Some steps toward composing a chapbook manuscript · Some steps toward composing a chapbook...

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Some steps toward composing a chapbook manuscript: Gather together the poems you consider “finished” or close to finished. Include poems that have been published in journals or magazines (making a note as to where and when those poems were published, information you’ll need to include later in your list of acknowledgements.) Begin by sorting your poems into 3 piles: Finished/published; close-to finished; unfinished, but maybe important pieces of a larger whole. Look at the pages of finished work; see how many pages you have. If there are 20 to 30 pages, look at how these pieces might work together, in terms of theme and/or style, how they might “speak to” one another. If the pile of finished poems is fewer than 25 pages, or the finished poems don’t seem to quite cohere, add poems from the other piles that might complement the finished poems, in some way — that might add texture or variety or fill in gaps in a kind of story your poems, as an aggregate, might tell. Try arranging these poems in terms of theme or subject matter or in a way that creates a kind of story or narrative arc, which may or may not be chronological. Try weaving different strands, in terms of themes or approaches — a prose poem, a lineated poem — or layering different textures. Keep sifting and going back and forth between the piles. When you have 25 pages that seem to cohere — poems that “speak to one another” — arrange them so that the sequence of poems makes a shape that seems satisfying to you, or that tells a kind of story. Do as much work as you can on the poems that seem unfinished but that the overall manuscript seems to need. Looking at the poems as part of a whole should help you to “see” them in a new light, and thus give you a different lens through which to revise. Choose a first poem for the manuscript that provides an entryway into the work, in terms of voice or subject matter. The opening poem should be strong and set a kind of tone. It might be “accessible” and welcoming, or it might be mysterious and intriguing; either way, it should make the reader want to read further Compile the poems, in order, into a single Word document. Each poem should begin on a new page. Use a font like Times or Times Roman, 12 point, 1.5 spacing between the lines. Use one-inch margins all around. I recommend left-hand justification, unless centering the poem on the page is somehow integral to the work. Indicate “stanza break, more” or “no stanza break, more,” when a poem goes over one page. Create a table of contents, listing the poem titles but not the page numbers.

Transcript of Some steps toward composing a chapbook manuscript · Some steps toward composing a chapbook...

Some steps toward composing a chapbook manuscript: Gather together the poems you consider “finished” or close to finished. Include poems that have been published in journals or magazines (making a note as to where and when those poems were published, information you’ll need to include later in your list of acknowledgements.) Begin by sorting your poems into 3 piles: Finished/published; close-to finished; unfinished, but maybe important pieces of a larger whole. Look at the pages of finished work; see how many pages you have. If there are 20 to 30 pages, look at how these pieces might work together, in terms of theme and/or style, how they might “speak to” one another. If the pile of finished poems is fewer than 25 pages, or the finished poems don’t seem to quite cohere, add poems from the other piles that might complement the finished poems, in some way — that might add texture or variety or fill in gaps in a kind of story your poems, as an aggregate, might tell. Try arranging these poems in terms of theme or subject matter or in a way that creates a kind of story or narrative arc, which may or may not be chronological. Try weaving different strands, in terms of themes or approaches — a prose poem, a lineated poem — or layering different textures. Keep sifting and going back and forth between the piles. When you have 25 pages that seem to cohere — poems that “speak to one another” — arrange them so that the sequence of poems makes a shape that seems satisfying to you, or that tells a kind of story. Do as much work as you can on the poems that seem unfinished but that the overall manuscript seems to need. Looking at the poems as part of a whole should help you to “see” them in a new light, and thus give you a different lens through which to revise. Choose a first poem for the manuscript that provides an entryway into the work, in terms of voice or subject matter. The opening poem should be strong and set a kind of tone. It might be “accessible” and welcoming, or it might be mysterious and intriguing; either way, it should make the reader want to read further Compile the poems, in order, into a single Word document. Each poem should begin on a new page. Use a font like Times or Times Roman, 12 point, 1.5 spacing between the lines. Use one-inch margins all around. I recommend left-hand justification, unless centering the poem on the page is somehow integral to the work. Indicate “stanza break, more” or “no stanza break, more,” when a poem goes over one page. Create a table of contents, listing the poem titles but not the page numbers.

Add the table of contents to the front of your Word document, along with any pages that include epigraphs or dedications and any pages that serves as section breaks in the manuscript. Number the pages of the document. (In Word, choose “insert page numbers” from the pull-down menu.) Now go back to your table of contents and add the page numbers, listing for each poem the number of the page on which it begins. The table of contents page will be page one of the manuscript. Create a cover page with a title — even it it’s only a “working title” — and your name and contact information. I’m providing you also with the manuscripts of both Narcissus and Earth, in Word, as they were submitted to the respective contests they won. The final pdf of Earth, also attached, will let you see the changes that were made before it was published. Look at other published chapbooks, as well, to get ideas for ways of assembling your manuscript. A chapbook, to my mind, is an ideal vessel for a distinct group of poems, something that can be read in one sitting and that contains a concise sequence of poems. Sometimes, I read a chapbook that seems to me like a small box of jewels. https://chapbookinterviews.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/cecilia-woloch/

