AMULET
voice of Penelope
62
All the young men came in
But you were never there
Standing as likely under a rafter
Off-center
Visible enough
63
As a still small-footed
Never old & wandering vine
Your trunk the exact imperfect
Square pillar
64
Light red leaves
On a low breeze lifted
Disobediently
65
A silver-tongued solitary of the moon
& of the oxygen atom
66
So I felt the urge to run & listen for you
Here where the breeze compresses the blossom
Raises the stems
67
I heard you
Your instep
Swivel & lift
68
An open sky
Upon every tread as you turned
So then I hesitated to listen
& the breezes stopped hiding you
So busy
Reflective of dark silence
Alertness & execution
So before I heard anything given or taken
I believed I knew your beastly mind
69
Bloodied all those young men
Felled in close quarters
Their alarms & piercing cries
As they departed
Who were they
The worthless
70
Even our frontiers were murmuring that moment
Who were they
71
& I sat
Answering myself
Marrying the unseen with my own answer
72
Satiated
How am I thus satiated
When I have never since eaten
Nor opened my hand
Nor opened my eye
Nor opened my belly nor my heart
Nor unstopped my ears
Nor disarranged myself
In the least
73
All this effort is useless
To break my coldness with blunt percussions
I no longer require axe heads
But crave sweetness
74
Restrain myself as I must
Of necessity
My ear at my door
May I avoid drowning in these tears & gasping
As the fresh salt breezes press in
75
Blood holds half the sky in its arc
& from my rooms
I listen carelessly
Since I am one with you
Who disregard mercy
76
Listen under your rafter
As we close on cruelty
& I know how all will resume
With me after this
Your familiar novelty
Your low tone loosened
77
& it is out of my mind
I must listen for what is inhuman
Out of my mind must hear
What the low tree-line against the horizon conceals
78
That sea that ever disturbs your busy heart
Since I have already listened long
For you among younger men
Even as the sinking fog departed with you
79
Not for the first time I laugh quietly to myself
Dear man
What are you doing
Stacking coins or cards to pass time
You with a pastime
80
Or am I never
To gauge
Your character
For all it is
Or what passes
As we lie
Listless in winter
My hands fallen
To my sides
Helpless
To circumstance
81
I will not be visible but will make no retreat
An amulet in your pocket
82
I will lie as I have lain
In our house
Waiting & tried
83
Again satiated
May I drink deeply
Of pomegranate
Swallow the dregs of it
May I wipe its stain
Scour granite
84
Stream running to the sea
Sky in it below the tree-root
& sea breezes rising
Then may I hardly be there
As the morning has gone & returned
& is scattered widely
With half the house
& its furnishings
85
Then may I throw all our corpses out
Walk in the salty air
As you my consort
Lead me for the moment through town
Secure in your honored anonymity
& feared in the streets their fathers also walk
Where our new passion withers
Withers while everybody watches
Sports foot races or martial contests
Where I also come to lose myself
& can drop everything watching
Our open-hearted boy my joy
In his tamer pursuits
86
Where I can run in place
Or raise the alarm of the newest cacophony
Even that fading away of all youth
That is this very instant screaming
A shrill blare we may never know here
Since no one in particular of any stature
Is sounding it
87
Since I can’t lose
My head now
Or in the sunlight
Lose you
My nearest & ancient hope
LAWN
voice of Mnemosyne
112
Like a young toddler
Trying to cruise
A moment my balance was easy
Was going well enough
As everything returned nearer than before
Nearer to the short or messy word which is a fitting
Amen to us
The wet stems in the vase
Off which the old blossoms are fading
Then fading again
As dry straight stems fallen
In every which away
Like things like sticks
A wonderful remembrance so many lose
113
Where childhood pulls itself up
& is coming forward
As one clings to a gutter
114
One looking ahead
Yes only forward
With as many looking on
As it were upon the advance of life
Why not run altogether
The grasses dimpling underfoot
115
I don’t require
These legs ears or ideas lower than weeping willows
More stricture than love revenge
Forgetting memory future
Or more noise
Or more inexact science
Or more chairs in the lawn
That I may cross some new direction
A narrow shadow running from me
116
Some rivulet slowing
A delicate odor at the beginning of summer
117
The sheer weightlessness of watered breath leaving a body
118
The window before me open
The small rocks set there
The dolls & the figures
The few carelessly strewn & upended companions
The unceremonious laughter of them
None brought in
119
The celebrations
Dropped cracker
Sky empty of cloud
120
Not even one empty of praise
Or the sharp new takings-in
121
Or the falling & ordinary knee-scrapings
122
So you won’t leave any legacy to anything
Or your little cars won’t go
Before the single push
123
Just the birth of more silence
Rusting into the rain
124
As I was removed from this house
Remembering I cannot go there again & proud I have not
Gone there again
That never do old wives return
