to a room inside the earthlit by a sourceless light
whereon a rough-hewn pedestalcarved from an ancient
treea face stared out at mestared past me into Time
someone had made the shrinea womanI thought
like meher gray hair wild unkemptas she worked
the wood with goldto make a precious overlay
the shrine a place to kneel& pray for continuance
like a giftanother morning camecool & gray
bringing the chance of rainrain that would wash the earth
clean of the summer’s dustbut I cannot forget
the shrinethe facethe woman working wonders
buried so deep beneath mein a roomin the center of the earth
Dream Interrupted—
The earth has many levels,
and escalators descend.
Figures are moving downward,
mother and father and friend.
So many are going down,
quietly, without a word.
One day they are here among us,
and the next they have disappeared.
They eat a last meal before leaving,
a supper of wine and bread.
And bowl after bowl of soup
to prepare themselves to be dead.
I serve and I sit among them.
I eat the proverbial bread.
Soon I will go down with them
to the speechless land of the dead.
Now I clear the plates from the table.
I sweep up the crumbs of bread.
But when I turn back to join them,
they have silently gone ahead.
Is it coldness or kind consideration,
that made them leave as they did?
Leaving me here among the living,
not alive but not quite dead.
Constructing a Religion
Not the rising sun,
but the setting sun.
Not the father,
but the mother.
Not the cross,
but the circle,
drawn in ink,
not blood.
The Word
inhabited
but unspoken,
like a bell unrung.
A cathedral
of the mind,
gray and cool
as Time,
with doors
so tall and heavy
that I must
tug and tug.
Inside, marvels
and terrors
annealed in
bright windows,
and a bird
sheltering in
high hidden spaces,
looking down
on a soul,
small, so small,
prostrate
on stone.
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.
Small Prayer
If my heart were scoured,
if my soul were remade
into a new and shining garment,
Lord, if perfection is death,
let me stay here
a little while longer,
spotted and stained.
House of String
Without hammer or nail,
without planed plank,
I will build a house of string.
One airy room to live in.
String walls, string ceiling
that let the light shine in.
A place to spend the hours
where no clocks ever tick.
Mine alone. Or ours.
O who can understand? O who?
How I have hungered for
the unbuilt, the unimagined.
How a piece of string
trailing me in a long line
wherever I go can be
a sheltering abode, a dwelling
place that is not a place at all.
Come, let us go there now
and sip the tea that is neither
sweet nor bitter, listening
all the while to the crickets
singing. Or not singing.
Safe in its flimsy walls,
we will sleep the sleep
we have always dreamt
of sleeping, rain saturating
our dreams, red leaves
at the door signaling a final fall
where all becomes nothing,
nothing all, where, as soft snow
begins to fall, one of us
will stay and one will go,
walking away from everything
we know, casting a glance
back to a house filling up
with snow, wondering,
O who is the lost one? Who?
The sleeper coldly covered over?
Or the coatless one who leaves
no tracks, who stumbles in the snow?
Snow, the Novel
In the end it was the only story to tell:
snow on the ground and snow silently falling,
the landmarks of a life vanishing, the road
erased, a house half-buried, a watcher watching
from an upper window who knows she cannot
stay and cannot go, she cannot stay or go,
who, as evening falls, withdraws into a dark interior,
feeling her way along the winding corridors
until the deepening snow has overtaken all.
When the last of the last ones go, if I am one
of the last, the last to believe and the last to know,
when Eternity unwrites me, when an unseen hand
lets loose the pen that wrote my story, and directionless,
I step out of the frame into a snowy unfenced field,
my tracks filling up as fast as I can make them,
then will I know the story in its entirety?
Know all that I need to know?
The now that is snow.
Sake
A squat bottle,
two cups, and us
toasting an anniversary
although we know
the wind may blow
away these walls
of paper, wood, and rock;
and if they fall, we’ll rise
and quickly improvise
a journey down time’s
cold silvery musical stream,
slipping on dripping
stepping-stones, drenched
to the bone until,
shades of our former selves,
we give up the ghost,
our ghastly smiles belying
the cold finality of lying
through centuries side
by side, cheated by time.
What is a marriage?
A promise, a vow never
to forsake the other,
and love a little realm
But here, while the sake’s
warm. Drink again.
For your sake. Mine.
Starry Night
their light keeps traveling onit will never darken
forever will it travelinto far reachescold corners
farther than lighthas ever goneall the stars that have ever
shone are shining stilltheir light doesn’t die
no neverthe stars assurein darkness is no peril
like lighthousesno longer therestars that went dark
a long time agoare shining somewheretheir light travels on
&nbs
p; something to hold& keep holdingas we hold on
to ones who have gone onlike lighthousesno longer there
their lightdoesn’t dieno neverkeeps traveling on
as we stumble& shine& rememberlooking up
Riddle
You are the bright one,
my dearest possession.
Speechlessly,
you offer up
your pictures:
joy, sorrow, terror, too.
You are both
one and many,
a hoard,
a chest of jewels,
some light-giving,
some taking
the light, until
I lose myself
in darkest night.
O who will perish
first? Me? You?
Though some do,
I pray never
to outlive you.
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.
My Life
A cracked bowl I hold in my outstretched hands.
A heavy cloak thrown down like a twisted shadow.
A book, its pages full of writing, a few unwritten on.
A book, its pages turning blankly in the wind.
A dream I had once, vanishing as morning comes.
A leaf upturned to the sun.
Rain, rain falling without discrimination.
All this and more so that today I kneel and ask,
Small fish, small silver fish darting in the stream,
where now are you going?
Crab
—Again, the dream of prey and predator, I can’t remember
when or where, only the pursuit, I am the one pursued,
for minutes, years, until I wake to familiar slanting eaves,
to a ceiling where knotholes look like curious eyes,
and doors hang crooked on their hinges but still are doors.