EARTH

2

Contents

WHAT WAS PROMISED ME 3

TETA 4

HER TREE 7

2006 8

YOUR RIVER 9

WILD COMMON PRAYER 10

FOR THE BIRDS 11

MY FACE 13

OUR FATHER, IN THE LAST GOLD LIGHT OF SPRING 14

LITTLE SONG FOR THE ONE AFRAID 15

EARTH 16

GHOST SYCAMORE 17

HARRY & PEARL: A VILLANELLE 19

AFTERLIFE 21

MY MOTHER IS THE POEM I’LL NEVER WRITE 22

A PLACE IN THE MUSIC 24

3

WHAT WAS PROMISED ME

Nothing. A ring and some salt. Rice in the white shoes. Music. A doll. The book my

mother read to me, over and over, when I was a child: tigers turning to butter, to milk.

An amulet from a boy who carried a knife in his pocket, too. Night — I was not

promised dawn — stars hooked to sky by my father’s hands. Love like a tree I could

climb to the top of and then jump down from, or swing from, or fly. Mercies so small I

could hide each one inside a flower. Sharp white teeth. A clock made of pearls, each

pearl an hour, and the hours numberless. The pink dress that disappeared — where did it

go? — and the tiny ballerina spinning and spinning inside a dome. A door that would

open and close. No house. No home but the story I’ve lived toward. Luck running out

like a shimmer of wind. Two buckets full of cold water, wood for a fire, and flame.

4

TETA

— for my great-aunt

Teta, it’s winter in Pittsburgh again

—darkbrick city of smokestacks and soot —

and we’re walking up Broadway Avenue,

past billboards and vacant lots,

through the slush of snow and cinders

as the streetcars slur past — ghosts

in our flowered babushkas and shabby coats,

shopping bags weighing down our arms.

We’ve bought cans of beets, heads of cabbage,

meat ground fresh that we’ll squeeze into fists,

and we don’t flinch when the crew-cut kids hiss,

D.P.’s, at our backs; we’re not ashamed anymore, at last,

to have come from nowhere, nothing, dirt —

the village you fled as a young girl, gone,

the houses burned and the fields you worked

into rows of green grown wild again.

Once you spooned honey into my mouth

because my arms and legs were like sticks

because I itched and wept and wanted,

more than sweetness, to know who I was.

But you sighed, No one wants to remember that stuff —

how you came to this new country, stinking of ship;

how you sold bootleg hootch for cash,

your own smooth flesh for a rich man’s song —

— stanza break, more —

5

the fat growing fat on the fat of the land

while you buried one child in a pauper’s grave,

raised two others on blood money, prayer;

all your sins in a basket too heavy to lift.

Your body already a heap of grief

the day you slipped in the alley and fell

in the garden you’d made of ground bone, ash,

under a slit of tin-washed sky.

And that was the last time you ever fell.

I watched as you shrank in your narrow bed,

blind, but you gripped my hand and sang

the old song of the little bird in a tongue

I still don’t understand — dark syllables fluttering

just out of reach — until you were shadow, whisper,

gone —your whole life a ragged story

stitched into breath, unstitched again.

Teta, we’ve never been much in this world,

although we were many, too many, once—

the children’s children who circled your table,

blowing out candles, eyes tilted like yours;

our faces the same face all over again,

the face of the stranger wherever we turned —

my cousin the Cossack, the Gypsy, the Jew

my cousin the dark Slav, my cousin the slave.

— stanza break, more —

6

And we’ll never belong to this place

where you came with your one suitcase

tied with rope, your shape like a shadow

risen from earth— some mute root pulled

from a meadow where wildflowers blazed

in the summer and winter lay down.

This is America, Teta, you’re dead,

and our dying means nothing here.

Give me your bags.

7

HER TREE

There was a tree I loved and had always loved, as a child will love a tree when the tree

has always loved her, too. Silver willow, I heard it was called. I called it Grandmother-

as-a-Girl. I called it Grandmother-Under-the-Ground. I waded the river beneath its

shade, my feet in the cool, shallow water, then lay in the sunlight to listen for her. When

the storm crossed the meadow — a sudden darkening; great ships of clouds racing

overhead— each leaf of my grandmother’s tree turned its shimmering back to the breeze;

each leaf a tongue to the rain, many-tongued. I stood up in the wind and ran through the

high grass as if through a sea of light. Half afraid that the tree would fly, but I turned to

look and the tree didn’t budge. Its branches only swayed like the arms of a woman

waving good-bye. A woman who’d stood in the doorway, once, of a house that would

someday burn to the ground, shaking the crumbs from her apron for birds. A woman I

knew would die too young, earth in her mouth, and keep calling me back. I reached the

road with my arms full of wildflowers, weeds, one twig I’d snapped from a branch. All

this I saved for an altar, a grave. Drenched in the sky — gray, then silver, then green.

