Visible Heavens

Joanna Solfrian

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781631010583
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2009 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize "There are poems which carry us clean away, transporting us into worlds as specific as the pink purse the author of Visible Heavens helps a little boy buy for his teacher, Miss Stone. Melancholy and loss, the missing of a gone mother, passion and solitude-stirringly well mixed in one potent brew of a book. Readers will feel at home here, but they'll also feel ignited with new presences, keenly visible and invisible perceptions-'It is a gift, this light we carry in our lungs.… ' Cheers to Joanna Solfrian for a fine first book, the stunning deep breath of her voice."-Naomi Shihab Nye, judge

1

SOMETIMES A GRAY MOOD COMES

Sometimes a gray mood comes

an elected valley in the heart

a flock of clouds—

it is then that the woman

walks very far to find warm weather,

a simple horizon with a sea,

a boat, and a shore that is long.

There is a man waiting

with flowers at the bedside.

Sometimes she returns,

sometimes he must go find her.

The sea, the boat, the shore—

these things know where she is—

as does the presence of death in every lily,

which is not the whole of the lily,

but something of it.

UNFORTUNATELY I REALIZED THIS

Your voice comes over the phone line

into my kitchen, right above the round dinner plates.

You remind me, jokingly, that we used to sit

together on bus rides and I never let you touch me.

PT, you called me: Perfect Tits.

I hear odd pauses in your speech; you’re inhaling

smoke. I hear the exhale

through the static, a long whoosh, evidence that you’re alive.

You’re outside. Your breath is manifest in the air.

Yes, I’m married.

I leave out the word happily, because I think it makes people sound

as if they’re lying.

As if happily really means we have nothing in common

or he can’t bear to watch me undress.

(I bet you’re thinking of them now, wondering, do they sag?)

I want to hear your list of tragedies. We’ll see whose is longer.

Your father died of prostate cancer,

you’ve had two brain surgeries,

you were in jail for a year.

OK, you win.

But, really, I want you to tell me about that day

all the rich kids’ parents showed up for Parents’ Weekend

and you were embarrassed by your mother’s pink nails and Capri Lights.

Do you remember that? I saw you shrink

into yourself, thinking, perhaps,

someday someone will make a movie about me.

I understand the shrinking,

but we don’t talk about it.

Instead, we talk about where our old friends ended up,

about how Lenny committed suicide by lying down on train tracks.

In terms of what’s quantifiable,

my list is not very long.

My mom was sick for four years with cancer

and died when I was twenty. That’s about it.

Dad’s remarried; there’s nothing wrong with his wife.

I’ve learned something about resignation.

I’ve learned to fool myself into thinking that wind is the trees breathing.

—I like to mention that four years part.

I do the math, one-fifth of my life

when she finally died in our living room,

but I don’t mention this.

I’m waiting for you to tell me you’ve always had a crush on me.

And there it is: you’ve said it.

Why must we pollute these conversations?

Why do we offer the birds’ nests of our hands?

I look down

at the round dinner plates,

wonder what I should cook. My eyes wander

around the kitchen

and then: fuck it.

What were you in jail for?

Arson.

Davey, I laugh, what the hell did you burn down?

He pauses.

I don’t want to talk about it.

I want to tell you I get it, because I think I do.

The small fire between your fingers isn’t enough,

your white breath isn’t enough.

This is about all we have in common:

it isn’t enough for me, either.

DIALOGUE

The new sun fills the sky

and underneath the earth lie the ashes

of a woman. Come nightfall,

the stars will light their small fires

and the night-worms will tunnel through earth.

The ashes of the woman

talk to the sun in a language

only ashes and suns understand.

When the stars begin their silent processional,

so too the night-worms their choreography.

Being neither of the sky nor earth,

I have no swaddling of star dust,

no knowledge of the underworld.

Time is still ticked off in hours.

What do I know of sitting on a park bench,

as I sit now, next to this old man?

He has just nodded hello,

he has just lifted his brow

to the sun.

THE BREAD OF ANGELS

Old Town Farm Road, 1988

My mother is giving me a singing lesson.

Breathe into your ribcage; make it wide as a barrel.

I ignore any sweetness in my upper register, for I

snuck out of the house last night, I snuck

out of the house! to smoke with Jen Finch.

(Didn’t people used to go over Niagara Falls in

barrels? Or was that just in Looney Tunes?)

The round notes leave my mouth and fall

with something of the slowness

of suicide. The leaves outside the window

are fall-yellow, the wood deck splintered;

the aboveground pool sits, tarpaulined,

a monolith to the lower-middle class.

I sing “Panis Angelicus” like someone being forced

to sing “Panis Angelicus.” Her back is a right angle

to the bench. I’m bored, therefore I slouch.

I beg her to play “Maple Leaf Rag”—how can

she know something so hop-around-the-living-

room and not play it every day?

We continue with “Panis Angelicus.”

Heavenly figures give away the bread of angels,

which becomes the bread of man … I accept little

in my hands these days except a wooden stick,

which I hold only to chase a ball on a field.

It’s a poor and lowly way of knowing oneself.

The piano notes descend ploddingly, the rug

smells like the old owner’s woodstove, like ash,

as if over some imaginary border

there’s a land of slow burning. The bookcase looms

behind me like the medieval iron man

I saw once, in a museum: Ellory Queen,

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Bible.

What is knowledge but the beginning of pain?

The bookcase whispers, everything in her life

has been written, though for now, her cells fall in.

A few years from now, after the rest of us pack up

and move to a state with a better view,

I will pick up stones, thinking them code for bread,

by a shore that returns after its retreat.

By your pathway lead us to that place of light …

as if we could find the path, or take it if we could.

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