Sarah Kennedy

2 poems


**


The Keep

1. House of Jealousy

So there I was, in the midst of my church-
going: felled by the devil, my lesser
half. What was I thinking—there were always
men with their long legs, those strong backs, they were
everywhere, a picture twisted up with
whatever stretch of body I claimed just
then. And it was pure scorn, that self I put
on all those unholy days, with its streak
of thigh and its cocked-up lip, the sneer and
the stride always headed away. Oh, but
the rain, the rain came down like someone’s lust
for someone else and then it was all stare
in the mirror, in the streaky glass that
every shop stood sentinel for their stuff,
the uniforms of the doormen saying
come on sweetie come on. And who was I
to think love should ever play one-on-one,
my brittle heart sulking, bracketed by
those infamous ribs. I dragged a finger
through my dreary foundation to check for
a wrinkle and nothing was there, but I
was wrecked, skimming faces for connection,
saying I had my reasons and I would
give up my sins and be good if I could
be sure of reciprocation but I
was keeping one cunning eye on those sheets
of glass, at home out there on the streets, my
fol-de-rol reflection swaggering toward
me, my flashes of hair, my great red dress.



2. House of Love

So low-low ceilinged the room where I lay
but it didn’t matter I was always
down, then out, I always crawled anyway

even to the scabbing of my soft knees,
dark and always damp, almost a cellar
with its jars of strange fruits stacked on boards. Was

there a window? I don’t recall but yes
an ancient mirror (if I turned my head
first this way, then that, I could see the signs

of many women’s faces that I think
I have known or heard about or read of),
open boxes of some inedible

root, that may have been my heart, may have been
my poor body with its funk scent and scrapes,
its thigh bruises, and the door went up up

but my feet were too dirty to go there.
I loved it while it held up (it was bad
in snow). That’s why I called it what I did.



3. House of Lassitude

The new books come and the magazines come.
They say who has won what award, they say

I’m not managing my career as I
should. My disobedient heart panting

and sprawled, I throw a scrap of meat at it
now and then when the mailman delivers

a letter. My home, my recliner. I
type away at the remote, looking for

an old movie on TV. If I pad
to the kitchen for a sandwich, that’s all

I can do for today. Another pile
of papers for grading, another wasp,

half wraith already, sorties the apples
because I left the glass door ajar once

more. He’ll whine himself to death soon enough,
and meanwhile the sky is a love-poem

blue, tinged with the melancholy of fall—
I remember that wagging for notice.

It all comes back to me here in my chair
from which I observe that my nails could use

an editing, but I’ll scratch that for now
since all my tools are in another room.



4. House of My Muse

And why not live here forever? Knife-point
cabinet corners, spiders lurking in shoes,
that damned flicker slamming every morning
into the window. It used to be sweet,
you with your nothing-succeeds-like-success,

your beautiful skin, your raise in the stakes.
But we were young then, and my question is
this: why am I the only one getting
old? I pull the blinds, and oh how you’d like
to jump on that one these days. Jalousie:

“adjustable shutter to regulate
the passage of air and light.” I know, from
jealousy or zeal. Or a passion for
detailing your perfections when you’re far
away. Is it a deadly sin, how much

musing I do on you, darling, or just
a painful irony for my mortal,
my blemished self? You would think at my age
I’d have found my way around, I’d be bored,
but the rooms in your house stretch jamb to jamb.

It’s a new empty space every day, so
why not stay where at least no visitors
come as audience to my declining
years, where I can imagine whom I’d hang,
if I had the gift of art, on the walls.