8

2006

In the year of the poppy year of the cornflower

year of the meadow of yarrow and buttercup

year of the thistle and ox-eyed daisy

in the spring of the year of our lord

of the train the engine the ticket the map

of the landscape of leaf shadow willow and birch

blurring past in the smoke of the burning fields

in the mist of the evening the ringing of bells

bells for the living bells for the dead

of the last great war which is one long war

of the ancient soldier come in his uniform

to stand hopefully at the door

of the house of no mirrors swept of ash

(in which I was a guest of the dark bread and rain)

to ask Have the Germans already left?

sixty years after the forests were flushed

of the last of our enemies last of the partisans

of the holy republic of mud

of the blood mixed with earth of the bones of itself

of which no one knows but the trees anymore

of which no one speaks but the child made of grass.

9

YOUR RIVER

(For Eve, on the Chattahoochee)

Your river has wish in it, and rain

and mud and twigs and the trees' lost leaves.

Oh, it's not really your river, but still

you widow it, walk beside it some.

Your dogs think the river is theirs,

bark at the birds and fish, swim sticks

across where it's deepest in their mouths.

It's not really their river, but nights

they breathe the dark house at its bend asleep.

And the green barn dreams your gone husband's dreams —

joist and beam, the sweet machines

in their sweet repose of rust and weeds

— oh wheel, oh hope, oh grass grown deep.

Today I circled the meadow, a hawk

in the river's lifted dress, this wind.

10

WILD COMMON PRAYER

I dreamt you were whole again, radiant, calm: your hair still golden but tinged with red

— a halo of rosy, burnished light; your hands untrembling in your lap. I was surprised to

find you home. But I’ve been here all along, you said. Or might have said. You didn’t

speak. You’d simply aged as women age whose bodies ease them toward death; grown

softer, more yourself. And I was the one who stood amazed, there in the kitchen where

we’d spent so many quiet mornings, friend. Wanting to touch you, wanting to simply not

forsake you ever now. Outside, the pasture lay down calmly; each blade shimmered in the

wind. This is eternity, I thought, and felt you breaking into all your lovely fragments as I

woke.

11

FOR THE BIRDS

I stopped under a sycamore, looked up:

bare white limbs against blue, blue sky

and in those branches, flickering, birds,

each with a bright green-yellow breast,

each the size of a small child's fist.

So what kind of birds are you? I asked

and slipped on my glasses, the better to glimpse

such wing and color, such flashiness.

Then, breathless, I climbed the sun-swept hill

to the naturalists’ offices, rushed inside,

saying, "I have a question about a bird!"

and was handed a book of birds to check.

I considered Common Yellow Throat —

Skulks in marshes. Male wears black mask.

Wichity-wichity song —loved that music,

but wondered if music could be the answer

to anything? I leafed through a few more pages,

learned that American Goldfinches turn

from winter's muddy greenish-brown

to summer's yellow brightness, turn

betwixt, in spring, this lemon-lime,

and fly in hiccups, flash their gold, a flock

of such birds being called a charm,

from the Latin carmen , meaning song.

— stanza break, more —

12

I ran back down the hill like a woman afire

practically into the sycamore's arms,

singing, anyway, skulks in marshes,

black mask, wichity-wichity song!

Singing, Spread out your colors, flash me your wings —

as the charm made its green-yellow sweep through the sky.

13

MY FACE

I thought I'd grow up to be a fish. Or a tree, or a piece of wind, like God. I thought I’d

scrape against myself until my face became my face. I never thought I'd grow up to look

like my mother, much as I craved her one pink dress, stuttered around in her high heeled

shoes, tried to sing the songs she sang. Or like my father, with his shadow in his shadow,

pockets, keys. I planted tulips upside down, thinking those flowers would bloom in hell,

and that hell was deep inside the earth. I walked around when I was small and spit my

name into my hands. I wanted everything to shine. And I was dark. And could not swim.

14

OUR FATHER, IN THE LAST GOLD LIGHT OF SPRING

says to me, Take down your hands.

Says, Let your sister have it, if she wants.

Wants nothing now.

The light that stood behind him will not stand.

So summer comes.

So he has not stood up in years,

who was the last of something, once.

Who once swam through flames, I thought.

Who made a shadow like a bird.

What do I want to know, and can’t?

That what he’d never said, he said.

That he’d kept his ankles covered where the chains

had gnawed his skin.

That he’d planted corn and melons

near the creek beside the house.

That the leafy golden light behind him

darkened. It was June.

15

LITTLE SONG FOR THE ONE AFRAID

Oh beloved, oh afraid

of the bloodstain, dark spot, ticking clock

of what has shone in your life like luck —

too bright to last — oh fortunate

who slipped the licked stones, glittering

inside your pockets, spread your arms

and dreamt your ghost wings would unfurl

from your bony shoulders —angel bones —

and that the sky would hold you up

and love — a tree from which you swung —

oh branch you called your father's name

oh bird who sang your mother's song

oh little sweeper of the world

whose life inside my life has burned.

16

EARTH

We’ve traveled like this all our lives, all our life as a people on the earth. We’ve gathered

and scattered and gathered again. In rooms made of firelight or of song. We’ve buried our

dead, when we could, in places they loved, or the bones of them. Every step, a turn of the

wheel, a word set down and no other word; every turn of the wheel a prayer in mud, the

answer of one God. Sometimes we’ve veiled ourselves and sometimes we’ve stood,

clothed only in sunlight and wind. Sugar of flowers on our breath; honey of birdcall in

our mouths. Once, I’d forgotten the way to the well and the smell of cool rain led me

there. Once I was only a child in my sleep; then I awoke and was everywhere.

