Keep and Give Away

Poems

Susan Meyers

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781570036705
• eBook ISBN: 9781611171785
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poems of discovery and loss pull the magical from the mundane

Keep and Give Away was selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative.

In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary. From minutia to marriage, crumbs to crows, nothing is too commonplace to escape her attention as she traverses terrains of childhood, loss, relationships, and death. Mostly lyrical and often elegiac, the poems of Keep and Give Away move along the rifts between the past and present, the lived and desired. The dominant emotions of the verses are deepened by observations rooted in our natural world, where birds are "yeses quickening the air" and the sky can "lap you up, and up." In the book's final section, marriage poems turn to fishing and gardening for their truths, contemplations that recognize the realities of a world governed by luck, imperfection, contraries, and—most of all—love.

Small bones of contention

A Counting

Two crows—no, three—plus their giant

shadows, swoop through the pines.

I tell you, the shadows count for something.

Why all this swirling of black capes,

fast, toward me? Fling nothing

across my shoulders, you glossy bad omens.

Six cronies (or is it three?) in the yard,

a covenant of crows. They know something.

One wanders so close I shudder. The others

swagger about and suddenly the warm afternoon

is an argument of seven crooks at the feeder.

One, on the feeder’s roof, glints my way

then tilts his big head upside down

to reach the seed on the tray beneath his big feet.

Another, vying for Top Crow, lands beside him

and the feeder sways on its little pole.

Hold it—this is a heist, they seem to say

before they lose their balance and flee.

Five, then four, pick over the plenty

like dumb thieves left at the scene, greedy

for the loot—old seed, bare ground, hulls.

Morning Song

The rooster I do not have blinks

and struts his glossy history in the pen

I want to build beside the garage.

“No,” my husband says, “pens

belong behind garages.”

I want to watch my rooster pick

through the day’s minutiae, my neighbors

listening for his early call, dreading it

the way I tolerate, late afternoons,

the baying of their deerhounds.

Every day he ruffles feathers.

Three young hens in the chicken yard

(and the brown leghorn I’ll buy at the fair)

admire his hot temper and fleshy comb.

They fuss over the right to ignore him.

I love roosters, the way I love

sonatas and the Song of Solomon.

The love I’d feel for this rooster

can’t live up to his diligent crowing

nor the curve of his spurs, his perfect feet.

Guitar

On any given night it picks its way

down the canyon, one step

almost in front of the other—agile enough

to slip by whatever spells trouble.

Forget fear. It slides down rocks, if it has to,

to reach bottom. By day, a red bandana

or straw hat, and why not?

No map, just crosshatch and parallel.

It inhales the heat, and the pinched cold

creeping off the mountain.

It lives alone, turns its back to the wolves.

Say it’s a tin cup with bent handle.

Peyote in full bloom. A train

pulling rich cargo across the horizon.

Tequila. A thumbnail piercing the skin

of a lime, the ripe shower that follows.

The One Place

Most Sundays we don’t attend, never did

except the fall my father died, and went then

because we had just moved to Minnesota—

new job, relocation—and feeling lost,

Blue and I turned to what we’d each known

as children when once a week we’d suffered

the hard pew, listening and praying,

mostly squirming, as we waited for something

to take hold. But year after year

when we go fishing, most often in spring,

boat trailer in tow, and get ahead of ourselves

with anticipation of the largemouths

waiting in the lily pads and miss

the narrow lake road to the right, its sign

hidden by an overgrowth of myrtles,

especially when it’s early and still dark,

that’s when we look for the steeple

and empty parking lot. The one place open

without a locked gate, without a guard

dog or chain or No Trespassing,

the one place allowing us—

before we’ve gone too many miles

in the wrong direction—to enter

its wide, forgiving drive and turn around.

The Catch

Salt in my mouth, the chalk

of the weight between my teeth.

The tide leaves the creek.

I coil, uncoil

to cast the net.

Timing is all.

I know this

but can do nothing to get it right.

My husband knows the balance

of circles,

the trust he puts in the center.

Carefulness is not his

yet I see the arc

of his right hand, palm up

to twirl the net.

You’re trying too hard, he says,

and it occurs to me

that’s where the lines tangle.

I watch his dance.

In his left hand a veil,

folded over, as if once again

he gives her away,

the young...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Trying to Get It Right
• Need Has Nothing to Do with It
• Small Bones of Contention