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.
CAT'S CRADLE
By RENATE MODELAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 Renate Model
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4634-4872-1Contents
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.
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