That never does a new face not rise up out of the earth
With nothing under her
& her legs sinking to her ankles
AXE
voice of Tethys
125
A man calling grouse or doves
126
The enveloping chill of the stream in that smallest meadow
Pools of shadow blurring its tree lines
127
Here is a hiding spot I might still wriggle into
Always the trapped smell of sunlight
& the oiled axe to split the last of the kindling
& the bank’s rippled edge & the heavy suckerfish
Steady under the running water
There it is a sunken leg
Now there is a wrongful sight
Or even the leg floating free beyond a bend
Slave to the running currents
128
The year’s hatchlings impossible to catch
Anywhere the foot splashes up down
129
Bodies that are wearied in the end
130
A white gate reflecting moonlight
Erasing the lines of curtilage
The slats as if drunken & wandering freely
The hinge worked loose from the post
Itself falling
131
The slatternly rise over the next boundary
Linking mine to yours
Mine to another’s
Leading leading
Always to the verge
132
I believe I am fated yes
I have a mild dampened fact for a body
133
How did I walk
What did I run to see
Why set my foot prints where
The dust here is tracked over
At a black metal post
With swirls scuffs
134
This here was nothing
I believed I would have
Or have any need to relinquish
REEDS
voice of Artemis
135
& the mind enfolds a wave into its tissues
You deceive me
You deceive me with your very arrival
136
As a game bird listening in the rushes
You reap the wildness that everyone else
137
Look into the water
& no one sitting still in the blind
The water rocking slowly
& as imagined enemies
A night of last summer
My chest relieved of its burdens
138
& we sharpen our ears
Beginning the hunt
& we forget the missed shot
The first
139
Your people waiting an expected letter
About how you may be
140
& there is ready game & the sun is barely rising through mist
141
& I don’t credit the cacophony & the green of reeds
& if we do not save them
142
What loss
What more
143
& there is no disorder by which we might bring hunger to bear
144
The body is hidden here
& then let it fly
& I will forget the shot
How I shot off one leg in the fog
145
But missed the fog
That was not my target
Then O my foreign target
& the willows stand & we listen a little while
146
But for several mornings the year’s goslings hid themselves
Huddled off the water
They were healthy & they were alert
& I listened to the joyous rustling of escape
You deceived me
So whispered my new conviction
You do not care
To finish even once
You will not finish what is yours
We are unmoving then
You will finish your hunt
You think
You frown
Move your legs
For greater comfort
147
Slipping out of my fingers
148
You miss them once
You stop finishing
You whisper Zero to the goslings
Zero & are angry
With yourself
149
Ah shit & you have finished an ugly
Failure for good
150
Off the watery surface
You have finished this off
You my huge target stand admiring failure
Its wet vista
Its bitter familiar odor
It’s only a short while
151
The odor of it unlike
Any rose or bramble of the mountain
152
Once but a passing summer cloud
& why two would ever think to look up at it
From afar & think
ENVELOPE
voice of Rhiannon
153
By the body you mistook
The animal body
Closed & stolid
& outward
154
Dispirited
Out of the mouth
Wriggling
Out of the lines
In or out
Of the many glosses
155
Out of that cranny
Now out of this cranny
Of what was mistaken
As the forbearers’ cranny
Glossolalia lost
156
With sensibility namelessly past & passing
We cocked an ear upwards at birds’ wings then
157
Never the present moment
It having slipped behind
As a low road caught behind a last curve
To fall beneath the wheel
Just look & there is another curve
158
The first mark you made after I fell silent
Was not the mark of your tongue
But a line
A narrow cold line drawn in the void
Of which you remain ignorant
Or that you drew it
159
You don’t care to delight me
Breath on its high horse
My blessing its saddle
Parting at a distance
160
That’s that
No more stirring the pot
That was animal behavior
161
Never the body from which the no issues
Or which enters a body dully
No emptied body into another
From which the no issued unfeelingly
162
No more animal abandon with such delightful feet
Then patting & padding one thing & another carelessly
So the fig is closing
The small envelope the ear the day the earth
So the garden
The classical figure
Mary Jane White is a retired trial lawyer who also holds a MFA Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has been awarded two NEA Fellowships, one in poetry and one in translation. Her Tsvetaeva translations appear along with early original poems in Starry Sky to Starry Sky (Holy Cow! Press 1988) New Year’s, an elegy for Rilke (Adastra Press 2007); Poets Translate Poets, (Syracuse 2013). After Russia: Poems of an Emigrant: After Russia, Poem of the Hill, Poem of the End and New Year’s (a bilingual text) is forthcoming in 2020 from Adelaide Books (NYC/Lisbon). Contact her at maryjanewhite@gmail.com. This is Chapter 4 of a memoir that won the Les Standiford Fellowship for the Writers in Paradise Conference, Eckerd College, Florida, for a workshop with Ann Hood.
