Elizabeth Spires : 29 Poems

 

Picture of a soul

 
A shirt I was born in.
I wear it. Or it wears me.
White, of course.
 
A loose fit.
Growing as I grow
but slowly going dull.
 
It must be washed
once, twice, three times,
then hung to dry.
 
There, can you see it?
Hanging high
on the hill.
 
Waving its arms
in the wind. Beckoning.
Sun shining through.

A Memory of the Future

 
I will say tree, not pine tree.
I will say flower, not forsythia.
I will see birds, many birds,
flying in four directions.
 
Then rock and cloud will be
lost. Spring will be lost.
And most terribly,
your name will be lost.
 
I will revel in a world
no longer particular.
A world made vague,
as if by fog. But not fog.
 
Vaguely aware,
I will wander at will.
I will wade deeper
into wide water.
 
You’ll see me, there,
out by the horizon,
an old gray thing
who finally knows
 
gray is the most beautiful color.

Small Prayer

If my heart were scoured,
             if my soul were remade
into a new and shining garment,
             then would I have to die?
 
Lord, if perfection is death,
             let me stay here
a little while longer,
            spotted and stained.
 

Ghazals

 
My name in the black air, called out in the early morning.
A premonition dreamed: waking, I beheld a future of mourning.
 
Our partings were rehearsals for the final scene: you and I
in a desert, saying goodbye on a white September morning.
 
The call came. West, I flew west again. Impossible, but the sun
didn't move. I stepped off the plane and it was still morning.
 
I've always worn black. Now a blank whiteness outlines
everything. What shall I put on this loneliest of mornings?
 
You've left an envelope. Inside, your black pearl earrings
and a note: Your grandmother's. Good. In ink the color of mourning.
 
I remember the songs you used to sing. Blue morning glories on the vine.
An owl in the tree of heaven. All of my childhood's sacred mornings.
 
Your mother before you. Her mother before her. I, before my daughter.
It's simple, I hear you explain. We are all daughters in mourning.
 
I was your namesake, a firstborn Elizabeth entering
the world on a May morning. I cannot go back to that morning.

On Upnor Road

Set back from the street behind a stand of trees,
a shuttered house unnoticed by casual passers-by,
     where I see you standing in the middle of your life,
poised to enter a summer evening where there will be
     drinks and then a meal on an old stone terrace,
and it will seem, as the glass of wine is lifted to your lips,
     that no one you know will ever have to die.
All this, of course, has already happened, happened
     many times, never to happen again. In that faraway dark,
two voices softly braid themselves into one murmuring
     conversation, but words spoken so long ago
want to be private. I would not imagine it otherwise.
     Unasked, I have entered a memory I was never part of,
and come face to face with love's leisurely vanished pace.
     Everything's changed. The new owner's cut down trees,
cleared decades of overgrowth to let the light in, and anyone
     passing right now will only see what the too-bright
present wants them to see: a gracious forthright house,
     empty of meaning, sitting overexposed in spring sunlight.

Riddle

 
Puffed like an adder.
Deflated like a balloon.
Tiny or huge, you are
never the right size.
 
A little man or woman,
you strut, you speak,
you want. You
have delusions.
 
O little one,
look at yourself,
posturing and ridiculous.
Go now, pleasE GO.
 
But no, without you,
what would I be?
That is the question
I cannot answer
 
until I am changed into
particle or star, and you,
you drift away as if you
had never been there at all.

 

Pome

From flowering gnarled trees
they come, weighing down
the branches, dropping
with a soft sound onto
the loamy ground. Falling
and fallen. That’s a pome.
 
 
Common as an apple. Or
more rare. A quince or pear.
A knife paring away soft skin
exposes tart sweet flesh.
And deeper in, five seeds in a core
are there to make more pomes.
 
 
Look how it fits in my hand.
What to do? What to do?
I could give it to you.
Or leave it on the table
with a note both true and untrue:
Ceci n’est pas un poème.
 
 
I could paint it as a still life,
a small window of light
in the top right corner
(only a dab of the whitest white),
a place to peer in and watch it
change and darken as pomes will do.
 
