A. E. Stallings

I hate you, How the children plead At first sight—

I never glimpse her but she goes Who had been basking in the sun, Her links of chain mail one by one Aglint with pewter, bronze and rose. I never see her lying coiled Atop the garden step, or under A dark leaf, unless I blunder And by some motion she is foiled. Too late I notice as she passes Zither of chromatic scale— I only ever see her tail Quicksilver into tall grasses. I know her only by her flowing, By her glamour disappearing Into shadow as I’m nearing— I only recognize her going.

Piraeus Archeological Museum On the journey to the mundane afterlife, You travel equipped to carry on your trade: A bronze, small-toothed saw to make repairs, The stylus and the ink pot and the scraper, Wax tablets bound into a little book. Here is the tortoise shell for the cithara, Bored through with holes for strings, natural sound box. Here is the harp's wood triangle, all empty— The sheep-gut having long since decomposed Into a pure Pythagorean music. The beeswax, frangible with centuries, Has puzzled all your lyrics into silence. I think you were a poet of perfection Who fled still weighing one word with another, Since wax forgives and warms beneath revision.

The two of them stood in the middle water, The current slipping away, quick and cold, The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold, Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter. Maybe he regretted he had brought her— She'd rather have been elsewhere, her look told— Perhaps a year ago, but now too old. Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her: To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails And fishes shelter in the undergrowth. And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth, Life and death weighed in the shining scales, The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.

Her body like a pomegranate torn Wide open, somehow bears what must be born, The irony where a stranger small enough To bed down in the ox-tongue-polished trough Erupts into the world and breaks the spell Of the ancient, numbered hours with his yell. Now her breasts ache and weep and soak her shirt Whenever she hears his hunger or his hurt; She can’t change water into wine; instead She fashions sweet milk out of her own blood.

Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had: As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight, Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through, Though someone always said I’d be all right— Just don’t look down or See,it’s not so bad (The nothing rising underfoot). Then later The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch, Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view, The merest thought of airplanes. You can call It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep; But it isn’t the unfathomable fall That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch, It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks: Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat, Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat, Select the prince from a row of identical masks, Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote, Or learn the phone directory by rote. Always it’s impossible what someone asks— You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe That you have something impossible up your sleeve, The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak, An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke, The will to do whatever must be done: Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

You humble in. It's just as you remember: The sallow walls, formica counter top, The circular argument of time beneath Fluorescent flickering—doubt, faith, and doubt. She knows you've been to see the gilded girl Who's always promising and walking out With someone else. She knew that you'd return, With nothing in your pockets but your fists. Why do you resist? When will you learn That this is what your weary dreams are of— Succumbing to Her unconditional love?

That it was shy when alive goes without saying. We know it vanished at the sound of voices Or footsteps. It took wing at the slightest noises, Though it could be approached by someone praying. We have no recordings of it, though of course In the basement of the Museum, we have some stuffed Moth-eaten specimens—the Lesser Ruffed And Yellow Spotted—filed in narrow drawers. But its song is lost. If it was related to A species of Quiet, or of another feather, No researcher can know. Not even whether A breeding pair still nests deep in the bayou, Where legend has it some once common bird Decades ago was first not seen, not heard.

For Rachel Right shoulder aching with day-long butchery, Left shoulder numb with dints clanged on the shield, The hero is fouled with blood, his own and others’, First slick, then sticky, then caked, starting to mat His beard—the armor deadweight all around him; His teeth grit and rattle with every jolt Of bronze-rimmed wheels behind the shit-flecked horses. But when he glimpses the mountains, the distant snow, A blankness swoons upon him, and he hears Nothing but the white vowels of the wind Brushing through stands of spears like conifers While a banner slips its staff and hangs in the blue Like a kestrel or a contrail. The hero’s death, The prize, elusive quarry of his life, Stands stock-still in her cloven tracks in snow And turns, one ear tuned to the creek’s far bank, One dished towards him. Her unstartled gaze Beads on him like a sniper’s sights, until At the clean report of a cracking poplar branch, She leaps away like luck, over rapid water, And snowfall scrims the scene like a mist of tears, Like a migraine, like sweat or blood streaming into your eyes.