5. House of My Relations

So Midwestern and so damned bland, my mutt-
faced, mud-colored, exoskeletally
slap-dash frame. I think I feel a vein twist
and gurgle in my chest. I do recall

a staircase chugging up my early child-
hood’s middle, a set of steps I swept, swept
until dust bloated the air-conditioned
face of my mother, sewing up her coat

against another coming winter. What
kills the women is trying to decide
what to remember and what to consign
to Goodwill, either go mad on the plains

or go mad in the car on the highway.
What is the first granddaughter’s name, who was
the truant, the coke-head, the slut. Brain-shocked
and womb-scraped, early ripe, early rotten,

every one in turn the apple of her
father’s red-brown eye. Bad hair day again,
the medusa in the mirror is one
of the long-lost sisters, hydra-headed

family of girls. What shall we call ourselves
today? The Scottish line? the Irish line?
One of us humming a noodly Celtic
tune while she brushes up on the diet

of the Cherokees, meant to melt her thighs.
She’s breathing hard, allergic to nature
like the rest of us, they put us away,
they take us out, we marry, divorce, then

marry again, our many children look
like everyone and it doesn’t matter
what’s going on in the kitchen because
it’s always our minds that go, then our hearts.



6. House of My Genius

She thinks she’s so smart, always lolling there
at the center of the room, but she’s no

brain, no, she’s my familiar, my Vesta
with a twisted heart, giving me the hairy

eye. Do this, do that, I’m your past, take me
with you but don’t touch me! I’m delicate!

Be a woman but keep your girlish looks!
That’s her burning at the bottom of my

pocket, that’s her pile of ashes still lit
and simmering at the core after all

this time. Gift of the gods, little hearth-fire,
nasty ancestor, she will tell you what’s

what, shriveling mother-look, cape of old
skin. She would torch the whole place if she could.


**

The Beautiful Ruins

Maybe there’s something instinctive in us, that we’re drawn to human habitation and can’t resist a ruin . . . .These once-inhabited places . . . suggest the lost past, the lost Eden, not the Utopia to come.

Kathleen Jamie, Findings

1. Rievaulx

One-way road to here: glitzy swish of brush

from a painter framing himself, a pair

of lovers reading aloud from the guide-

book—dominant script, nostalgic: garden,

kitchen, the carved markers for the abbot,

greater monks, the prominent visitors.

The lead roof is a deconstructed hole,

the stained glass is long smashed, saying nothing

anymore of God’s bloody narrative,

most of the wall stones recycled away.

The sun these days is no haloed saint; she’s

a diva, spangling above. The flying

buttresses are just skeletons, bleaching

and crumbling. The gorse on the moors tightens

its fists. The bridge you have to cross will buck

and sway. There is a twist. Consider this,

if you’re going to make the drive: the past

is never what you expect. They’ve got it

on sale, but it isn’t free. And once you

begin, there’s no good way of turning back.

2. Jerpoint

St. Christopher in life-size bas relief

on the great stone corner of the monks’ hall,

still shouldering a child over water,

though dumped from the canon himself. The ranks

of saints and ladies and nobles and knights

holding court in slabs that ring the cloister,

their broken bodies and limbs remembered

almost invisibly by restorers

who placed them in attendance on empty

space that marks where the herb garden once bloomed.

In one dark corner, carved “weepers” still squat

around the base of a tomb, mourning in

effigy—St. Catherine accessorized

with her smart little wheel, Michael always

ready to deliver the message you

don’t want—everyone’s maintaining that grim

Benedictine grin, though the young woman

at the counter in the postcard shop says

she never studied her Irish after

grade six, who would who cares, and down the road

the king’s cross is surrounded by cows, and

the stone is nearly erased. A round tower’s

locked in the spiked fence of trees at the field’s

far end, no access, no entrée to its

high-handed risky door, and in the glass

studio nearby the makers blow and

blow and the blue globes and wine goblets

shine for the buyers, who come in droves. They

have driven out here for remains, gravestones

and ravens, a bit of inexpensive

wistfulness. The weather cooperates,

as it will, rain falling on the gentle

hills and the decaying, distant walls, wind

slapping itself with branches, then howling.

3. Strata Florida

So little left beyond the chapel, just

some scraps of arch, hint of foundation, but

the body of Davidd ap Gwilim’s here,

under the famous old yew. Or is it?

Talley Abbey claims him too; the guide will

take you right to him. He’s here or here or

here, she frets (the markers are all in Welsh).