 
O I remember days….
Climbing the branches of a tree
ripe and heavy with pomes.
Taking whatever I wanted.
There were always enough then.
Always enough.

“In Heaven It Is Always Autumn”
                      John Donne
 

In heaven it is always autumn. The leaves are always near
to falling there but never fall, and pairs of souls out walking
heaven's paths no longer feel the weight of years upon them.
Safe in heaven's calm, they take each other's arm,
the light shining through them, all joy and terror gone.
But we are far from heaven here, in a garden ragged and unkept
as Eden would be with the walls knocked down, the paths littered
with the unswept leaves of many years, bright keepsakes
for children of the Fall. The light is gold, the sun pulling
the long shadow soul out of each thing, disclosing an outcome.
The last roses of the year nod their frail heads,
like listeners listening to all that's said, to ask,
What brought us here? What seed? What rain? What light?
What forced us upward through dark earth? What made us bloom?
What wind shall take us soon, sweeping the garden bare?
Their voiceless voices hang there, as ours might,
if we were roses, too. Their beds are blanketed with leaves,
tended by an absent gardener whose life is elsewhere.
It is the last of many last days. Is it enough?
To rest in this moment? To turn our faces to the sun?
To watch the lineaments of a world passing?
To feel the metal of a black iron chair, cool and eternal,
press against our skin? To apprehend a chill as clouds
pass overhead, turning us to shivering shade and shadow?
And then to be restored, small miracle, the sun
    shining brightly
as before? We go on, you leading the way, a figure
leaning on a cane that leaves its mark on the earth.
My friend, you have led me farther than I have ever been.
To a garden in autumn. To a heaven of impermanence
where the final falling off is slow, a slow and radiant happening.
The light is gold. And while we're here, I think it must
    be heaven.

The Playground

 
Although
the moon is rising and the doors of the house
are locked against the darkness,
and pockets of leaves spin to no purpose
in the whirlwind, I get up
and dress myself, drawn by the shouts
of the children on the playground
playing tug-of-war and crack-the-whip,
the lines alive, taut,
as the smaller ones spin away, one by one,
into dark corners where nothing can save them,
and I join the game without a word to anyone,
caught in a line
snaking backward and forward
until it joins, like time, at either end and
mends invisibly,
the face of the child on either side of me
pale as a star
as each holds my hand tightly,
begging to enter the world and live a little while,
my body the instrument of passage.
 
 
We play
as the clock strikes
one, then two, then three,
encircled by light, outside the circle shadow,
and they make all the rules,
and I obey,
no thought to the waning moon
that turns the city grey, the world inverted
like a dream I’ll wake alone from in the morning,
the bed’s cold sheets
thrown off like so many obligations,
as they pull me toward them and I pull away,
the future bearing down so quickly upon us.

 

Mutoscope
 
 
Swirl and smash of waves against the legs
and crossgirders of the pier, I have come to Brighton,
come as the fathers of our fathers came,
to see the past’s Peep Show.
On two good legs, on one, they came,
veterans and stay-at-homes of the Great War,
all casualties, to stroll the West Pier’s promenade,
past bands, flags, and minstrel shows,
past Gladys Pawsey in a high-necked bathing costume
riding her bicycle off the high board,
past Hokey-Pokey and Electric Shocker,
to the old Penny Palace, pennies burning hotly
in their hands, the worn watery profile
of Queen Victoria looking away from it all.
I bend to the mutoscope’s lit window
to see “What the Butler Saw”: a woman artlessly
taking off her clothes in a jerky striptease
I can slow down or speed up
by turning the handle of the mutoscope.
Easily I raise her from darkness—
the eye eternally aroused by what it can’t touch—
to watch her brief repeating performance
that counts for so little. Or so much.
I can’t be sure which.
Abruptly, THE END shuts down the image, but her story
continues as she reverses time’s tawdry sequence
to dress and quickly disappear
down a maze of narrow streets and alleys
filled with the ghostly bodies and bodiless ghosts
of causality, the unredeemed and never-to-be-born
bearing her along to a flight
of shabby stairs, a rented room where she is free
as anyone to dream her dreams and smoke a cigarette,
smoke from the lit tip spiraling
in patternless patterns toward the room’s bare light bulb,
the light I see her by harsh, violently
unforgiving, as she makes tomorrow into a question
of either/or: to leave this room, this vacancy
forever, or go on exactly as she has before.
Old ghost, your history is nameless and sexual,
you are your own enigma, victim
or heroine of an act of repetition that, once chosen,
will choose you for a lifetime.
I peer into the tunneled past,
so small, so faraway and fragmentary,
and yet, not unconnected to what I am now.
Dilapidation upon dilapidation, Brighton
is crumbling, fading to sepia tones,
as your unfunny burlesque continues past
your life, perhaps past mine,
the past preserved and persevering,
the sentimental past.

