The Coldest Mother
I can only follow one stone through
to its interior: and I do.
An amethyst from Achill.
The stone is transparent violet.
Firelight plays with its color the way eyes play with tears.
It’s cold where east is north and the earth is flat
and a person grows old.
Equivalence—no matter at what distance.
The fluttering snow is at the mercy of
ever-increasing crescents crossing circles
measured by squares, dashes,
fish bladder, almond patterns, placenta.
The folks up higher know everything of illness.
I saw a child rolled in a cloak of snow
to kill his fever.
Irregular heart, aortic stenosis,
rheumatism, atrial fibrillation, vertigo, blood clots,
deafness, colitis and poor eyesight.
Scars on a wrist and internal stitches,
headaches, PTSD from winter accidents,
childbirth. Sorry, this is ordinary
stuff for a cold mother. At the end
she wants to live in comfort like a pearl in an oyster.
She can chill here in peace and suck on ice.
The sun is warm, the northern lights are curtains
blowing across the heavens to which I float.
Every faraway ice floe leads to fairies.
And every boat leads to material sciences.
I know about both of them
and I still believe they’re too much alike.
White icebergs float or sink
under the wings of Aer Lingus.
Bling wobbles on a window:
it’s the sun our beloved.
See the monk on the Skellig squeeze and rub
his frosty eyes
when he spots twelve swans
and a little girl
on a purple amethyst in the ocean foam.
An early scene
innerly seen:
random sprays
of snow across Fresh Pond
(far below freezing
in Fahrenheit)
could be a white man’s torso
who escaped a hospital
and shed his sheet and slid
happily face down on a mud-streaked mass
of ice. Could be cyclamen
with its leaves like violets
or refugee camps in Syria.
I must not lose heart.
It takes sixteen years for
a soul to cross the silvery ice
to the forbidden fields of grace
never knowing if it’s fair
to choose self-starvation over health care.
I was such a cold mother a mineral was a flower.
Dear Hölderlin
(for Maureen Owen)
Years ago in a migration
we each carried our own
rug and pillow,
telescope and strings.
Our tent was portable and able
to be dismantled.
It could be rolled
and stuffed very fast.
Flowers and grass
still grew freely and sea-lilac
had already cracked
the tarmac. So there was sustenance.
At the estuary nearby
two continents had split apart
and a curlew
flew alone and crying.
Carefully a book
would be buried
with iodine and wine
and food that doesn’t rot.
The cross is a good marker
for an avenue and white clover,
trampled where little
sweet pea is growing higher.
Down the hill comes a poet
with ginger hair, he puts
violets inside his hat,
herbs and water and says:
There was once music here,
a round table
and gang prayer,
and an exploding glacier.
Women kept each tent clean
until one cried,
I’m going to take care
of myself.
We heard her packing
the woods into her tote
like a nymph
managing a shipwreck.
After that, for us all
empathy was our only hope.
A Vision
Some old people want to leave this earth and
experience another.
They don’t want to commit suicide. They want to
wander out of sight
without comrades or luggage.
Once I was given such an opportunity, and what did
I find?
Mist between mountains, the monotonous buzz of
farm machinery,
cornstalks brown and flowers then furrows
preparing to receive seeds for next year’s harvest.
A castle, half-ruined by a recent earthquake still
highly functional.
Computers, copying machines and cars.
It was once a monastery and home for a family
continually at war.
Cypress trees and chestnut and walnut trees. A swing
hanging long from a high bough,
where paths circle down, impeding quick escapes by
armies or thieves.
I was assigned the monastic wing that later became
a granary.
Brick-red flagstones, small windows with hinged
casements
and twelve squares of glass inside worn frames.
From the moment I entered the long strange space,
I foresaw an otherworldly light taking shape.
Scorpions lived in the cracks.
I came without a plan, empty-handed except for my
notebooks from preceding days.
be revealed to me by circumstances.
I took long walks that multiplied my body into
companionable parts.
Down dusty roads and alongside meadows,
and pausing to look at the mountains and clouds,
I talked to myself.
Mysticism “provides a path for those who ask the way
to get lost.
It teaches how not to return,” wrote Michel de Certeau.
One day I had the sense that there were two boys
accompanying me everywhere I went.
I could not identify the boy on the left,
but the one on the right was overwhelmingly himself.
Someone I knew and loved.
The other one was very powerful in his personality,
an enigma and a delight.
His spirit seemed to spread into the roads and
weather.
Silver olive trees and prim vineyards.
Now a rain has whitened the morning sky but every
single leaf holds a little water and glitter.
Mirror neurons experience the suffering that they see.
