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CHAPTER 1

SITTING IN THE DARK


I am related to light.
Even nights I sit by a pond that gathers the darkness into its arms,
where even the reeds lie still.

What is it I come here to know?
Some questions take forever to ask.
In water the moon casts her net and the heart lies tangled in light.

In these moments what is at stake?
Of darkness and light what cousins will the soul make?

I am related to light.


THE MYTH MAKERS

Most of me was born here in a kitchen where grandmother danced in straw shoes and blessed me with her spatula, "To appease the Chinese gods," she said, "and keep your breasts from falling." As summer thickened in the yard, we planted shamrocks and practiced ESP. "I swear on Jesus, gin,
and the Union Jack that Winston Churchill will come back." In the loose map of black tea leaves she saw me walking backward in a gown before the Queen. "You'll be a Windsor — don't ever marry a Catholic." Her yellow hands greased the lamb with oil, while holding a lit cigarette. I could not help but hope, the gray ash turning red as jewels tumbled from the air.
She had no breasts or teeth, and orange peel withered on the stove, as she blew her vapor rings and veiled my flesh in smoke. Now,

my father's dead and seven stitches seal my breast. In my kitchen, no man views a new moon through the glass.
Last night my mother called.
My ex-fiancée shot himself.
He was Catholic, and fond of words like "banshee" and "betrothed,"
I make soda bread, and mark the crust with soil. I live where the earth is always cold,
and floatplanes in a headwind break a trail across the sky.
My neighbor claims Aurora has a song.
I haven't heard it yet. But lucky, yes,
to be awake as night unravels into red. Perhaps we're made of feather, thread, and storms,
but with winter almost over I lay my faith in simple chores.
The stove is full of coals, and summer was a season of the wasp. I shovel out the ash, smear citrus on the kitchen glass, and love the stubborn blood and dead wings as they dissolve in morning light.


FOUND

Grania's crate,
Large as a hope chest or small child's coffin.

Just an ordinary box, camouflaged by camp Gear and cast-off teacups. Brimming

To its cedar plank lip; letters and her poems Earmarked with my name and tears so old

They petrified the page with rings of rage And signs of old growth. I shake it

Like a gift; hear paper chafe its Thin yellow skin; make music

With the rattle of old bone pens.
Note after note, dust rising like a shout

From just buried ash,
Her breath ascends through ribs

Of shadow on the wall. I sing her in,
I swallow her strength,

And the smell of old books Falls through me

Like sunlight Or memory

Of Grania uncoiling her hair.

for Beatrice Elizabeth Patricia Cornwall


THE STONE HARVESTERS

I want a poem from the stone.
I know it's there.
I heard it as a child when Grandpa dragged the heel of his lame leg across the pavement.

It happened in a wheat field.
He was eight,
his foot caught beneath a blade,
while tendons snapped and words died out like cement forgets the rain.
The harvest continued on.

They say he shook without a sound,
eyes white as the pupils of a marble man.
And though he tried to speak again,
it seemed that pebbles filled his mouth.
I didn't know him.
He was hard to understand.

But he showed me pictures once,
of a trip he made to Italy,
and sent a book about an artist who found men inside of stone.

We buried him.
He wanted me to carve the plaque.
And now I want the words inside his stone.

for Fredrick Dobson


MEDITATION ON THE NATURE OF POETRY

Isaac will not go to mass.
He is deaf,
and no one there can speak in sign.
When I return,
he is waiting in the garden stringing Froot Loops on a vine.
I ask him,
"Are you making beads?"
He signs,
"No. I make a rosary of weeds."

for William Stafford


MEDITATIONS ON BEETHOVEN

The road to unreachable sound.

And proof the heart has for its own set of ears.

A pond where moonlight makes noise.

What silence sings in deaf, bruised boys.


SESTINA: THE SIXTH DAY

The six nouns that occur most often in her verse are, in order of frequency:
day, life, eye, sun, man, heaven ... summer and morning are ... among the twenty-five nouns that she uses fifty or more times in poetry.

— GEORGE FRISBIE WHICHER, This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson

Flour sifts the way a day falls. In this life and another, a woman is baking in a window, one eye measuring yeast, a second instructing the sun,
who is her firstborn, a little man,
thinking of fresh bread and heaven.

"Is flour the dust of Heaven?"
The Gruel Dough ripens all day and so death leavens in a man.
Clay bowl, linen cloth, rising life.
A belly blooming on the shelf, while the sun cluttered kitchen bears memory, in a boy's eye.

And shadow brings evening to a woman's eye.
At the second rise, she proofs the dough for heaven in a scorched pan buttered by sun.
Flawed hands test the work of one summer day.
Her dough springs back, and a resurrected life shapes bread and rolls and a wafer man.