Truro

I found a white stone on the beach
inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.
All night I'd slept in fits and starts,
my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.
And then morning. And then a walk,
the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.
I felt its calm power as I held it
and wished a wish I cannot tell.
It fit in my hand like a hand gently
holding my hand through a sleepless night.
A stone, so like, so unlike,
all the others it could only be mine.
 
The wordless white stone of my life!

 

My Daughter
 
     After a theme by Carlos Drummond de Andrade
 

Late in the afternoon, she sits with me,
trapped in the corner’s shadows,
a thought that comes and goes,
dark hair unlike my own, dark eyes
that mourn the absent love between us,
her life a task of waiting she did not choose.
The light shines through her body,
her eyes fill with tears, but still she says
nothing, no, nothing at all. She waits
until the sun disappears, and then she goes,
taking my name with her, leaving
a silent space that words can never fill,
my daughter, the one I never had, who calls
to me so softly that nobody hears.

Blue Nude

It is not true
what they say about the body:
that it must be loved, that it cannot
sleep through its nights alone
without injury.
 
Look at me. Look
at the way the artist lies
about his loneliness, painting a room
where walls, floor, and ceiling
converge on a door too small
 
for me to leave or enter.
Leaving my face featureless as snow,
my body bruised like the pears
he buys only to paint.
They should have been eaten weeks ago.
 
Swollen and isolate, they sit
on a bone-white plate, their shadows
distortions of their true shape,
ellipses of blue and darker
blue the eye falls into.
 
I know
how the snow fell for days
outside his studio, how he painted
in his coat and gloves,
rising each morning
 
to break the ice
in the washbowl and light
the stove, the heart of the flame
blue against his chest.
The heart, he thinks, the heart
 
is blue and solitary.
It knows what it knows.
And so he paints a room
with one of everything:
one bed with one pillow,
one window overlooking
shadowed figures walking
two by two, one book whose pages
turn as days do, each page only
a part of the larger story.

Profil Perdu

In 1949, in Menton, after long love-making
one afternoon, they drew each other:
 
each kneeling, in turn, by the bed
as the other slept or drifted,
 
the pen tracing on paper what
the body knew, the strangely lovely
 
angle of her face thrown back on a hill
of white pillows, and he, in his turn,
 
wanting if he wants anything never
to leave this room. Each has fallen
 
softly back into the body as one
might fall into a dream of high blue
 
meadows in midsummer, midsummer time
leaving them another hour, two,
 
before they must make their way,
shivering, down the dew-stained mountain.
 
O let us gently close the door
on love’s impromptu sketch and leave
 
them as we would be left, here
among the long shadows of a room
 
we have entered without reflection,
all grief or grievance put aside
 
to draw the body’s burning
outline on white sheets, white paper.
 
Their life, and ours, the evidence.

You have flown to the dangerous country

 
You have flown to the dangerous country,
how easily you have left this life behind,
this street, this quiet city street,
where letters arrive each day dependably,
where trees make a canopy in summer,
and winter, it is winter now, possesses a cold clarity.
 
But in the place where you are there is heat,
there is hunger, and the trees have been cut down,
and dogs, there must be dogs, slink out of the night’s
blackness, teeth bared, and the sound of drumming penetrates
your sleep even when there are no drums. And slowly,
you begin to forget the words we are used to saying here,
they speak another language there, a language that has no place
for words like snow and safety, a language I will never know
because I have never been to the dangerous country,
                                                    and I do not think I will go.
 
