2 poems
**
The Keep1. House of JealousySo 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 LoveSo 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 LassitudeThe 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 MuseAnd 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 RelationsSo 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 GeniusShe 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.
Labels: 5.2, sarah kennedy, summer 2011