A boy opening the stove becomes a man.
Rubbing sea salt from his eye,
he thinks about eternal life and what he knows of Heaven.
There must be bread, and one long day with so much light, there is no need for sun.

And twilight brings manna from the sun.
The loaf is done, and coriander and honey a psalm in the mouth of a man.
A boy, full of bread, lies sleeping in the wild grass. The lamp is lit, another
  day labors through the sieve of eternity. A mother's eye is a covenant with shadow and the grain of heaven.
She craves the bread of angels and reads the book of life.

In this kitchen, a boy's life began. Now, he is dreaming of the sun.
Crumbs are swept from the table in heaven and frost blossoms in the field around a man.
As the moon rises in his mother's eye,
the sun is orphaned in the sky to seek another day.

What is kneaded in a day rises through a life.
A boy's eye loves summer and crust the color of sun.

When a man's bread sounds hollow, the labor of heaven and morning is
  done.

for Emily, who had no children,
and my mother, who did.

THE MOON AFTER ALL


you don't ask but there it is her song every black night the bone of solitude sticks in your throat.

the moon after all in perfect accompaniment her lone note risen from the windpipe of dusk

that hour severed from morning from night.


FISH WIFE

What's the use In being jealous of the sea?
She's a constant flirt; dark Promise of seduction Beneath her whitecapped skirt.


IDENTIFYING A HARBOR WITCH

First you must be a woman who wakes by the sea.

All men speak of you,
they say your heart's in hibernation. In winter you soak your skin in sea,
sleep at harbor's edge,
become a piece of wood so petrified they can't see your growth. They hope you have no feeling left.
When they sail away, weave seaweed through your hair.
Make braids of jealousy. Crush bull kelp with your heel, when held by men in sun its bulb promises warm light.

This will begin with a man who gives you eight stones from a shore called Desire where the sun is always rising.
Each one has steeped so long in water dyed by dawn,
that they are streaked with sunrise;
especially when emerging from the moist clasp of a wave.
He will give them to you the first morning you make love; one for each day you spent together. He will leave them tracking across your white sheets like the print of a wild animal on a thin skin of snow.

When it is understood that he is never coming back,
you will swim to a frigid coast you know and become this woman who wakes by the sea. He will fear you behind him,
rattling eight dawns in a bag,
cursing his name with the hiss of each day you sink in the sea.

You will be a woman charmed By the fire of his stones.

for Virginia Woolf


PURSUIT
We are creatures made for joy; if only we know how to reach.

— JAMES DICKEY, in a letter to Ann Sexton


On the nightstand;
tea, stale,
and coins he forgot.
Above the white mug I cup my hand;
no steam,
no spice lifting like scent from skin.

Breath is visible in the coldest air.
Children clutch it,
want with mittened hands,
to pluck it hot from the air like an egg.

We are born chasing touch —
its brief and fragile heat.


THIRST

Kissing tulips, I enter again your indigo breath. My tongue covets yours,
hovers

Kept and free and blessed. How easily nectar weeps. I drink, lips rabid for a smudge of bliss. The ink of blossoms coats my mouth. You keep this color in your breath.

acrostic for Keith


PASSAGE

After you're done ... what is there left for you to confront but the great simplicities?

— STANLEY KUNITZ

You go. I gather the last Of your exotic warmth; Moroccan Mint tea lukewarm in the cup.
Even your spoon is no comfort —
My tongue in the center Of its cold, hollow heart.


HAIR

You send a picture to your mother and she writes back asking,
"Why did you shave your head?"
"What church do you go to now?"
And you remember that everyone but her has seen you this naked before.

So you tell her about an old woman you saw on the subway. The one you thought had been a dancer from the turned out way she walked and the way she wouldn't let her bruises show.
She didn't walk the way you thought a beaten woman would walk.
She took small, vibrant steps,

still steps that barely moved.
Just enough space between joints to get her from here to there without shaking bones loose or letting out the music inside.

Grace without sound.
When you asked her,
because it seemed important to know,
she told you that's her name.
Her full name.
Grace Without Sound.

And you tell your mother it reminded you of being picked up from ballet,
going home,
sitting on daddy's knee while he pulled with a comb and said "Princess, you're good,
but your body is wrong."
And you tell your mother the woman's hair was perfect.
Pulled tight in a tail that reached down her back,
hung black between her legs;
it was the only thing about her that swung a little free. Even so

it pulled the skin at her temples,
made her eyes narrow where they should have been wide.
It's hard to see the world with hair held back that way.
And you tell your mother

you imagined the woman brushing out her hair in the dark;
the way it would spark blue like the lamp dad hung from the porch,
the one that killed flies quick when they flew toward light,
though even that buzz wasn't loud enough to drown out the sound of your mother knocked senseless to the ground.