Back at Strata Florida the pilgrimed

dirt clichés into the twisted roots. Turn

to the marker at your back, for the leg

whose owner—don’t say it, a man always

with one foot in the grave—epitaphed it

here before he hopped a ship for the States.

He’s a great companion for the poet,

that wanted corpse, resting under his tree,

its toes in his bones, which may in fact be

sunk in the dirt of the “church in Wales,” which

means English, though tangled with Cymraeg, deep

as the letters on the tombstones, of which

two trace the resting place of Davidd, voice

of the nation, symbol of the past, who

lies perhaps here, and perhaps somewhere else.

4. Tintern

What a dissolute morning, the morning

they rose for prayer and found pounding soldiers

at the gate. Not possible: violence

in the house of God, the monks in their robes

in the doorframe, the armored men shoving

into the space here in their own country,

their own home, not France or Ireland or Spain,

some other place they could promise was

heathen, a threat, in need of crusade. Murmurs

of invasion for months but the lead roof

solid as belief, the stained glass windows

a dim holy light inside which even

warriors had worshipped. How could it come

to this, a Roman sort of empirelust:

cannibal hunger, a king swelling with

power, his men chopping the stone faces

of knights and saints to dust, then shouldering

the silver, fattening themselves with gold?

Think of a morning, not too warm to burn

the manuscript herbals or to fling out

the stored corn to the people gathering

from town to watch and scatter the broken

stones of the granary walls. How could this

happen, in the heart of the civilized

world, that men could rage worse than animals?

They were into the garden already,

ripping leaves and stomping the buds—what would

there be of physic come summer—pointing

the brothers to the road they had not walked

for decades (had not thought it possible

that a war could be turned on them, on them,

for such slender reasons) and them with no

where else to go, no home on earth but this.

5. Cerne Abbas

Oh Aelfric, we miss you, and your grammar,

your homilies, your little rooms. A world

of painted glass said Lord Stanley during

the Stuart years, slapping a riding crop

on a well-bred thigh to mark how much he

appreciated religious retreats.

Especially since he owned one, of which

only paraphrase remains, the stone guest

house, a complicated doorsill, the work

of Aelfric spirited off, oh Aelfric,

once of Winchester, once of Eynsham, once

of Cerne, all of your studies in ruin

once Henry VIII blends nation and church—

how efficiently he channels desire!

The state, the golden state with its airy

commands (see the astonishing halo-

headed king and all of his glittering

courtiers, la-de-da, waiting for a sign),

must insist on patriotism, must

insist that all jewels and plate be sent

posthaste. Oh, Aelfric, hand to your brow back

in 998 at the plight of poor

servants: Bosses who cannot permit those

working under them to know kindness should

never themselves enjoy luxurious

lives. We miss your history of Judith,

your God loves kindness, scattered in special

collections. Your empty window, lodged now

with the National Trust, isn’t enough,

crumbling in an old field, low and alone.

6. Fountains

It was the Cisterians’ first,

then it was

Henry’s, Edward’s,

Richard Gresham’s (and its

five hundred acres).

It was the quarry

for Fountains Hall

.............................for the farmers who lived

nearby.

.................Why not?

The monks were disappeared:

they squat on a late ferry to Ireland:

they’re angry old uncles:

................................................they marry, raise

their houses and barns.

If this is the work

of God,

.........................what need have we of Satan?

.........................................................................It

is one boy’s—

.................he wanders the walls, counting

his rosary down.

School-children come here

to study

.........................the engineers of the stones:

uncommonly gifted

uncommonly

skilled.

.................It’s everyone’s, no one’s: under the

reformed fields,

sacrificed to grass, lie still

the anonymous graves

holding their own.

**

return to sawbuck 5.2

**

Sarah Kennedy is the author of six books of poems, including Home Remedies (LSU), .A Witch’s Dictionary (Elixir), Consider the Lilies (David Robert), Double Exposure (Cleveland State University Press), and Flow Blue (Elixir), and her seventh, The Gold Thread, is due out from Elixir Press in 2012. A professor at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, Sarah Kennedy has received grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts and is currently a contributing editor for West Branch and Shenandoah.