17

GHOST SYCAMORE

The winter I knew you weren’t coming back,

I ran down the hill from the house, the path

through the woods turning red and gold with death

— dank leaves underfoot; branches twined overhead —

and, breathless, stopped where the lake begins,

having glimpsed, through the blur of mist, a glint

of something silvery, knife-sharp, bright —

I stepped from the shadows toward that shine

and suddenly, there, in the sky at my feet

on the lake’s surface, shimmering, a tree,

or the ghost of a pale tree, lightning-limbed,

that seemed to have risen up from within

the body of water, the body of sky —

and again, on the far shore, the other side,

the same tree —spectral, luminous —

bowed as in grief at the water’s edge

where it stood among lush pines, bone-white, stark

— stripped of leaves, of rough outer bark —

— stanza break, more —

18

old sycamore, old boundary-marker — father,

as I saw you in a dream, once, self and other

self, in this world and the next, as if a veil

between them lifted, then everything went still.

19

HARRY & PEARL: A VILLANELLE

My father wears shoes in the afterworld

— the shiny, brown dress shoes we buried him in.

My mother goes barefoot and answers to Pearl

though that wasn’t her name — Daddy called her girl

and told us, Your mother works hard; be good kids.

Now Daddy wears shoes in the afterworld

because he lay shoeless his last years, lay curled

like a child in his bed crying out, or he’d sing

and our mother went barefoot and answered him. Pearl

was her middle name, given her, slurred, at birth

— a drunken grand uncle’s grandiose gift.

But our father wears shoes in the afterworld

and our mother, who followed him — ever his jewel —

to wherever they’ve gone, in her last white dress

goes barefoot beside him now, answers to Pearl

— won’t answer to mother and won’t be implored;

she cooked and she cleaned and she sang that’s enough.

Now my father wears shoes in the afterworld

— shiny brown dress shoes — and gives her a twirl

in his arms she’s his girl, she’s his girl again, laughs,

my mother, who’s barefoot and answers to Pearl

— stanza break, more —

20

when I call to her, call to my sweet disappeared

mother and father who slipped through my breath.

My father wears shoes in the afterworld.

My mother goes barefoot and answers to Pearl.

21

AFTERLIFE

I want to be fierce and joyful and a meadow when I’m dead. Spindly flowers and waist-

high grass and the shadows of clouds across that brightness, shifting, like so many ships

in the sky. I want to be all in one place, at last, but vast, a sea by the side of the road. I

mean green, and I mean poppies and daisies, everything blooming at once. And I want to

be, again, that girl who pushed into the wind. Who stood up to the sun, big-mouthed and

brave. I mean, if I’m going to die, let me live. Let me wade out into the darkest part of

the night and name myself. Wild-haired bitch of the mongrel stars. Moon on her

shoulders. Dirt-rich, proud.

22

MY MOTHER IS THE POEM I’LL NEVER WRITE

When I hated myself,

when I sulked and bled

and had no god to call,

she loved me;

she called me back.

Her strength was the wren’s

plain strength

but my mother was beautiful,

more beautiful than I saw,

more delicate.

Really, I don’t want to tell anyone.

What’s to tell?

Her crooked hands.

When I was hungry,

I was fed.

When I was sad,

I could lie down

beside her in her bed,

or when I was glad,

exhausted from joy

from working beside her

in the garden

or in the kitchen

she swept and swept.

When I had wrecked my life,

she told me, “You don’t have to

fall apart.”

— No stanza break, more —

23

When I was wrong

she taught me

how to forgive myself.

When she died

I took the flowers from her grave

and scattered them.

When I want her voice,

her face again,

I have only

to look in the mirror.

Gone like the sparrow,

gone like the wren.

Gone like the blossoms

blown into drifts

from which her name

was gathered once.

24

A PLACE IN THE MUSIC

Once, as if in a dream, I saw them walking away from me. Or not away, but just ahead. In

a little shiver of silvery wind. They knew I was following, and kept on. Arms linked,

walking side-by-side, on a road between fields of waist-high grass. Wind tossing their

hair and ruffling the hems of the flowery dresses the women wore. Some uncle or other,

still a boy, scampering after the rest — was that joy? And what it said to me, this vision

or dream, was not to be afraid: that it's only a kind of magic, death, and the story is rich;

the story goes on. I was behind them, watching them walking into the wind, when I heard

the hum beginning inside me— a place in the music, high and sweet — as if they were

singing or also heard the song I’d begun to hear, and were glad. And loved me still. The

sky that silver, too. Although none of them turned around.

25

Acknowledgements:

"What Was Promised Me" and "Our Father in the Last Gold Light of Spring" appeared in

Cave Wall.

"Teta" and "Afterlife" appeared in The Crab Orchard Review.

"2006" was awarded the Indiana Review Poetry Prize and will appear in the Indiana

Review in 2014.

"Your River" appeared in The Mississippi Review.

"Wild Common Prayer" appeared in Double Room.

