Marie Ponsot

“Saturday’s child must work for a living.” “I’m moving from Grief  Street. Taxes are high here though the mortgage’s cheap. The house is well built. With stuff to protect, that mattered to me, the security. These things that I mind, you know, aren’t mine. I mind minding them. They weigh on my mind. I don’t mind them well. I haven’t got the knack of  kindly minding. I say Take them back but you never do. When I throw them out it may frighten you and maybe me too. Maybe it will empty me too emptily and keep me here asleep, at sea under the guilt quilt, under the you tree.”

Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer Northampton-style, on the porch out back. Its voice touches and parts the air of summer, as if  it swam to time us down a river where we dive and leave a single track as evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer that lets us wash our mix of dreams together. Delicate, tacit, we engage in our act; its voice touches and parts the air of summer. When we disentangle you are not with her I am not with him. Redress calls for tact. Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer still. A small breeze rises and the leaves stir as uneasy as we, while the woods go black; its voice touches and parts the air of summer and lets darkness enter us; our strings go slack though the player keeps up his plangent attack. Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer; its voice touches and parts the air of summer.

MORNING Reading the bones, wetting a fingertip to trace archaic characters, I feel a breeze of silence flow up past my wrist, icy. Can I speak here? The bones say I must. As the first light strikes across the lake, magpies scream, and the cast bones say the work must come true, it’s been true all along, we are what we do out on our digs. Dictor and looker, all eyes, with spade and a jeweler’s loupe I sift mud & dust for bone, for shellcast. Spy, archeologist of freshness, I expect sight-made-sound to reveal fear cold at the throat of change, and loosen its grip so that mind, riding the bloodwarm stream, wells up as the speech that bears it and is telling. EVENING Magpies scream. Though the tongues of birds say Now and warn forward, free of a live past, we seek back and forth for change, the ghostly sparkling of our watertable under everywhere. If I don’t speak to tap & ease it out, I go dry & dumb & will die wicked. On the lake of the poets a stone lamp flickers. It casts eight moons dancing, casting doubt on the moon that rides above the winter air. Ice thaws in a poet’s throat; the springing truth is fresh. It wakes taste. The taste lasts. Language floods the mud; mind makes a cast of words; it precipitates, mercurial, like T’ang discourse riding the tidal constant of its source.

All he undertook goes under, under the undergrowth he rose from fly-boy, lovely in his day. All his clothes — spruce suit & tie — are underclothes against ungrounded gray. All his studies understudy an unstudied play. Under the under of what I remember we are both twenty and except with each other underemployed.

(for my daughter) Composed in a shine of laughing, Monique brings in sacks of groceries, unloads them, straightens, and stretches her back. The child was a girl, the girl is a woman; the shift is subtle and absolute, worn like a gift. The woman, once girl once child, now is deft in her ease, is door to the forum, is cutter of keys. In space that her torque and lift have prefigured and set free between her mother and her child the woman stands having emptied her hands.

The big doll being broken and the sawdust fall all scattered by my shoes, not crying I sit in my dark to discover o failure annulled opens out in my hands a purse of golden salvaged sovereigns, from floors of seas culled. The dancing doll split in an anguish and all the cords of its elegant limbs unstrung; I stumble whistling; the bones of my skull marvelously start to sing, the whole shell of myself invents without peril and contains a court aubade. I hid the dovesmall doll but something found it. Frightened I gave the fire what was left. Surrounding, it mulled dulcet over the melting jeweled two blue eyes. That night our hearth was desolate, but then its stones sprung flowered and the soaring rafters arched. Now all the house laughs, the sun shouts out clearly: dawn! the sea owes us all its treasures; under the soft the riotous explosion of our waking kiss or gift, a stone plucked or shorn free of gravity falls upward for us, slow, and lies there, quietly.

What women wander? Not many. All. A few. Most would, now & then, & no wonder. Some, and I’m one, Wander sitting still. My small grandmother Bought from every peddler Less for the ribbons and lace Than for their scent Of sleep where you will, Walk out when you want, choose Your bread and your company. She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.” She looked fragile but had High blood, runner’s ankles, Could endure, endure. She loved her rooted garden, her Grand children, her once Wild once young man. Women wander As best they can.

I’d like to assume from my April birthday, I quickened the womb on the 4th of July. If you suffered as I a sternly fought tendency to endless dependency you’d know why.