I think of a tear in a curtain, a jagged man-high tear,
that you step through easily, without a glance backward,
because you are drawn to the dangerous country,
to the need and the want and the hunger,
and to something more that I cannot name.
I feel such a distance, such an unreality,
when I think of you in the dangerous country,
with the heat and the dust and the dogs,
the drums and the knives, the nightmares and the screams.
 
But I tell myself there must be birds and flowers,
rare flame-colored exotica surrounding tiny pastel houses
that a child might draw, there must be children flying kites,
running along a curving shore where watercolor waves
wash up in shades of ultramarine, there must be
painters painting paintings of it all, and laughter
and singing, because people laugh and sing everywhere,
                                                    O tell me that they sing.
 
Do the people there, do they ever ask you
what it is you mean by winter and by snow,
by safety and by silence? Do you try to explain?
And then I begin to wonder what it is to be safe,
do I feel safe here, and is there safety anywhere,
as I move through the rooms of this house, drawing the curtains,
the street so quiet now, and twilight coming on.
 

Poet-in-residence Elizabeth Spires reads her poem "The Cabin". Santa Catalina School, January 25, 2013. 

The Cabin

 
The two-lane highway rushes up and down,
a white line down its middle leading it on.
It curves the way the stream beside it curves,
carved out by glaciers in a time when the world was ice.
Past time is with you always, always here.
It's held in gorge and meadow, in grey-green moss,
in lichens, in boulderspill from old stone walls.
So turn at the wayside onto an unmarked road
that leads a mile uphill, then dwindles to a grassy path
through August woods, dim as a church and cool.
A fallen birch will block your path. You'll hear
him saying clearly (you who imagine such things):
You can't farther! Can't go in my woods!
Ignore the warning and press on to find his cabin
in a clearing, its door locked to the world.
With the right key the door will open to you,
you who are neither first nor last to come here,
why have you come? To crank the old black phone
in the kitchen, hoping a voice at the end of the line
might answer? To idly turn the pencil sharpener,
the kind he used in a schoolroom when he was master,
its silver blade sharpening the point of all he said?
Here, in the bare front room, a lapboard his lap,
he wrote about the weather outside and in his head.
Nothing betrays him except, half-hidden on the mantle,
a chipped toy goblet, rose-red when the light shines on it,
something a child might play with, a child long gone.
Now take down the book of letters from the shelf that opens
on its own to words he wrote after a daughter's death:
We thought to move heaven and earth--heaven with prayers
and earth with money. We moved nothing. And here we are,
Cadmus and Harmonia, not yet placed safely in changed forms.
Somewhere beyond these rooms, these trees, this path,
he's laughing his dark laugh, changed the way the wood
in the woodpile changes, softening over years so slowly
the eye can't see, unless the eye has all eternity.
When you leave, leave all as it was--the black phone
on the hook, the heavy book back on the shelf--
for the next one who comes as curiously as you did.
Outside, linger for a moment. Sit on the old stone slab
he raised up off the ground and made into a bench
(the kind that, lettered, might mark a grave).
Stare at the mountain that was his constant companion.
It looks at you without emotion, it does not rage or love,
as he did, and yet its permanence consoles. The wind
is picking up, moving the trees to softly whisper, Ssshhh!
A spider on your shoe is listen to all you say.

 

Like Water
 
 
It hadn’t been three months since he had died
when we sat together in your living room,
a green world going on outside, the June wind
blowing hot and hard, bending each leaf and branch,
while inside all was still: a still interior where
three women sat in shadow stirring summer drinks,
the room the same as it had always been,
 
but changed, his absence palpable. You said,
“I thought I’d gradually miss him less, the way
a craving for a cigarette lessens a little after weeks
of going without. It’s not like that.” You paused,
drawing in a breath. “It’s like a thirst that deepens
as each day passes. Like water,” you finally said.
“I want him back the way I want a drink of water.”
 

