Creature: Poems
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Creature - Marsha de la O
I
To Be Unprotected
Alone, under a blue cloud backlit
by a quarter moon in a dry wash,
I wanted starlight to bend low
brush my face and bare arms.
There’s a thirst inside syntax
for what can’t be told: night breaking
against a bowl of mountains, heart
ticking each unit of flux.
When I say I heard it, I mean
I felt its song on my skin in needles
in shards raining like flakes
from a hammerstone.
Feathered, rippled, stroke-struck.
Inside my body, a hum or tremble
in a place where I keep fear,
outside, a glister, a lilt, falling
as sound from stars
like tin, like salt, like silt. Words
can’t mean the same thing twice.
When I say I thought I might die
of beauty, I mean it broke me apart.
I had to give in, let night drape
a garment of sound over my human
form. Let words yearn toward
silence, under the piano of starlight.
Its soft percussion.
If wild is psalm and singer, let
it wash over, empty me, and
make use of my emptiness,
I am willing.
My father died in the fullness of spring
as petals began to brown. New buds were forming, but not many.
Was it glorious? It was.
Our backyard, like an aging showgirl.
He nourished himself with light like any other plant.
He would raise his chin and close his eyes.
He sang snatches of Bing Crosby ballads, could whistle
on-key. He did not admit that he loved me.
I never saw him cry until very late. He could keep it soundless.
Control his breath. Be silent,
as a tear rolled down his cheek.
Then another, and another.
In this drought, I save every drop for my flowers. Some last only a day.
He didn’t acknowledge weakness. Or complain.
But, over years, would not tend himself,
body and mind, a forgotten garden.
Horses Resting
The horses gather beneath the oak, maybe curious
about the wagon and the man, or his horse. They sense
still-tender green shoots in the mottled shade
But don’t stretch their long necks down, now that quiet
has taken them, held in each other’s presence,
their bodies close in shadow.
Sunlight collects in pools on the open road, yet in shade
falls like bits of mosaic glass, the smell of heat and dust
and light-seared grass, scent of the world wanting its water
on this parched earth.
They look to be bays in the photo, though the far one,
a chestnut, has turned to nuzzle the flank of the gray
gelding in harness between cart shafts. The gray
gently rolls the snaffle bit in his tender mouth.
The shared being of herd animals ripens into quietude
that even the driver leaning against the tree can feel—
horses drowsing together, as if drowsing were wisdom
or fullness, and he wonders
How it is that being among beasts of burden could feel like
sharing company with languid angels. And thinks that
such closeness is also spacious, and their quiet involves
the silence of the oak and its gracious shadow, as though
Peace were part of the water table at the roots of the tree.