"For the Birds" appeared in Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About

Birds, edited by Billy Collins.

"Harry and Pearl: A Villanelle" appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review.

EARTH

Poems

CECILIA WOLOCH

Winner of the 2014 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize

Two Sylvias Press

Copyright © 2014 Cecilia Woloch All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Two Sylvias Press PO Box 1524 Kingston, WA 98346 [email protected] Cover Art: Crossed Tails by Jonde Northcutt Cover Design: Kelli Russell Agodon Book Design: Annette Spaulding-Convy Created with the belief that great writing is good for the world, Two Sylvias Press mixes modern technology, classic style, and literary intellect with an eco-friendly heart. We draw our inspiration from the poetic literary talent of Sylvia Plath and the editorial business sense of Sylvia Beach. We are an independent press dedicated to publishing the exceptional voices of writers. For more information about Two Sylvias Press or to learn more about the eBook version of Earth please visit: www.twosylviaspress.com First Edition. Created in the United States of America. ISBN: 13: 978-0692333372 ISBN: 10: 0692333371

Two Sylvias Press www.twosylviaspress.com

Praise For Earth

In Earth, Cecilia Woloch writes with the wonder and resilience that are essential, not only to empathy, but to transformation. Woloch weds us to the natural world through language that is both straightforward and particular. A “river’s lifting dress” comes to represent history; branches swaying “like the arms of a woman waving goodbye” come to represent mortality. These remarkable poems are hymns and requiems; they are made of "blood mixed with earth." —Terrance Hayes These poems reflect a mature writer, a woman unflinching in both love and craft. The love is unabashed; the language boldly lyrical and image-rich. As a devoted reader of Cecilia Woloch's writing, I relish anything she offers, so I welcome Earth, this book of passionate, vigorous poetry, in which grandeur of spirit always redeems sorrow. As Woloch writes in the gorgeous prose poem "Afterlife": "I want to be fierce and joyful and a meadow when I'm dead." May we all be meadows with you, Dear Poet. —Holly Prado These poems gel together beautifully with a musical sense of foreboding and epiphany inhabiting the lines. These pages give us a terrain where a "honey of birdcall in our mouth" seems equally at place with a landscape populated with a willow that leaves the speaker "half afraid that the tree would fly." I want to return to Earth again and again. —Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Acknowledgements

Some of these poems first appeared in the following journals and magazines. Many thanks to the editors. Indiana Review: “2006” Cave Wall: "What Was Promised Me" and "Our Father in the Last Gold Light of Spring" Crab Orchard Review: "Teta" and "Afterlife" Mississippi Review: "Your River" Double Room: "Wild Common Prayer" Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, edited by Billy Collins: “For the Birds” Spoon River Poetry Review: "Harry and Pearl: A Villanelle" Asheville Poetry Review: “Little Song for the One Afraid” and “Earth” Double Room: “Wild Common Prayer” American Mustard: “My Face” and “A Place in the Music” Love and gratitude to Holly Prado and her Tuesday morning writing workshop for ongoing support and encouragement, and to Carine Topal and Sarah Luczaj for their invaluable feedback on work-in-progress.

Table of Contents

I.

What Was Promised Me 1 Teta 2 Her Tree 5 Little Song For The One Afraid 6 My Face 7 A Place In The Music 8 2006 9 Earth 10 II. Your River 13 Wild Common Prayer 14 For The Birds 15 Our Father, In The Last Gold Light Of Spring 17 Ghost Sycamore 19 Harry & Pearl: A Villanelle 21 My Mother Is The Poem I’ll Never Write 23 Afterlife 25

For my mother, in memory

Tell me there is

A meadow, afterward.

— Lucie Brock-Broido

I.

~ 1 ~

WHAT WAS PROMISED ME

Nothing. A ring and some salt. Rice in the white shoes. Music. A doll.

The book my mother read to me, over and over, when I was a child: tigers

turning to butter, to milk. An amulet from a boy who carried a knife in his

pocket, too. Night — I was not promised dawn — stars hooked to sky by

my father’s hands. Love like a tree I could climb to the top of and then jump

down from, or swing from, or fly. Mercies so small I could hide each one

inside a flower. Sharp white teeth. A clock made of pearls, each pearl an

hour, and the hours numberless. The pink dress that disappeared — where

did it go? — and the tiny ballerina spinning and spinning inside a dome. A

door that would open and close. No house. No home but the story I’ve lived

toward. Luck running out like a shimmer of wind. Two buckets full of cold

water, wood for a fire, and flame.

~ 2 ~

TETA

for my great-aunt

Teta, it’s winter in Pittsburgh again

— darkbrick city of smokestacks and soot —

and we’re walking up Broadway Avenue,

past billboards and vacant lots,

through the slush of snow and cinders

as the streetcars slur past — ghosts

in our flowered babushkas and shabby coats,

shopping bags weighing down our arms.

We’ve bought cans of beets, heads of cabbage,

meat ground fresh that we’ll squeeze into fists,

and we don’t flinch when the crew-cut kids hiss,

D.P.’s, at our backs; we’re not ashamed anymore, at last,

to have come from nowhere, nothing, dirt —

the village you fled as a young girl, gone,

the houses burned and the fields you worked

into rows of green grown wild again.