February origami
 

A room, empty and cold.
A daytime moon, cheek
scraped off, hanging by a thread,
looking in at what you do.
You sit on the floor, cross-legged,
folding and refolding
a square of paper, a letter,
white writing like swirling snow
on a scroll. As a child,
didn’t you sit by the window
coaxing raucous paper cranes—
red, green, and yellow—
to fly into a sky of blue?
Now what could you say or do
to make a piece of paper fly away?
You watch your hands,
two birds, shape paper into
a white, diminishing thing.
Here is my heart, you write,
quill sipping ink from a bowl.
Here is my heart.
Take it if you have to.
Two wings beat in your hand.
The injured moon, sheer
as rice paper, slips away.
It is a white, white day.

 
Letter in July

My life slows and deepens.
I am thirty-eight, neither here nor there.
It is a morning in July, hot and clear.
Out in the field, a bird repeats its quaternary call,
four notes insisting, I’m here, I’m here.
The field is unmowed, summer’s wreckage
everywhere.
Even this early, all is expectancy.
 
It is as if I float on a still pond,
drowsing in the bottom of a rowboat,
curled like a leaf into myself.
The water laps at its old wooden sides
as the sun beats down on my body,
a wand, an enchantment, shaping it
into something languid and new.
 
A year ago, two, I dreamed I held
a mirror to your unborn face and saw you,
in the warped watery glass, not as a child
but as you will be twenty years from now.
I woke, a light breeze lifting the curtain,
as if touched by a ghost’s thin hand,
light filling the room, coming from nowhere.
 
I know the time, the place of our meeting.
It will be January, the coldest night
of the year. You will be carrying a lantern
as you enter the world crying,
and I cry to hear you cry.
A moment that, even now,
I carry in my body.

Glass-Bottom Boat

 Key West

 
In the Cubano diner, tiny cups
of black, black coffee, hot and sweet,
and chipped blue china plates
of black beans and yellowtail,
fished by the fishermen
as the sun came up this morning.
 
Yesterday out on the reef,
we looked through the floor of the boat,
through layers of clear, clean water—
windows looking into other windows—
down to the floor of the world,
shallow, pliant, and shifting.
There, schools of yellowtail
swam through the living coral,
bright as stained glass,
cast into underwater constellations
both strange and familiar:
a flower, a brain, a cathedral.
Suddenly a shadow parted the school—
as if a cloud had just blotted the sun—
a barracuda swerving as they swerved,
and nothing they could do.
After it fed, the two halves joined,
the missing ones unmourned,
all as it was before.
 
If I could live for a thousand years,
ten thousand, would ever I see
the great family of men, women, and children,
both preying and preyed-upon,
swimming as freely as the yellowtail?
Would that be heaven or hell?
Each naked human face a candle
joining other candles in a procession
spanning many centuries, entering
the cathedral of live stone
whose heavy doors are cast
with scenes from our own lives,
moving as moving pictures move,
until the reel runs out.
In that world-without-end hour,
will the future read us in relief,
blindly touching each raised
and burnished scene with fingertips,
the ejaculate word forming on their lips,
an O! and then again an O!
of terror and astonishment?
O how will they sing knowing what they know?
Streaming through time, they see
our approach, we are plotted
in space, our light outlives our lives
and sends a signal far into
the future: the past is alive!
Dead and dark for a long time,
we are as stars to them,
stars wishing to be wished on.

 

Wordling

 
In a world of souls I set out to find them.
They who first must find each other,
be each other’s fate.
There, on the open road,
I gazed into each traveller’s face.
Is it you? I would ask.
Are you the ones?
No, no, they said, or said nothing at all.
 
How many cottages did I pass,
each with a mother, a father,
a firstborn, newly swaddled, crying;
or sitting in its little chair,
dipping a fat wooden spoon
into a steaming bowl,
its mother singing it a foolish song,
One, one, a lily’s my care ….
 
Through seasons I searched,
through years I can’t remember,
reading the lichens and stones
as if one were marked
with my name, my face, my form.
By night and day I searched,
never sleeping, not wanting to fail,
not wanting to simply be a star.
 
Finally in a town like any other town,
in a house foursquare and shining,
its door wide open to the moon,
did I find them.
There, at the top of the winding stairs,
asleep in the big bed,
the sheets thrown off, curled
like question marks into each other’s arms.
 
Past memory, I beheld them,
naked, their bodies without flaw.
It is I, I whispered.
I, the nameless one.
And my parents, spent by the dream
of creation, slept on.

