Katherine Soniat’s sixth collection of poetry—A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge—is recently out from Dream Horse Press. The Swing Girl, published by Louisiana State University Press, was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize. These poems are from a new ms., in progress, The Secret Where. Her work has appeared recently in Women’s Review of Books, Citron, Hotel Amerika and Crazyhorse, among others. She teaches in the Great Smokies Writers Program at UNC-Asheville. ---------
Promises of More
In the Paschal holy week of lambs, an illness that had no name began
to sharpen his edges
as she sat in the courtyard. She smiled from a bench at the sun. Insistently.
Solar pulse of coming and going.
The law of attraction. The law of recovery, of obtaining and holding to the hand
of a man who is leaving.
Where was the handlebar (for she was flying off-center
in deep green grass) to make a hard right turn out of April, May, and those first
three days in June when he proved himself no more.
And Done Again
Promised directness, no illusions until our plan rolls
over, burying its head in the sand, and still the grit’s
flying as the train derails, maybe loses its wheels
as we face each other on the ground. Sudden and
fresh and whole,
or at least headed that way. Take a breath, my love, before
you mix with me for already I am calling myself, spirit estranged
(extinction-of-leopard), and you quickened thrall of red weather.
We lapse into our sleepy animal hearts to shut winter out. Records
of night and day recede. I open my eyes, that certain we’re fused
with the wind. Then it arrives—tardy, stern, and sniffing first
my hand then yours for direction, for a linearity that would snip
even the coils of DNA.
It wants to stand for us. It stands above
our almost wordless space as you say, I want this,
and knowing I am that, light crawls the sky,
silent and elusive.
Lyric Runes
Blindfold her, so she’ll not to confuse eyes with the heart of another.
Wasn’t there a moon over the potholed parking lot? Hush that Orphic
scrambling of maladies spilling over and under. No sign for a nest of vipers,
yet.
There was the blur of densely churned Etheria where the elementals
gathered, burned, and bred. Then took it too hard.
That’s how the song goes (went). How two charmed figures demanded more
of the dark than anyone knew. The company they kept with a mask that offered
erasure.
In one cockeyed instant the point fell away, and what eternity can do
it did—incision below the belt
[wet blue spiral]
A Job for the Ba Soul
Broadcast silence across the plowed
field in time for the Sun God (Ra-e)
to nap for twelve hours…720 minutes
in the pure purse of the underworld. For
there too dwells Spiritus Mundi, Thanatos,
and Eros, and every other foiled
human mask.
The book of anything dead holds secretions
repeatedly stamped in silver: tarnished imprints:
the journey: a record
the umbilical leaves behind. Mythic whimper as the trail
grows cold. Was there ever a single point of view
for Emerson’s OverSoul ?
Ba Soul lingers above each finitely wrapped mummy
and knows to hold space for the body.
**Egyptian Ba-Soul:
The Ba, or soul bird, was the manifestation of a person’s individuality surviving
after death. It hovered and guarded the mummy, its wrapped and sacred body.
—Book of the Dead (Tchenena, 8th C.Dynasty)
Cryptology
Precisions ( ~ * / < \ ) in gold or silver.
A reliquary too the mask provides to hide behind
while being presented with (or present in) a new life.
(frequencies buzz with interpretation)
Indeterminate terminations.
Signs of the first (fly-away-or-stay) thought-questions
when Eros magnified then scorched the brain (swoosh)
like bees in a crazed terrarium—
swarm creatures polishing the glass storm.
(not unlike that bird print on her linens sail rigged horizontal
to sway the sleeping heart of another)
Ba-Soul stays in place above the strapped, imperial mummy—
a myth it makes of skeletons, a joke of naked-as-you-go. Poor old
jaybird, relentlessly bundled.
Ba knows the body counts, forwards and back.
Cryptology counts too—
the rigmarole of forever and a day encoded.
Pronouns promulgated: He/She. The royal We
that cross every border, and will not be diminished.
SHUT, the password every lover or old soul knows.