Odd shaggy bits
of memory flourish & multiply the Russian olive leaning downward
in Avon grandmothers one banished strangely—
Her long black braid
plain gingham dress oddly formal her fine-boned beauty fiercely spent
I traced the artery in her arm wanting
the detail of her.
The giant magnolia in blossom. A wrack of mange.
*
Five great blue herons land in silence
walk the lake edge the night the great medievalist came for dinner
stars thickened the dark.
Beauty, a mother-cloud: her stampede of me
into prairie dust & prayer horns God-shadow in the northern sky—
The cherry cabinet stuffed with lavender to stanch the smell of sickness.
I am shriven by severity and cold. Arctic light loosens
the capacity of joints.
My neck-bone
marrow shifts one millimeter. Small loops, tattoos of breakage, itch.
Tiny hammers foliate,
then scar.
*
Sudden migration: God’s foot upon the treadle—
Bereavement a history of plunder & snatch & death
as in be-reafian OE., to seize
to deprive to plunder//see reave verb,
to strip, un-child, un-live. Within
the valley of dry bones, I spin
sense-bereaving straw into love letters:
make a soul.
—
Eva Hooker is the author of Godwit (3 Taos Press 2016). Hooker’s poems have appeared in journals such as AGNI, Salmagundi, Witness, Orion, Salamander, and Notre Dame Review.Â