The unfeminine flower

Formally, shall she begin,
greeting her days with ceremony,
bowing to the sun and to the wind.
The air shall be a mirror
she shall not look in, her petals
peaked and stiff as a nun’s cowl.
She shall avert her face to the bee’s buzz.
Spiked, her stem shall pierce
the Gardener’s thick glove.
In consequence, she shall be passed over.
She shall lose the first flush.
 
Around her, the rank sweet odor
of the garden in midsummer.      And she, untouched.
Parched, she shall not drink,
shall not confess her need. Nor,
knowing her flaw, shall she ask for mercy.
As summer ends, so finally shall she.
Then shall a simple song be sung
by the low and the high choir,
by cricket and fieldmouse and owl,
whose words, if it had words, would be,
She is gone, the proud solitary one . . .

She: the unfeminine flower.

Bruise
 

All black, a hard dark
spot, it sits in the tree’s
bare arms. Caw! Caw!
it calls to no one.
Again, too rude: Caw!
The truth is out:
it eats dead things.
It knows that want
can make, unmake
a world as much as love,
love’s awful opposite.
And so, once more,
the terrible syllable: Caw!
And then it lifts
its wings and flies
into a world diffuse,
green, and blameless,
leaving a bright spot
of nothing where it sat.
One oily feather
in slow free fall,
a bruised blue-black
iridescence,
is all that’s left.
But still I hear it: Caw!
An ugly crow perched
in the charred chest
has left, knowing,
what does it know?
That the word
at the bottom of
the world is black.
I will not say it,
but pray that crow
not come back.

 

Black Fairy Tale
 
 
Who were you that day you left your parents
standing on the platform, waving black handkerchiefs
-How young they were then!-
and you waving back, you with money in your pocket and your
grin,
as the train began to move, first slowly, then slowly
speeding up, the whitewashed houses of that village
falling flatly back into the past
as you sped forward into a morning stilled by fog,
by enchantment, dreaming of a woman
bending over you, pouring milk into a glass,
whispering, Drink this, Drink this.
 
So many years have passed!
You wake to the noon sun burning a hard black outline
around the fallow fields, the shimmering trees and houses,
shadows doubled into themselves, hiding,
the train speeding faster, ever faster,
birds on the wires, black birds,
marking off milestones, chuckling to themselves.
Smiles, gestures, currency, the few words
your parents taught you, like love, farewell, and courage,
are useless now, you’re crossing unfamiliar borders
quickly, much too quickly, your death and birth connected,
as the crow flies, by a straight line on a map
although you never wanted, did you, a journey as simple as that.
 
 
For one-ten thousandth of a second
you stall at midpoint, caught between twin cities,
twin infinities, just long enough to glimpse
the past’s pale child beckoning from the black edge of the forest.
Return, you must return, by following the black fairy tale,
the one your parents kept from you,
locked in the black book in the back of the closet.
Bits of bread, fluttering rags snagged on hedges,
will show you the way if you look, if you look.
Who must you save? Shadows are showing themselves,
touching this thing and that with their shadowy spells,
a fat red sun is disappearing as you enter
the clearing where the empty cottage stands,
its door swinging on hinges that sing, What use, What use.
Nobody’s there, nobody that is
except a crow, hunched in a tree,
its feathers black as coal and shining, eyeballing you,
each eye as empty as the barrel of a gun,
making a click, click, click,
now that you’ve arrived.

The Bodies
 
 
Here, in the half-dark of the sauna,
                  the bodies of the women glisten ...
 
Naked, disproportionate, lush,
hung and burdened with flesh, they open slowly,
like orchids blooming out of season.
 
Sweat beads my forehead.
Heat rings my breasts, like circlets,
and I am my body, all shimmering flesh.
 
Secrets are whispered here. Stories told.
The bodies, alabaster, abalone,
relax, give up their pose, to ask,
How shall we be joined?
How shall we know each other?
By doors, by chains and linkages
through which we shall be
                        entered, touched, possessed.
 
