The Local World

Mira Rosenthal

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612779881
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Poesia

"Mira Rosenthal's The Local World incorporates deeply lived experience and mystery in a fluent shape-shifting that can take you anywhere— and bring you back, changed. The poems are beautifully crafted narratives of loss, travel, and salvage. There is a damaged family at the heart of these poems, an abandoned farm, and many rooms, parks, and train cars in far places. Yet, like all really good poems, Rosenthal's language consistently rises above its cries to wonder and beauty. What a joy to find this stunning first book to award the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize." —Maggie Anderson, Judge

"In Mira Rosenthal's stunning debut collection, The Local World, memory is not a static screen for nostalgia but a fierce journey into the self where danger resides. These beautifully crafted poems work through a series of brilliant tropes, a tissue pattern resting over a piece of cloth, a knife cutting from the inside, a boy shadow-boxing with himself, a sunflower 'like the mast of ship rising tall.' Rosenthal is both a traveler and a thinker. Her poems, elegant marvels, dramatize her personal struggle to understand and transform the past. This is a dynamic book, one to read and reread."—Maura Stanton

"The poems in this stark collection feel as if they have arrived just after casting off emotional ballast. A burden has been carried from the familiar world, and over time and distance, that load has been dispersed. And now the poet returns, halfway between grief and transcendence, but in that dark return lies hope."—Maurice Manning

III. Mysticism in the Dark

I have to blind myself artificially in order to focus all the light on one dark spot.

—Sigmund Freud

MYSTICISM IN THE DARK

As children we were warned not to whistle at night for fear of evil spirits.

Dangerous animals became even more

sinister and uncanny in the dark.

A snake was never called by its name at night because it would hear.

It was called a string.

A beetle the size of a child’s fist was never pointed out to have pinchers.

It was called a button.

A spider in the web of its life didn’t have poison secreted away

nor the sticky means with which to entrap.

It was purely called an apple hanging on a branch.

A black bat wasn’t fast enough to swoop into anyone’s hair, get tangled

there.

It was called a paper snowflake.

It was called a falling leaf.

A lizard bent around a branch

was a headband you wear to keep hair out of your face.

A cricket was simply a clothespin.

The bigger animals were nothing more than clothing tossed out.

A bear was a worn-through winter jacket.

A fox, a scarf rubbed down to beaded threads.

And that praying mantis stuck up against the wall,

only a necklace to adorn your thin collarbones.

A scorpion is merely the bent latch from a window.

A silverfish is just a drop of coffee.

Two cockroaches paused on cement,

plainly a pair of sunglasses dropped and forgotten in the hustle of the day.

A line of ants, straight stitches on the hem of the tablecloth

at which you’ll sit in the morning.

And what is that roll of toilet paper doing

hooting from the ridge of the roof?

And why is the lamp shade creeping stealthily through the courtyard

and hopping up on the rim of the open garbage can?

And how is that small water bottle inching slowly forward,

leaving its saliva, a trail of where it has been

pointing to where it is going?

And who scattered those twenty plump babies’ shoes under the bush

and what makes them chirp and dance around

like popcorn in the fryer?

They seem to be looking for something so small

they can’t find it, pecking as they are with their blunt toes.

A house is not a house and you are not inside the house.

You are not a body lying in bed

but a bench for something higher to sit down on.

If only you could move your wooden legs and stand up,

everything would be revealed in an instant.

SNAPSHOTS OF THE FARM BEFORE WE SOLD

*

Mistletoe all through the oak,

rubbery prehistoric in the crux

of its host—how much will it cost us

this year?—suckers spreading.

*

Bonfire fed with the brine

of stealthy-rooted blackberry vine—

is that blue juice at the heart

of the flame?—ashy

spoils puddled after ongoing

battle with weedy abundance.

*

Side field we worked to clear

all summer, hacking away at the pack

of leaves—olly olly oxen free!—

our four cats roaming

out there with the spirits

of what we once had.

*

What we once had: pigs, goats, trampoline, sheep,

pits in the gravel road, old evergreen tree

with a swing, and rain, rain, rain—will it

ever stop?—gushing from wooly

bodies we evacuate

to higher ground.

*

Fermenting red button pyracantha

berries the birds wash down—what

was that?—flying headlong drunk

into the floor-to-ceiling

glass, cracked pane.

*

Unlucky trunk with a vee that once

began to split down the middle,

so we drilled holes, inserted bolts

with nuts to hold the cable taut

but flexible enough—are those the basics

of psychology?—to bind opposing halves

but bend when storm blows through the boughs.

*

Tree guy going

higher and higher all

pulleys and levers, his saw

ready to hack off the base

of those suckers—what simple

essential machinery—he

hoists into the leaves.

*

Rotting fence posts wicking water up

the vein of dead wood grain, growing

beer bellies of moisture, toupees

of fresh moss—I guess this is

goodbye old men—we’re

selling, we’re moving to town.

ADAPTATION

and we take the rise hiking Clifty Falls in Indiana, the first on the path

in the morning heat

there are stories forking off there are stories told over and over

and inchworm threads thread our eyelids and noses and mouths we keep

grasping at

and invisible binding binds us, makes our bodies trussery, with sweat

and sticky web collecting forearm, shoulder, chest

there are stories stuck there are stories that hold like duct tape

and then we go down

and occasional gusts toss black and yellow caterpillars into underbrush,

a flat boulder to sit on, some bread and cheese to eat

and we watch the stream twist off toward working smokestacks and

the Ohio

and there’s a sound of industry: a distant motor underneath it all, the

minor key of which I am so sedulous a student

and you say: what was it again?

there are questions there are stories about unfair questions that stick in

your hair like gum

and you say: what was it about pain?

and I tell it, how my stepfather would use psychology to keep us going,

hiking California’s Yolla Bolly Wildern...