Once more, by grace or luck, I have escaped capture. I am safe.
Or am I? Now I must navigate the solid world of stairs
steep in their disregard, each thing in this house a fact to hold onto.
O yes, to live I must believe in the solidity of this red rocking chair
on a porch in Maine, this cup of coffee steaming in my hand.
I must believe.
The sun is burning off the fog, the islands slowly coming into focus.
A kayak tied to the dock is bobbing gently, a splash of red
in the day’s blank canvas. Small boat, I will go out.
I will paddle beyond the seeming solidity of this porch, this house.
I will go out.
Often now I wonder how far can one go, how far?
Horizons exert a pull. Uncountable islands suffer fog’s erasures
and then come back. Beneath the water’s glossy shifting surface,
traps. Sleek boats in the distance race past unaware,
leaving me bobbing in their wake. The tide takes me out, far out,
the day’s debris floating past, a bottle, a buoy,
and one small shipwrecked swimmer expertly skimming
the waves, carried along, or carried away, as I am today.
I scoop it up, small crab, wondering, Are you alive?
No. You are dead, dead, dead. You hang, limp and dispirited, in my hand.
A hunger, ravening and unimaginable, has sucked body and soul
out of you through an empty eyehole, leaving your shell intact,
so that you only masquerade as crab. O crab, I understand you.
Too often I have done the same.
I make you my compatriot for the day. Set you on the bow,
like a figurehead, but facing the wrong way, so that we are eye to eye.
Speak, crab! Be oracle. Interpret the depths of my dream,
the day’s dark portents. But you are mute to all entreaty.
You seem to move a claw—are you alive?
No, it is only a trick of wind and water. And so I paddle out
to where no cry can be heard from helpless prey or predator.
I cry.
The wind is picking up, the sky clouding over into gray.
Waves restless as thoughts that won’t stop threaten to swamp me.
I am prey. Return, I must return, or be completely swept away.
Someday I will merge with this landscape supreme in its indifference.
I will be as crab.
Leaving this place, another summer gone, I won’t
take you with me. I’ll leave you facing seaward on the porch railing,
your throne a clamshell, to cast your eye out over islands
leapfrogging to the horizon. I’ll say goodbye to a season
quickly disappearing, to a house that only exists in summer, for summer,
under a spell all winter not to change, to change, to change.
Next summer when I come back, warm flesh and blood
or insubstantial spirit, will you be here to greet me?
Pincer and claw, will you have held on through winter’s worst, intact?
O Cyclops, teach me, teach me, teach me, to be dead
and believe in resurrection.
NOTES
The quotation from Dōgen used by permission of Steven Heine, Zen Poetry of Dōgen: Verses from the Mountain of Eternal Peace (Tuttle, 1997).
The answers to the riddles are “ego” and “memory.”
“On Riverside Drive”: The statue of Shinran Shonin is located at 332 Riverside Drive in Manhattan.
The poem “She Leans” is based on A. Aubrey Bodine’s photograph of the same title.
Photo by A. Aubrey Bodine © Jennifer B. Bodine courtesy
www.aaubreybodine.com.
Ensō image used by permission of Madison Smartt Bell.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The poems in this book first appeared in the following magazines, online publications, and anthologies:
The American Poetry Review: “Cloud Koan”; “The Sound of the Sea at the Shore”; “My Life”
The Atlantic: “Riddle”; “”; “A Memory of the Future”; “Small Prayer”; “Small as a Seed”
Ecotone: “Gold Bug”
Five Points: “The Amiable Child”; “On Riverside Drive”; “Ensō”
The Hopkins Review: “Snow, the Novel”; “Island Graveyard”
The Hudson Review: “The Streaming”; “Dream Interrupted—”; “Starry Night”
Image: “March: St. John the Divine”
The Iowa Review: “Sake”
Kenyon Review: “Mountains of the Heart”
The New Criterion: “The Shrine”; “Picture of a Soul”
New England Review: “Light Like Water”; “House of String”
Ploughshares: “The Road” (under the title “A Life”); “Constructing a Religion”
Plume: “She Leans”
Poetry: “Pome”
Poetry Daily: “Pome”; “Picture of a Soul”
Transmission (Satellite Press): “Magicicada”
Southwest Review: “Zen Sonnet”
“Riddle” (memory) first appeared in Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2011 (Alhambra Publishing, Belgium).
“A Memory of the Future” appeared
in Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2013.
“Constructing a Religion” appeared in the anthology The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing, London).
I would like to thank Jane Gelfman and Deborah Schneider, friends and agents through many books, and my editor Jill Bialosky for her sustaining belief in these poems. My gratitude also to Phillis Levin for her generous insight and suggestions. And to Madison and Celia who have always been there when I needed their help.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELIZABETH SPIRES (b. 1952 in Lancaster, Ohio) is the author of six previous collections of poetry: Globe, Swan’s Island, Annonciade, Worldling, Now the Green Blade Rises, and The Wave-Maker.
She has been the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Ohioana Book Awards, and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2011–12, she was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and in many other magazines and anthologies, and have been featured on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac.
She has also written six books for children, including The Mouse of Amherst, I Am Arachne, and I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings.
She lives in Baltimore and is a professor at Goucher College, where she has taught for many years.
ALSO BY ELIZABETH SPIRES
POETRY
Globe
Swan’s Island
Annonciade
Worldling
Now the Green Blade Rises
The Wave-Maker
FOR CHILDREN
With One White
Riddle Road
The Mouse of Amherst
I Am Arachne: Fifteen Greek and Roman Myths
The Big Meow
I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings
EDITOR