I see them, row upon row, the rank and file
of generations moving without pause:
—the bodies of the young girls, the willows,
complete unto themselves, androgynous;
—the great bodies of the mothers,
circled by their little moons, adoring;
—the mothers of the mothers,
the old wise ones, ponderous and slow.
And in another room, not far from this one,
the restless bodies of men, searching
without knowing what it is they search for.
Body of the world! Body of flesh!
Leaving this room, I leave the orbit of women.
I dress and walk into the snowy night,
into the great body of the world,
cold, still, and expectant.
Bodying forth, I am taken by the dark.
 
What am I? Asked, shall I say:
       Struck by a spark, I quickened
      and was born to flashing
      days and nights, a small significance
      of one. I did not wish to change,
      but changed, feeling desire and fear
      and love, failing many times.
      My meaning made, I died,
      the windows darkening for the last time.
 
We move, we love, we cry out,
we hold or cannot hold to what we are
and finally wake to find ourselves
changed beyond all imagining.
Was it enough to have lived?
In that moment of still approach,
will it be given to us to know?

Angel

             
                Amiens Cathedral
 
O spirit embodied, but without
need of body, made without artifice
by Mind and worked in stone,
what was your Maker thinking of?
Your face smooth and untroubled
as a newborn’s, the brow cool
and the eyes blind, one finger
touching the air, most fair of elements.
All is appearance, you tell us,
wearing the weight of stone wings,
stone clothes, without complaining.
Perhaps you, too, once had a flaw-
a thought, no more than that,
less than angelic. In a second
of a second, you were restored
to innocence by a Maker omniscient
and kind. The thought was gone.
But you were some place other than
heaven, and changed to stone.

 

At the Bambi Motel
 

Walls the color of old plums, a “tapestry”
above the bed: 4 dogs playing cards,
smoking cigars. One cheats, aces tucked
in his vest, squints at the schnauzer’s
royal flush and sighs. A wall-size mirror
doubles the room, doubles the double bed
into something immense, a mattress
for a troupe of acrobats.
Where are we? How did we get here?
And most of all, where’s Bambi?
I wouldn’t, couldn’t have dreamed
up this place if I’d read true romance
magazines for a year. In room 8,
someone’s having a row with someone
else. Cow! he accuses her.
Pipsqueak! You call this a honeymoon!
she yells back. Fighting
must have a titillating effect.
Silence for a minute. The pop of a cork.
And then of all things, giggling!
I bet somebody’s made the front page
of The National Enquirer staying here.
What if our room’s broken into by mistake?
What if the guy next door is a senator,
the girl Miss Panty Hose of 1968?
I chain the door shut, tape the keyhole
under your doubting gaze.
Your eyes glaze over, you begin your
impersonation of a sex maniac
who can’t get his clothes undone.
Sin makes us blush like innocents
nevertheless …
 
 
                                               I fall asleep
dreaming of Bambi. There’s a forest fire!
I must get the dogs out! Intoxicated,
they dive out the window into a snowbank,
cards falling out of their clothes.
(Snow? An hour ago it was August!)
Room 8 lends the fire department champagne
to put out the flames. The senator’s
distressed-Miss Panty Hose is more
undressed than I am. She grabs him
by the nose, makes him say “cheese”
for the photos. Where will we stay now?
The dogs are grateful. One knows
a place down the road, Roxie’s.
“They treat you real good there,” he growls,
“pink lightbulbs and wait till you see
what’s on their walls …”

 
Boardwalk

 
Tonight
these messages
we pencil into picture postcards
to send to friends
who live inland, who never visit the ocean,
seem scrawls of omission: dolphins sighted
and lost … fishermen on the jetty in yellow raincoats …
the boardwalk’s arcade of lights …
We sleep in a rented house
that offers no protection against nightmare:
the black wave high as a house
rising against us, or fog
walling us in
until, like sleepwalkers,
we break the windows with our hands
and let the night rush in to fill each room’s emptiness.
 