Once you spooned honey into my mouth

because my arms and legs were like sticks,

because I itched and wept and wanted,

more than sweetness, to know who I was.

But you sighed, No one wants to remember that stuff —

~ 3 ~

how you came to this new country, stinking of ship;

how you sold bootleg hootch for cash,

your own smooth flesh for a rich man’s song —

the fat growing fat on the fat of the land

while you buried one child in a pauper’s grave,

raised two others on blood money, prayer.

All your sins in a basket too heavy to lift

and your body already a heap of grief

the day you slipped in the alley and fell

in that garden you’d made of ground bone, ash,

under a slit of tin-washed sky.

And then you never stood up again.

I watched as you shrank in your narrow bed,

blind, but you gripped my hand and sang

the old song of the little bird in a tongue

I still don’t understand — dark syllables fluttering

just out of reach — until you were shadow, whisper,

less —your whole life a ragged story

stitched into breath, unstitched again.

Teta, we’ve never been much in this world,

although we were many, too many, once —

the children’s children who circled your table,

blowing out candles, eyes tilted like yours;

~ 4 ~

our faces the same face all over again,

the face of the stranger wherever we turned —

my cousin the Cossack, the Gypsy, the Jew;

my cousin the dark Slav, my cousin the slave.

And we’ll never belong to this place

where you came with your one suitcase

tied with rope, with your shape like a shadow

risen from earth — some mute root pulled

from a meadow where wildflowers blazed

in the summer and winter lay down.

This is America, Teta, you’re dead,

and our dying means nothing here.

Give me your bags.

~ 5 ~

HER TREE There was a tree I loved and had always loved. Silver willow, I heard it was

called. I called it Grandmother-as-a-Girl. I called it Grandmother-Under-the-

Ground. I waded the river beneath its shade, my feet in the cool, shallow

water, then lay in the sunlight to listen for her. When the storm crossed the

meadow — a sudden darkening; great ships of clouds racing overhead —

each leaf of my grandmother’s tree turned its shimmering back to the

breeze; each leaf a tongue to the rain, many-tongued. I stood up in the wind

and ran through the high grass, as if through a sea of light. Half afraid that

the tree would fly, but I turned to look and the tree didn’t budge. Its

branches only swayed like the arms of a woman waving good-bye. A woman

who’d stood in the doorway, once, of a house that would burn to the

ground when she’d gone, shaking the crumbs from her apron for birds. A

woman I knew would die too young, earth in her mouth, and keep calling

me back. I reached the road with my arms full of wildflowers, weeds, one

twig I’d snapped from a branch. All this I saved for an altar, a grave.

Drenched in the sky — gray, then silver, then green.

~ 6 ~

LITTLE SONG FOR THE ONE AFRAID

Oh beloved, oh afraid

of the bloodstain, dark spot, ticking clock

of what has shone in your life like luck —

too bright to last — oh fortunate

who slipped the licked stones, glittering

inside your pockets, spread your arms

and dreamt your ghost wings would unfurl

from your bony shoulders — angel bones —

and that the sky would hold you up

and love — a tree from which you swung —

oh branch you called your father's name

oh bird who sang your mother's song

oh little sweeper of the world

whose life inside my life has burned.

~ 7 ~

MY FACE I thought I'd grow up to be a fish. Or a tree, or a piece of wind, like God. I

thought I’d scrape against myself until my face became my face. I never

thought I'd grow up to look like my mother, much as I craved her one pink

dress, stuttered around in her high heeled shoes, tried to sing the songs she

sang. Or like my father, with his shadow in his shadow, pockets, keys. I

planted tulips upside down, thinking those flowers would bloom in hell, and

that hell was deep inside the earth. I walked around when I was small and

spit my name into my hands. I wanted everything to shine. But I was dark.

And could not swim.

~ 8 ~

A PLACE IN THE MUSIC

Once, in a dream that wasn’t a dream, I saw them walking away from me.

Or not away, but just ahead. All my dead beloveds in a shiver of silvery

wind. They knew I was following, and kept on. Arms linked, walking side-

by-side on a road between fields of waist-high grass. The wind tossing their

hair and the hems of the flowered dresses the women wore. Some uncle or

other, still a boy, running after the rest — was that joy? And what it said to

me, this picture in my mind, was to not be afraid: that it's only a kind of

magic, death, and the story is rich, the story goes on. I was behind them,

watching them walk into the wind, when I heard the hum beginning inside

me— a place in the music, high and sweet — as if they were singing or also

heard the song I’d begun to hear, and were glad. And loved me still. The sky

that silver, too. Although none of them turned around.

~ 9 ~

2006

In the year of the poppy year of the cornflower

year of the meadow of yarrow and buttercup

year of the thistle and ox-eyed daisy

in the spring of the year of our lord

of the train the engine the ticket the map

of the landscape of leaf shadow willow white birch

blurring past in the smoke of the burning fields

in the blue mist of evening the ringing of bells

ringing out for the living the living the dead

of the last great war which is one long war

of the ancient soldier come in his uniform

to stand hopefully at the door

of the house of no mirrors swept of ash

(in which I was a guest of the dark bread and rain)

to ask, Have the Germans already left?

sixty years after the forests were flushed

of the last of our enemies last of the partisans

of the holy republic of mud

of the blood mixed with earth of the bones of itself

of which no one knows but the trees anymore

of which no one speaks but the child made of grass.

