Cat's Cradle - Softcover

Model, Renate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1463448724 ISBN 13: 9781463448721

Publisher: AuthorHouse Publishing, 2011

Synopsis

Poetry is my link to all of life. It is the sea in my body, the touch of people, even those I don't know, the wonder of place. Each poem is a deeper breath, and I am grateful for it. I love words. They glisten like shattered glass, like glass splinters, they have the power to wound. I steal time from a demanding law practice to write, photograph, tend my family, my garden and four rascally dachshunds.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CAT'S CRADLE

By RENATE MODEL

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2011 Renate Model
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4634-4872-1

Contents

I. CAT'S CRADLE......................................1What, not awake?.....................................3The Feast............................................4Apricots.............................................5Mi Tierra............................................6I am coal............................................7Your Beginning.......................................8Love is..............................................9Love Song............................................10These arms...........................................11Starfish.............................................12Love Song II.........................................13That Summer..........................................14P.M..................................................15Image................................................16Your words...........................................17The Early Park.......................................18Nights...............................................20Child................................................21You Slipped From Me..................................22Clouds Over Labrador.................................23September............................................245 a.m................................................25I Said I Think It Is A Good Poem.....................26Take Them............................................27Dominoes.............................................28Stay.................................................29I'll Be An Open Field................................30Thinking.............................................31Language.............................................32You Ran..............................................33Under Ashes..........................................34Echoes...............................................35Lies.................................................37Cat's Cradle.........................................38When It Was All Said.................................39Damn Fool............................................40II. JOHN'S LEAP......................................41John's Leap..........................................43El Hacedor...........................................44Leaving Handel.......................................46Mourning Picture.....................................48Alice................................................49The Ritual...........................................51The Adversary........................................52Digging..............................................53Two Weeks............................................54David In Taos........................................55Child Play...........................................56Lost Angel...........................................57To M, Aging..........................................59The Popcorn Vendor...................................61The Visit............................................63Mourning E...........................................65Choose...............................................66Sepia................................................67September 11th.......................................68Bill Hanson..........................................71The Chosen...........................................73For Victor, dying....................................74To W.R. Wilkins on Ken Sleight.......................75Victor...............................................76Soldier..............................................77Moving Targets.......................................78Joel At The Beach....................................80III. THE PAINTED ARK.................................81Fat squirrel.........................................83The Painted Ark......................................84Pile Of Thin Bones...................................86Sleep, Tiger.........................................87Pears................................................88Death Of A White Bear................................89High Meadow..........................................90Berries..............................................92River Of Cloud.......................................93Hawk.................................................94Blue Heron...........................................95Reading Aspen........................................97Koi..................................................98Spent Poppies........................................100Invasion.............................................101Damn, The King Snake.................................102A Gift Of Amber......................................103Dachshund Morning....................................104Tapestry.............................................105Laps To Extinction...................................106As At Comfort........................................107

Chapter One

CAT'S CRADLE

What, not awake? My touch has been too light.

You woke me with a glance, yesterday.

      THE FEAST

    What went wrong? Carefully,
    carefully
    the cloth was laid,
    smooth but for two folds, two
    low ridges, face to face,

    then the knife,
    polished,
    polite,

    and the waiting bread.


      APRICOTS

    She
    brought him apricots
    even in winter
    when the fruit was small,

    sometimes
    walking two miles for them,
    letting them ripen
    slowly
    in a north window.

    He thought,
    tasting the fragrant
    sungold skin,
    like hers, they
    were always in season.


      MI TIERRA

    The man with the hat and I
    sat side by side.
    We played a game
    with our eyes, with our hands,
    without names,
    In a place with a Spanish name.

    The man with the hat and I
    sat under a starry sky,
    not real, the stars weren't real
    on a ceiling painted blue
    in a place with a Spanish name.
    They were part of the game.

    If you lose your hat somewhere
    and go back and look
    and it isn't there,
    but you find another, not the same,
    do you take it?
    A hat that's not the same?

    I am coal

    Your breath
    ignites me,
    even from so great a distance,

    your gaze consumes it.

    And all the mirrors in the spinning
    room look on
    with envy, laughing.


      YOUR BEGINNING

    I'm whole!

    flowing like milk-sap in green
    stems
    a spread-out starfish,
    a sun-blemished
    pear cracked open,
    heavy with soft juices.

    Feed on me winged creatures!

    I'll cling to your legs, live
    in a gull's belly,
    drop clam-shells into the sea!


      Love is

    a paper cut that sudden stings
    and thrills and bleeds and must be
    stopped and throbs
      under its bandage,

    a dream of Eden, of orchid-eyed zebras
    with hooves
    like midnight thunder,
      ....believing.

    Love is a tree at sunrise,
    two halves of a seed pod, split open,
      .... revealing birth.

    Love is

    your reflection, magnified, upside
    down, in a single drop
      of spring rain,

    love is a child's toy, bright
    plastic pieces
    that fit together so simply,

    that we break
      or take apart.


      LOVE SONG

    We were long in this ice age
    spawned
    in cold beds at the edge
    of winter,
    with miles, snow miles in open
    coats and wet shoes,
    exposed to our own bitter elements.

    I stood in the sun watching
    icicles weep.

    We never touched, never
    held
    their fire-splinters on our tongues.

    These arms, folded
    like linen
    smelling of closets, tidy beds,

    are only arms. But fly, arms,
    be sails, be pillows,
    be gulls with trembling
    wing feathers.

    These thighs
    are white mushrooms growing
    under the sand, which your eyes
    uncover,
    your hands gather up.

STARFISH

You are five oceans. My tongue burns
with the salt taste of you. You
surge in my veins like an
exotic tide.