An arcade of lights …
 
We can go to the shooting gallery,
a Wild West Saloon, and aim for the piano player
frozen over an upright
riddled with bullet holes. Hit the spittoon,
and his head spins round
his left foot taps out time
to a fragment of honky tonk played over and over.
We can ask Sister Lisa to advise, impersonating
lives we’ve studied on the boardwalk,
gestures of boredom and desire.
She’ll open our hands like old maps,
look into our palms and lie, pretending
we’ll have many children.
We can have our picture taken by a photographer
with a trunkful of costumes. He’ll pose us,
stone-sober, in front of painted backdrops
from plays and novels: a cherry orchard,
a train station, a fin de siècle drawing room.
His old-fashioned flash
blinding us, so that we stagger
back onto the boardwalk holding each other,
unsure which way to go.
On either side of us, more mirrors
and lights, more hours to kill
until the boardwalk closes at one or two.
 
 
Tomorrow
we’ll sleep till noon. Or maybe
I’ll wake early and quietly leave you to
walk the empty boardwalk, arms around myself,
reassured by the clarity of morning,
gulls scavenging, the smell of coffee
coming from the coffeeshop.
I’ll mail the stack of postcards
left on the nightstand, dating them
Yesterday, Today, or Tomorrow,
pencil two stick figures into your favorite view-
a curving panorama of the ocean
who wave and wave,
their backs to a breaking wave
held
in the split-second before it crashes around them,
the dull grey sheen of the sun
(unseen but felt) slanting even as it does now
on a jigsaw of boards and swollen pilings,
shops and tents and rides
closed tight, roped down,
covered over like expensive merchandise,
the ocean glittering as if
someone had been polishing it all night.
 

Death Dress
 

For A. S.

A midwife wore it.
Delivering a stillborn girl,
she wiped the death off her hands on the dress.
Wiped the death off, went to the next house
and delivered twin boys with black hair.
 
A witch wore it.
Stuffed mandrake and belladonna into the pockets.
At nights the dress flickered in the forest,
queen of the trees, a crazy apparition.
A black stone is her pillow.
 
A nun wore it.
Her skin turned transparent with fear and longing.
She stuck a crucifix through her heart.
A page in her Bible turned black.
 
A widow put it on.
She choked on lamentations,
shrank into a skeleton.
The dress continued to fit perfectly.
 
Your friend wore it.
Three times she tried to take it off.
The third time the buttons burnt her fingers.
She stuck her head in an oven.
Her head turned black.
 
You wore it.
You put it on your mannequin when you bathed.
You slept in it,
dreamt it was your invention.
It grew black roots into your brain.
 
You were not buried in it.
It is not a dress to be buried in.
You wore it, and now you give it to me.
Regal and elegant, I stand here stiffy in this black.
Unready, unwilling, I give it back.

 

More poems of Elizabeth Spires
 
New Criterion
 
Poetry Foundation 

About her poetry : 

Elizabeth Spires.  Poetry Foundation

A Meditation on Noticing in “A Memory of the Future”. By Ryan Asmussen. Chicago Review of Books, June 24, 2020.

Speaking with Elizabeth Spires about poetry, poets, and time travel. In advance of her talk at the Ivy Bookshop Friday, Writing Seminars alum discusses her newest poetry collection, 'A Memory of the Future'. By Bret McCabe. Hub John Hopkins University, September 4, 2018.

Q&A with local writer Elizabeth Spires on her poetry collection, ‘A Memory of the Future’, By Elizabeth Hazen. Baltimore Fishbowl, August 22, 2018.

Poet and Writer Elizabeth Spires to Keynote 50th Annual Sophie Kerr Prize at WC. The Chestertown Spy, May 1, 2017. 

Goucher College professor Elizabeth Spires speaks with poet and University of Maryland professor Michael Collier about her work, her family, and her poetic influences. She opens the program reading "The Papermaker," about working through a case of writer's block. The two writers discuss the influence of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Josephine Jacobsen on Spires' work. Spires reads "Riddle," about self-definition, "Ghazal," to discuss form, and ends with reading "In Heaven it is Always Autumn," about her friendship with poet Josephine Jacobsen. 

HoCoPoLitSo,  March 1, 2016.

Local Writer Spotlight: Poet Elizabeth Spires. By Caryn Coyle. CBS News Baltimore, November 28, 2011.

Elizabeth Spires on Josephine Jacobsen. Originally published in Crossroads, Spring 2004. Poetry Society of America