By: Kim Haines-Eitzen
Morning Walk
A discarded pillow—bloated,
corners chewed by kangaroo rats,
feathers precious commodities—
lying by coils of hose,
desiccated and cracked.
Broken hub caps,
beer cans—all Light
on these dirtways—
shattered bottles,
clear or brown and half buried,
labels baked, withered.
Plastic water jugs,
anonymous—no place
for celebrity smart water—
empty save only for spiders.
A child’s backpack,
faded pink, caught in thorns,
shredding at my touch.
And a cassette tape, brown
ribbons strung out in tatters,
El Gallo Grande:
the big cock, a silly man,
the Urban Dictionary says.
Silent Treatment
Rocky olive-groved hillsides, a limestone turreted mansion,
windows flung open, my mother lying in bed.
Nearby a dove scratches at her pane, raps a morse code.
The gardener outside whistles a dirge to dawn
to the bombs that fell during the dark moonless night. Metal on stone.
Looking back in the window, my mother lies dry, silent, grey.
Her food tray, pastel green, remains untouched, refused.
A doctor down the hill puts straps on a young child’s legs.
Leather and metal. Boy, six, wears a pinched face,
grips cold bed-handles. Days of silence,
my mother shut up, closed away, distant. Her breath
moves the circular room, her sighs bend the ashen pines.
Doves return to their mourning-moans.
A tortoise pauses its morning trek to water, to listen.
There is no water here, but scalpel catches sun, warming
for blood, sinew, muscle carving.
Lamentation
We bury the living
in tidal pools washed clean
with a saline shameful
and true. And then we
raise the dead by vein and
line and each riven
crease weathered, worn,
worn out. Raise them up
to meet our eyes, to beckon
our ears at the sun’s
rising. Veins scarcely
wondering at the coursing
saltiness, at brush and fire
and timber golden with
a glory saved for the
sanctified. But this
life is hardly holy, bit
by bitter bit fragments
pull at the edges of the
eyes until we only know
the wetness, the salty
taste, of tears needing
to find their spending,
line by line, etched
along the rain-stained
littoral of our souls.
Kim Haines-Eitzen is a professor at Cornell University and a poet whose work draws upon her childhood in the Middle East and her current life in the lush Finger Lakes region of central New York and the high deserts of Arizona.
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