching the end of the road
too soon. Not one tear the whole trip but now
so many mornings on my hands and knees.
Etched glass of the spirit, stone
that is love.
The only picture of February that endures
is the last evening I slept in the house:
my husband returning home from work at dusk
to find me bathing, coming in to talk
then heating water in the kettle and saucepan, pouring
the boiling liquid into the far end of the tub.
Departed Cordelia
My father said, You are a spirit. Where did you die?
and we were equally alive. I thought to correct him
but he was not in his perfect mind.
My answer, to myself: still, still, far wide,
wide of the mark, wide of this world and time.
My father said, You are a spirit. Where did you die?
and I kissed him as he slept, wild-haired, sliding
down in the chair. My kiss would be his medicine
if he was in his perfect mind.
We met again in prison, he and I. For a while
his memory cleared. I wept that he knew my name,
my father who’d raved, Spirit, where did you die?
From the beginning my heart held my words aside
and he sent me with France, to battle, to the storm.
He was not in his perfect mind.
I left forever. I’m dead as earth. I gravely
flowered, a rose in the rain, a dark bowl of flame.
My father said, You are a spirit. Where did you die?
but he was not in his perfect mind.
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