So you tell your mother you thought these things and went home.
You looked in the mirror and you knew what you wanted to see.
You wanted your locks lying in the sink;
black finger marks on porcelain skin.

So you shaved your head.
It was raw for a while,
but now you like the way it chafes,
burns, breathes. Your shock of held back rage.

for Zoeanne


VEHICLE

At daybreak I drove from home to a place called Overlook.
The road was long and steep,
as it always is,
there were difficult corners,
as there always are,
and around each bend I said
"I want my fervor back."

Sometimes the heart is an old blue car,
paint peeling,
garbage in the cup holder and no back bumper,
Skittles and coins between the seats.

And yet,
I reached the top to watch sunlight blend with the wind,
and my heart, each cracked, unoiled part,
was fueled with inexplicable joy.

DEFINING PRIZE

(Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 1976)

1

"something offered ... in contests of chance"

One summer,
after rape,
I found eight four-leaf clovers.

2

"something taken by force"

I picked them.
I dried them.
I locked them in a drawer.

3

"to estimate the value of (archaic)"

Back then,
at ten,
it was enough.

4

"something exceptionally desired"

To hoard luck.
To guard luck To think God was making up.


WINTER HEART

White sack

caught in the black dance of a dead tree.

Thin plastic skin ripe with wind and light.

Blossom flirting with decay,

angel in a see-through dress,

egg that wants a chance

to woo the numb to breath.


THE BLESSING END

Icicles melt,
their long wands first filling up with light.
We break them off to place the blessing end inside our mouths.

Let's claim there's grace for the dead who still have thirst,

toast now what grieves and yet hosts mirth,

confess we live and long for birth.

for the ice sculptor, Lyn Marie Naden


FRIEND

When I am with you, I belong to the spontaneous chorus of all green things.
If I listen, your words are crystals woven through wind. When we walk talking in the black woods,
the end believes in beginning again.


WALK RECKLESSLY

In the smallest room in Alaska we dream of a wider world.
There is so little space there is only one good place to stand;
in front of an untrimmed window that knows the mountain,
the neighbor, the world.
From here, there is no horizon.
Fog rolls up over its lip so there is only a possible line. Yesterday,

outside this door,
the tsunami of a great silence.
Today, the echo of a boy who swore he wouldn't write poetry,
then asked you how to spell scar.
I warn you about pushki.
The blister, the burn.
How broken leaves and blood collide with skin and light.
A cow moose looks over her shoulder at something we can't see.
A calf. A bear.
We are both hungry.

You open the door.
I watch you walk up the slim path,
move with ease and tenderness among the toxic plants.
I follow.
Even though I have good balance,
I walk with my arms held wide.

for Kim Stafford, Kachemak Bay, Alaska


NEIGHBOR

(Kachemak Bay to Vietnam)

Each word is harbor for the next,
from your shore to mine the sea says the same thing.
Let our days, be hand-painted plates we pass among our friends —
a ladle lying empty by the sink,
the blue bowl heavy as its compost overflows. We come,
like a bear to the meadow where roe for the Buddha ripens in the grass.
As autumn leaves lay all God's tables,
roots toughen in the garden, drink sugar from the past.


MIRACLE

Weed: a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

— RALPH WALDO EMERSON The Complete Works, 1904

Midwinter, among old-growth trees,
one shoot strays toward the light.

What odds.
It isn't much.
Such room for dark to play its part.

The gleam of green.
Faith, thaw,
Spring, sun;
they'll come again.

What mystery!
The tale itself becomes enough.
I kneel to praise

what reaches up.

for Emily Dickinson


ROUGH DRAFTS

Earth and snow.
From the meeting of these great hands we want some sound.
A clap. But there is nothing,
or the ebbing of some psalm the heart has yet to learn.
This is the hardest kind of listening.
And who will care?
Most do not.
It doesn't matter.
It is all applause,
applause, applause.

How is it possible to ask for more than that?

for Dorothy and William Stafford

WHAT WHALES AND INFANTS KNOW

Beluga Point, Turnagain Arm, Alaska

A beluga rising from the ocean's muddy depths reshapes its head to make a sound or take a breath.

I want to come

at air and light like this.
To make my heart a white arc above the muck of certain days,
and from silence and strange air

send a song

to breach the surface where what we need most lives.

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Excerpted from "Of Darkness and Light"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Kim Cornwall.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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