Morning
Morning, the call of wine-throated robins,
some deity plucking and placing in mountain air,
not din, not sleepless; we wake with things.
We are not alone where a hand sweeps the day
into chords. Which of my hands I never know
to hold out the window so I’ve been trying both,
switching between them and I am not unhappy
when it rains on my left, warms my right. I am not
unhappy. I ride the bus to work where we pick up
men on their way to the fields. They are not city men.
There I hear of choices, of which tools for stirring clay
dirt, lopping fat leaves, beheading chicken and small
pigs. Where decisions are always swift, decisions always
of this only planet, I am not unhappy. They flower,
these men. They do not wait to erupt in blossom. With which
of these mouths would it be best for me to tell you
that the men are calm as they are torn through
by petals?
Wake
So we are told the tombs
are empty, their inhabitants whittled
to dust through time,
though time is not the answer,
and we are told
the way not to disclose
is to bite the tongue
with the force it takes
to split a grape.
Which is nothing. Not even grotesque.
And in silly roadside vineyards
the fruit is sifted through
with the delicacy
of a lie. Fingers are not
mouths. The dead have gone
nowhere. So the disinterested
parents pull to the shoulder
and order Merlot,
look past one another
to ivy curled in the patio awning,
to their children asleep
in the car. This the last time.
This the beginning of something
on the other side of caring.
We are told that a wake
is a vigil, that to drink in the presence
of the body is a grace,
predicate to which the soul is no longer
attached. The Here in We Were Here.
The hum of holding on to something.
Like sitting in a room
where your captor has finally let you sleep,
his amber teeth glistening. The Were
in where we are. The How
in where to look. Mouth to know
with what to touch.
Bolaño in Blanes
Catalonia, Spain
He was sweating. Fireworks rose like wet spires
over Cala Bono cove,
its promontory faces biting horizon and turning
coastward. A slow ascension on a transplant list
marked a race that couldn’t be won.
He carried a pen
and damp pad to the shore, hand a little less steady
but still legible: if family is indeed the truest kind
of country,
your order is to look for something coming from you and live
within it. Something like this cub from that lion,
this fawn from that doe.
On his birth continent he could no longer write,
but Latin America only let go of utopias
because someone from somewhere else said so—
from across the Atlantic, this lion to that cub: Catalonia,
Costa Brava, the Mediterranean side of a separatist
Spanish mouth fed with Mexico,
fed with El Salvador; this cub from that lion.
His liver needed a replacement and his country had nothing to do
with country—
he carried it in love, in children, in the chamber
of his abdomen.
Patriation, perhaps, has only to do
with making enough to feed your children,
to partition any of their worldly griefs and occasionally flatter
the woman you love.
So much more has been asked for.
But again ascension will prod the facile chemistry
of his torso into morning,
chemical ash still in the sand: bottle oranges,
gunmetal azures,
the exploded tops of rockets.
He will clutch his stomach and weep. This cub. That lion. The want
of providence in province the most precious thing
we have to wean her on.
Jess Williard is the author of Unmanly Grief (University of Arkansas Press, 2019). His poems have recently appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. He is from Wisconsin.
Read two poems by Jess Williard previously appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo MiRRorediMage, courtesy Shutterstock.