The quick pulse in my neck echoes your
far-flung seas. How long
and deathlike

the hours splayed limp on sand in the white
eye of a withering sun and blank,
chaperone sky.
waiting,

yearning, like a young girl at a dance,
for your glistening hands
to reclaim me.

      LOVE SONG II

    Always your pattern
    Steel-etched on the pewter sky,
    your hard, distant outline.

    Our bud had no leaf ...
    no flower.
    Green calyx
    turned to brown pod in one
    season.

    Even now
    the winter ground
    heaves
    like a rebellious tide.


      THAT SUMMER


      Summer drifted. I lay
    with my face on the water and promise
    clung like sweet blue mussels under gray
    pilings

      We swelled with the tide.
    The sea was brown with salt weed and a taste
    of anemone.

        I have no patient ebb,
        not seven hours,
        not one.

      That summer I wore the sun
    on my forehead. Promise beamed from its socket.
    I squandered pride.

    But I mined no silver vein. It hid from my fingers
    in a cage of light....

      Now I pace the implacable
    hours, sun-blind.


      P.M.

    You say nothing's changed.
    I try to believe you. We hang
    magnified like two drops of water
    in our round silence, reflecting
    the light.

    It cuts your face, deft
    little prism knives
    making strange patterns, a navigator's
    map, an unreadable language
    whose symbols swim
    through my walled-in breathing.

    Nothing's changed, but light,
    playing shadow games,
    unrolls a dark sleeve between us.

IMAGE

In the dream-dark wood
your face is golden, twinned, like
the hooded eyes of an owl glimmered
in lacing branches.
I must stay asleep
or lose you.
My waking hands are numb
with pitch, and the tearing ooze
of cedar striplings.
Your face, pale
as a lost moon, fades white
in the whitening sky.

    Your words
    sleep in me, content
    as children
    exhausted from play,
    ....not wanting other food.
    Want is this,
    a flared, insistent
    trumpet-flower held up,
    night poured from the sun-brown petalled
    lip of day.

THE EARLY PARK

Soundless, in deep snow
a bed we have not
yet slept in,
or dreamed of ...

I invent you, paint eyes mouth hair
with my breath
on the snow-drifted air,

scalding my cheek with this dream

until the wind takes you ...
and the path
and the blurred trees
the wire waste-baskets

filling with snow ... wire
skeletons,
wire skyscrapers,
windows blown out.

Wind erases them
and the sheep-meadow landscape.

II

I cross the ball-field, or Arctic Sea
or crater,
to its rim of gray benches,
artifacts of summer,

we no longer communicate

and reach, as if a destination,
the desolate lake,

while wind, a mid-wife,
leans on ice sheets at the hard birth

of my snow-slowed steps.

Nights
neither of us could sleep,

I'd rock him
in the white vaults
of my eyes
and,
lids shut,
play
his restless, out-of-breath
never-enough games
until
for awhile,
we slept,
my September
child, moon-dredged,
as we are,
from two separate seas,
impulsive,
impatient you
insatiable me.

Child
in his arms asleep, moon-pale
and dreaming....

unaware
how deeply we are joined.

Your head once stretched my loins,
now gentle lies....

and I,
I long to bear you, child, again,
hold you
and him

within my thighs.

    You slipped from me, careless
    as an abandoned shawl,

    How long ago?

    And still my thighs lie, broken columns
    in the Dorian grass

    where you pressed them,

    open ever, to the empty
    skies.

    Clouds over Labrador
      clump sullen as porridge,

    drowning a sliver moon and the
      sugaring stars.

      Must I forgive
      this arrogance,
      this swallowed
      sky,

    while I, deprived of you, lost,

    lost in these furling clouds,
      heave swells of grief

    from my tundra soul,
      as if,
    somewhere
      you really do
      still hear me


    SEPTEMBER

    In a heartbeat, in the single
    blink of an eye
      a gate claps shut.

    The star-burst gleam
    of fish leaping, lost
    in the stream's iridescence.

    My eye cannot follow,
    my arms cannot hold this radiance.

      Like cars racing
      to the intersect, bound
      where?
      Our days
      are paved with STOP signs.
      We do not stop.

    II

    In half-light, not quite
    dawn, on our shared pillow,
    I watch the blue throb of a vein
    in your neck. `don't die,'
    I pray,

    'don't ever die.'

    5 a.m., awake

    one hour already, threading

    a slurred maze

    of misremembered names,

    faces blurred like pencil scribbles

    in the margins of books

    read long ago, in a summer hammock,

    when? I try to remember, and

    retrieve yours, partly, unformed, misshapen,

    an echo, a single sock retieved from

    the dark depths of a closet,

    an unpaired glove, the `l' so beautiful

    it should be doubled.

    I said I think it is a good poem.

    It has yearning and images of loss
    and desire,
    and promise, but only in dream

    You said "Open your eyes."

    They would shatter. The lids
    are brittle
    and eggshell thin.

    Take them! letters or poems or
    stippled leaves,
    you've shaken loose
    from my tree.

      What
    will you do with them? One day
    rake them in heaps
    for burning?

      I am paper. I tear
    I crumple. I fly up and
    flutter down, like colored confetti.

    I am not my words. I am a paper
    cup you drink from.


      DOMINOES

    He thought himself so many ways a man.

    "I've carried coffins," he once said when
    they made love.

    Carry mine!

    "There are some coffins even I can't carry."

    Liar!

    And in the end this self-spoiled boy
    Couldn't bear the weight
    Of her desire.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from CAT'S CRADLEby RENATE MODEL Copyright © 2011 by Renate Model. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: AuthorHouse Publishing
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1463448724
• ISBN 13: 9781463448721
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 116