A forest thick with rust and gold that doesn’t rust.
I saw a painting where the infant Jesus was lying on
his back
on the floor at the feet of Mary
and his halo was still attached to his head.
And another painting where there were about forty
baby cherubs
all wearing golden halos. Gold represents the sun as
the sun represents God.
Outside wild boars were still roaming the hills.
Maize, sunflowers, honey, thyme, beans, stones,
olives and tomatoes.
Rush hour in the two-lane highway.
Oak tree leaves curled into caramel balls.
A Franciscan monk sat on a floor reciting the rosary, a concept borrowed from Islamic prayer beads centuries before.
Figs, bread, p
asta, wine and cheese.
These are not the subconscious, but necessities.
People want to be poets for reasons that have little to
do with language.
It is the life of the poet that they want, I think.
Even the glow of loneliness and humiliation.
To walk in the gutter with a bottle of wine.
Some people’s lives are more poetic than a poem
and Francis is certainly one of these.
I know, because he walked beside me for that
short time
whether you believe it or not. He was thirteen.
That night I drank walnut liqueur, just a sip, it tasted
like Kahlua.
The inner wing of a bird is the color of a doe.
And the turned-over earth is the color of a nut, and a bird,
but soon it will be watered for the green wheat of spring.
Flying up the hill on the back of the motorbike in the warm Roman air was like drinking from the fountain of youth.
Umbrella trees along the Tiber.
I walked on the rooftops across Rome, including a grassy one, and one where a palm grew out of a crack in the rocks.
I was carrying an assortment of envelopes containing paintings and notes for my Mass but they could not be managed easily because their shapes were irregular.
Some had juttings, some were swollen, the color red was prominent. They depicted divided cities, divided into layers, not all in a line. A layer cake sagging under the weight of accumulated dust, dirt and now grass.
Each layer had been purchased at the cost of decades, even centuries of hand-hurting, back-breaking slave labor. Caveat emptor!
Broken columns, mashed marble friezes and faces. The triumph of greed
was written across my storyboard. The city was a
mighty and devouring creation,
a creature with a crusted skin.
Even in the city you look for a place that welcomes you. You actually want to be found!
Being found is the polar opposite of making a vow.
When you sit down on a stone, face up to the sun, you can’t help but think, Mine, mine.
And you don’t have to promise anything to anyone in time.
You may be called to a place of banality or genius,
but as long as it is your own happiness that responds to it,
you are available to something inhuman.
Mozart sat at the piano for the better part of every day.
All over the world monks have lived in desert hovels as scribes, prophets, mendicants.
They are the extreme realization of one aspect of human personality
that tends towards lack of possession and solitude.
There was a hole in the roof of the Pantheon where
we were told
that the snow fell through onto the relics of Catherine of Siena
the mystic and onto the porphyry.
A man in Rome told me that a monkey climbed down a wall
holding an infant in his arms and in remembrance
there is a statue of the Madonna
on the very rooftop where he began his descent.
Alas
For you, what is happiness?
Black tiles and slant
of ribbed clouds.
A child’s rainbow
with a house under it.
Clothes in the washer
clapping all night.
Acknowledgments
Thanks as ever to the editors of Graywolf Press and to the staff and atmosphere of the Vermont Studio Center and to the kind people of Civitella Ranieri. For help along the way, my thanks to Rae Armantrout, Christian Wiman, William Corbett, Carolyn Forché, Isaac Slater, Richard Kearney, Elizabeth Robinson, Linda Norton, Carmine Cerone, Xandra Bingley, Lynn Christoffers, and to the exemplary life of Joeritta de Almeida.
I would like to thank the editors of the following publications that published my poems and the poems of so many others:
American Poet, The Baffler, Consequence, The Economy, Epiphany, Fact-Simile, Fire (UK), Golden Handcuffs, The Harvard Review, The Lamb (Song Cave chapbook), New Orleans Review, Pataphysics, Paul Revere, Plume, Poetry, The Straddler, Talisman, The Volta, and Water~Stone Review.
Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including most recently Come and See, The Lyrics, and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation. She received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement, and she has won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. She lives in New England.
The text of Second Childhood is set in Minion Pro, an original typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in 1990. Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by BookMobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
Table of Contents
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
For the Book
The Garden
Parkside
My Stones
Evening
Xing
Between Delays
For Miles
Loneliness
The Monk and Her Seaside Dreams
Second Childhood
Progress
Why Did I Dream
Flame-Light
The Cloisters
Angelopoulos
Sometimes
A Child in Old Age
Born Below
The Coldest Mother
Dear Hölderlin
A Vision
Alas
Acknowledgments
About the Author