Run like squirrels after each other,
lengthen like buds out of the brown earth that lifts
and floats a little with the movement of wrens:
no it is not spring yet, not even now in our deep crisis is it spring:
all growth turgid, she said obscenely: turgid spring:
fistfuls of flower or leaf, one reproductive, the other not, both necessary:
my hands ungloved throughout the pruning
sliced and punctured, the welts as brief as the roses will be.
*
And hot tea, brewed with the one bag found
in an otherwise empty cupboard on the coldest day:
the name he’d shouted, Old Bag, not half-wrong man in a hurry
taking what he can of the world because it’s owed him:
those who touched my hair in the street, my ass in the subway,
who kicked at pigeons and taught their sons to do the same:
they’re either dead now or, older bags than I, awakened
to their cruelties and changed—we should not expect it:
a good life: paying what we owe the world.
*
The priest asked that every mother in the congregation stand:
every grandmother, great grandmother, and mother-in-law
(encouraging laughter): and then, in his largesse, every foster mom,
childcare provider, pre-school and elementary school teacher,
until I was the only woman seated at Mother’s Day mass,
my devout, dementing dad staring forward, head
high and at an angle I recognized as ashamed, not of but for me,
or so I like to believe: and so I do believe,
agnostic that I am, in the wielded power of humiliation
to crush, till not a drop of god is left us.
*
Run like rounds of automatic fire,
lengthen like blood over the pale cloth that lifts
and floats a little with the settling wind:
the images are more than that:
our helplessness is less than theirs.
Near here a wall of lost things, keys mostly, hung from pins:
no one stops to search. But what of the rooms,
what of the locks, pockets of breath held inside.
*
In the days of landlines when I was young,
if my parents spent an evening at friends’
they’d call their destination and leave
our phone off the hook. The logic being, I suppose,
they’d hear our screams in case of calamity.
All night I listened, receiver at my ear, to mostly
underwater noises, though I might have caught a passing voice,
a laugh. Sometimes I’d press the switch hook, daring
the line to cut. Sometimes I’d press my luck and speak.
*
Hard keeping in view the Snow Moon for long as it rose
behind trashcan, tree, cloud: also known as Hunger Moon:
sinking, crowning, then tucking back in. I wouldn’t nurse,
my mother said, refused formula, too. There were later times
I hungered, others I was full, each time living on
my body’s bounty, alternately less and more the rounded shadow
pooled beneath my feet by noon: tilting planet of darkness,
waxing corona of light: sufficient, without need.
*
As for calamity, etymologists claim obscure origins for the word,
its agrarian roots shared with many languages,
as with the Old Irish kel-: to strike.
Glass that changes color when reheated is said to strike.
See also: strike camp, strike gold, strike out, -oil, -through, -back:
hit and get hit until you feel it: a sudden realization that
this is what our ruling class has decided:
first roll of the ball that knocks down all the pins:
air strike, clock-, hunger-, labor-, lightning-: hit and get hit until
you no longer feel it: a pose, a coin, a deal, a blow, a match.
*
Run like the Magdalene’s abundant hair, long enough
to clothe her, lengthen like the bones the artists carved
beneath her penitent flesh, ascetic now, beautiful,
as they say, only on the inside: one way to end her.
A Gnostic text discovered in 1945 attributes to Magdalene
words long attributed to Jesus in the New Testament:
The suffering of each day is sufficient. Workers deserve
their food. Disciples resemble their teachers.
*
In a persistent rumor some say his animators spread in 1966,
Walt Disney arranged to be cryonically preserved:
that his body, or at least his head, lies frozen under
Cinderella’s Castle. At San Diego’s Frozen Zoo nearby,
the rare, endangered, and extinct incubate
in shapely bottles of pink liquid, like potions or perfumes:
glass wombs for rhino, viper, sea star. The last
of the studio’s films to use cel animation, The Little Mermaid
spawned the Disney Renaissance of 1989: cels go
for a fortune on the internet, each one of a kind.
*
People used to say, soaking wet, they’d got caught
in the rain: a sudden downpour: the pouring rain.
The rain is constant, I wrote in a postcard once,
perhaps from here. I was fifteen, and on the tour bus,
where I could crush on her best, was a girl named Rain,
who napped on her brother’s shoulder as we drove. I didn’t
long to be the shoulder: I didn’t wish I were the girl:
I needed a face for my own true soul, is how I’d put it
to myself: and it was hers I wanted, not mine.
*
When the yoga instructor says that breath is the body’s
only autonomic function our minds can regulate,
I think of my father’s last breath. When she calls for
chest openers, I think of my mother’s autopsy. Then I think
morbid, and I let that judgment go. It’s theorized
pigeons’ navigational skill relies on sensory, magnetic,
and celestial cues. At rest, they roost communally, chests
puffed, in rows: savasana: Sanskrit for corpse pose.
*
Sparking when the chisel struck, flawed with small cracks,
Michelangelo abandoned the work intended for his tomb:
one stone, four figures: the artist, dead Christ, two Marys:
ten years: it took ten minutes on our high school tour—
how loud we were, and quick: I pronounced it ugly,
fearing failure, the mess of love and death
I couldn’t recognize as mine: the mother’s lips
at her son’s ear, his lifeless hand on the Magdalene’s
shoulder, the old man’s effort to hold them all,
collapsing pyramid of burden and embrace:
their own dust puddled at their feet.
*
Run like noon bells across the stone and hillside,
lengthen in the clamor as shadows lift
and float beneath you: you are a pin in the map now,
wobbling in the gravity between strike and echo:
the rounded red expectancy, clods of upturned earth.
Blood runs there, and voices, the planet’s many
infrasounds that birds are said to hear: you are one pin
wobbling in the gravity: the map in bloom with others.
*
He’d take me to the city with him to sell
raffle tickets for church: selling chances,
he called it. I was small, easily turned by the crowds,
but I was loud—I’d learned to shout so dad could hear:
his ringer, he called me. Toward evening, he’d lift me
to his shoulders above the other voices, close to his ears:
we had a lot to say: we were wordless at the end.
After he died, I took his hearing aids with me. Sometimes
I bend to them and speak. Sometimes
I raise them to my own ears and listen.
Note:
Section beginning “As for calamity . . . ”:
Line 4 is taken from northstarglass.com
Line 7 is a quote from Aaron Bushnell before his death
Line 8 is taken from cambridge.org
Section beginning “In a persistent rumor . . . ”:
Line 6 is from a Natalie Middleton article in Orion
—
Kathy Fagan’s sixth poetry collection, winner of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022). A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches at The Ohio State University.