~ 10 ~

EARTH

We’ve traveled like this all our lives, all our life as a people on the earth.

We’ve gathered and scattered and gathered again. In rooms made of firelight

or of song. We’ve buried our dead, when we could, in places they loved, or

the bones of them. Every step, a turn of the wheel, a word set down and no

other word; every turn of the wheel a prayer in mud, the answer of one

God. Sometimes we’ve veiled ourselves and sometimes we’ve stood,

clothed only in sunlight and wind. Sugar of flowers on our breath; honey of

birdcall in our mouths. Once, I’d forgotten the way to the well and the

smell of cool rain led me there. Once I was only a child in my sleep; then I

awoke and was everywhere.

~ 11 ~

II.

~ 12 ~

~ 13 ~

YOUR RIVER for Eve, on the Chattahoochee Your river has wish in it, and rain

and mud and twigs and the trees' lost leaves.

Oh, it's not really your river, but still

you widow it, walk beside it some.

Your dogs think the river is theirs,

bark at the birds and fish, swim sticks

across where it's deepest in their mouths.

It's not really their river, but nights

they breathe the dark house at its bend asleep.

As the green barn dreams your gone love’s dreams —

joist and beam, the sweet machines

in their sweet repose of weeds and rust

— oh wheel, oh hope, oh grass grown deep.

Today I circled the meadow, a hawk

in the river's lifted dress, this wind.

~ 14 ~

WILD COMMON PRAYER

for SLS

I dreamt you were whole again, radiant, calm: your hair still golden but

tinged with red — a halo of rosy, burnished light — and your hands

untrembling in your lap. I was surprised to find you home. But I’ve been here

all along, you said. Or might have said. You didn’t speak. You’d only aged

as women age whose bodies ease them toward death; grown softer, more

yourself. And I was the one who stood amazed, there in the kitchen where

we’d spent so many quiet mornings, friend. Wanting to touch you, wanting

to simply not forsake you now. Outside, the pasture lay down calmly; each

blade shimmered in the wind. This is eternity, I thought, and felt you breaking

into all your lovely fragments as I woke.

~ 15 ~

FOR THE BIRDS

I stopped under a sycamore, looked up:

bare white limbs against blue, blue sky

and in those branches, flickering, birds,

each with a bright green-yellow breast,

each the size of a small child's fist.

So what kind of birds are you? I asked

and slipped on my glasses, the better to glimpse

such wing and color, such flashiness.

Then, breathless, I climbed the sun-swept hill

to the naturalists’ offices, rushed inside,

saying, I have a question about a bird!

and was handed a book of birds to check.

I considered Common Yellow Throat —

Skulks in marshes. Male wears black mask.

Wichity-wichity song — loved that music,

but wondered if music could be the answer

to anything? I leafed through a few more pages,

learned that American Goldfinches turn

from winter's muddy greenish-brown

to summer's yellow brightness, turn

betwixt, in spring, this lemon-lime

~ 16 ~

and fly in hiccups, flash their gold, a flock

of such birds being called a charm,

from the Latin carmen, meaning song.

I flew back down the hill in that windy light

practically into the sycamore's arms,

singing, anyway, skulks in marshes,

black mask, wichity-wichity song!

Singing, Spread out your colors, flash me your wings —

as the charm made its green-yellow sweep through the sky.

~ 17 ~

OUR FATHER, IN THE LAST GOLD LIGHT OF SPRING says to me, Take down your hands.

Says, Let your sister have it, if she wants.

Wants nothing now.

The light that stood behind him will not stand.

So summer comes.

So he has not stood up in years,

who was the last of something, once.

Who once swam through flames, I thought.

Who made a shadow like a bird.

What do I want to know, and can’t?

That what he’d never said, he said.

That he’d kept his ankles covered where the chains

had gnawed his skin.

That he’d planted corn and melons

near the creek beside the house.

~ 18 ~

That the leafy golden light behind him

darkened. It was June.

~ 19 ~

GHOST SYCAMORE

The winter I knew you weren’t coming back,

I ran down the hill from the house, the path

through the woods turning red and gold with death

— dank leaves underfoot; branches twined overhead —

and, breathless, stopped where the lake begins,

having glimpsed, through the tangled mist, a glint

of something glimmering, silvery, bright —

I stepped from the shadows toward that shine

and suddenly, there, in the sky at my feet

on the lake’s surface, shimmering, a tree —

or the ghost of a white tree, lightning-limbed,

that seemed to have risen up from within

the body of water, the body of sky —

and again, on the far shore, the other side,

the same tree — spectral, luminous —

bowed as in grief at the water’s edge

~ 20 ~

where it stood among lush pines, bone-white, stark

— stripped of leaves, of rough outer bark —

old sycamore, old boundary-marker — father,

as I saw you in a dream, once, self and other

self, in this world and the next, as if a veil

between them lifted, then everything went still.

~ 21 ~

HARRY & PEARL: A VILLANELLE

My father wears shoes in the afterworld

— the shiny, brown dress shoes we buried him in.

My mother goes barefoot and answers to Pearl

though that wasn’t her name. Daddy called her girl

and told us, Your mother works hard; be good kids.

Now Daddy wears shoes in the afterworld

because he lay shoeless his last years, lay curled

like a child in his bed crying out, or he’d sing

and our mother went barefoot and answered him. Pearl

was her middle name, given her, slurred, at birth

— a drunken grand uncle’s grandiose gift.

But our father wears shoes in the afterworld

and our mother, who followed him — ever his jewel —

to wherever they’ve gone, in her last white dress

goes barefoot beside him now, answers to Pearl

— won’t answer to mother and won’t be implored;

she cooked and she cleaned and she sang that’s enough.

Now my father wears shoes in the afterworld

~ 22 ~

— shiny brown dress shoes — and gives her a twirl

in his arms, she’s his girl, she’s his girl again, laughs —

my mother, who’s barefoot and answers to Pearl

when I call to her, call to my sweet disappeared

mother and father who slipped through my breath.

My father wears shoes in the afterworld.

My mother goes barefoot and answers to Pearl.

~ 23 ~

MY MOTHER IS THE POEM I’LL NEVER WRITE

When I hated myself,

when I sulked and bled

and had no god to call,

she loved me;

she called me back.

Her strength was the wren’s

plain strength

but my mother was beautiful,

more beautiful than I saw,

more delicate.

Really, I don’t want to tell anyone.

What’s to tell?

Her crooked hands.

When I was hungry,

I was fed.

When I was sad,

I could lie down

beside her in her bed,

or when I was glad,

exhausted from joy

from working beside her

in the garden

or in the kitchen

~ 24 ~

she swept and swept.

When I had wrecked my life,

she told me, You don’t have to

fall apart.

When I was wrong

she taught me

how to forgive myself.

When she died

I took the flowers from her grave

and scattered them.

When I want her voice,

her face again,

I have only

to look in the mirror.

Gone like the sparrow,

gone like the wren.

Gone like the blossoms

blown into drifts

from which her name

was gathered once.

~ 25 ~

AFTERLIFE

I want to be fierce and joyful and a meadow when I’m dead. Spindly flowers

and waist-high grass and the shadows of clouds across that brightness,

shifting, like so many ships in the sky. I want to be all in one place, at last,

but vast, a sea by the side of the road. I mean green, and I mean poppies and

daisies, everything blooming at once. And I want to be, again, that girl who

pushed into the wind. Who stood up to the sun, big-mouthed and brave. I

mean, if I’m going to die, let me live. Let me wade out into the darkest part

of the night and name myself. Wild-haired bitch of the mongrel stars. Moon

on her shoulders. Dirt-rich, proud.

~ 26 ~

~ 27 ~

Cecilia Woloch is the author of six collections of poems, most

recently Carpathia (BOA Editions 2009). The French translation of

her second book, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, was published as

Tzigane: le poeme gitane by Scribe-l’Harmattan in 2014. Tsigan has

also been adapted for multi-media performances in the U.S. and

Europe. Her novella, Sur la Route, a finalist for the Colony Collapse

Prize, is forthcoming from Quale Press in 2015. Other literary

honors include The Indiana Review Prize for Poetry, The New Ohio

Review Prize for Poetry, the Scott Russell Sanders Prize for Creative

Nonfiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the

Arts, the California Arts Council, CEC/ArtsLink International,

Chateau de la Napoule Foundation, the Center for International

Theatre Development and many others. She collaborates regularly

with musicians, dancers, visual artists, theatre artists and

filmmakers. The founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild

and The Paris Poetry Workshop, she has also served on the faculties

of a number of creative writing programs and teaches

independently throughout the U.S. and around the world.

~ 28 ~

Publications by Two Sylvias Press: The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano (Print and eBook) Fire On Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry edited by Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy (Print and eBook) The Poet Tarot and Guidebook: A Deck Of Creative Exploration (Print) Earth, Winner of the 2014 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize (Print and eBook) By Cecilia Woloch The Cardiologist’s Daughter by Natasha Kochicheril Moni (Print and eBook) She Returns to the Floating World by Jeannine Hall Gailey (Print and eBook) Hourglass Museum by Kelli Russell Agodon (eBook) Dear Alzheimer’s: A Caregiver’s Diary & Poems by Esther Altshul Helfgott (eBook) Listening to Mozart: Poems of Alzheimer’s by Esther Altshul Helfgott (eBook) Cloud Pharmacy by Susan Rich (eBook) Crab Creek Review 30th Anniversary Issue featuring Northwest Poets edited by Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy (eBook) Please visit Two Sylvias Press (www.twosylviaspress.com) for information on purchasing our print books, eBooks, writing tools, and for submission guidelines for our annual chapbook prize. Two Sylvias Press also offers editing services and manuscript consultations.

~ 29 ~

Created with the belief that great writing

is good for the world.

Visit us online: www.twosylviaspress.com

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