The Quick

Katrina Roberts

• Verlag: University of Washington Press
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806921
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Literary Criticism

The Quick is a book of essences. Katrina Roberts's large-spirited and exhilarating poetry is at once celebratory and elegiac, lyric and narrative, striving to divine what's at the quick of this fleeting existence we share. Anchored in many ways by the long poem "Cantata, " which chronicles her pregnancy and the birth of her son, the book turns and turns its kaleidoscopic lens, settling now on origins and creation myths, now on Greek or Welsh gods, now on a painting by Vermeer or on an article from the daily news, all slipping together to illuminate our coming to consciousness, our coming to "be." The poems ask how one might reconcile one's simple joys with the world's larger concerns. An inquiry of this depth cannot fail to encounter grief, but it is a grief tempered and transcended by the acceptance of ongoing life, as well as a consistently outward-focused eye and a passion for language. Sparked by Roberts's sharp imagery and daring cadences, this is a fresh and savvy collection, informed by science, myth, music, philosophy, and etymology, all braided within a sinuous narrative line that runs from sorrow to rich celebration.

IV

Hush, beloved. It doesn’t matter to me

how many summers I live to return:

this one summer we have entered eternity.

I felt your two hands

bury me to release its splendor.

—LOUISE GLÜCK, “The White Lilies”

Bread

At dusk the girl who will become my mother

stands peering over potted jade leaves

and burnished pebbles through bay windows

onto Sparks Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Flakes of snow swarm and clot—soft grey

moths around the globe street lamps

just now bursting into glowing zinc peaches.

Behind her there is the kitchen where a broad

woman, whose voice is rich from within, skin

shining like walnut shells, someone with

a daughter, also, slaps and pounds a fat lump

of warm dough against the wood countertop,

a haze of flour encircling her so that she, too,

is a haloed thing. And within the study lined

with books, and way beyond, my mother sees

all airborne things and how her mind connects

the swirling dots. So this is how her mind moves,

though her brown leather soles, laced tight

rest firmly on the worn threads woven long ago

(much older than she is by far) by quick hands

in Turkey or Thailand, places she’d like to go

gleaming indigos and golds, persimmon and

pomegranate—colors that would stain the fingers.

Her body is thick, her mother says, like a little

pony and she stamps her foot—no! (she is winged

Pegasus here at her grandmother’s)—gazes

toward the looking glass above the bamboo-grass

cloth behind the velvet arms of a loveseat where

she likes to sit reading, stockinged feet curled

beneath, and sees reflected flaxen plaits drinking

street light in to gleam. Somewhere, the white toy

poodle yips. She could card and spin this life of

hers into a long fine thread of liquid gold, she

knows, a skein heavy in her hands with heft

like loaves Rose will take from the oven in two

hours for supper, small wisps of steam

dampening her tight black curls, her face dusted

with flour pollen. . . . And someday just beyond

another decade, half again the years she

already owns, the girl will remember this snowy

afternoon, the glow inside and out, the bread

in her hands when Rose steps toward her, and

a sweet milk scent thick in her nose—as she leans

to press her lips against my smooth warm head.

Firstborn

“I miss my sons but there was nothing

to eat,” says Akthar Muhammad, who traded his children

for wheat in Kangori, Afghanistan.

“What else could I do?” Average

life expectancy: 44, and one

in five kids die or more

before the age of 5.

“I have sold the two most intelligent of my ten.”

For Sher, 10, per month:

forty-six lbs. of wheat,

and Baz, half the years, half that amount—both

sold for six years.

Sar-i-pol Province, a village

of mud-walled dwellings, and somebody’s babies sent

on a three hours’ walk

through rolling hills to the larger

town of Sholgarah. “I felt bad that I was sold,”

says the older. “I work very

hard and during the night

they send me into the mountains to sleep with the sheep.

I felt bad that I was sold.

I cried. I still cry.

I cry at night. But I understand why

the selling of me was necessary.

I must go now.

I must hurry or they will beat me.” (March

second, 2002)

Flesh of my flesh, bread

of my soul, such fortune finds us fed, together

still. Please give me strength.

Birthday

Up at Five Corners, beneath hawthorn scrub just off-road

a mother, already cold, lay

like a dashed-off letter “c” in the midst

of her six babies—each no longer than a ballpoint pen,

fur—white, brown, black,

wet from puddle spray, tapered ears caked

with mud. I peered close to see blood. None? As if

they stretched out willingly

to sleep, snugged into tangled grass

on the scraggly ridge. But why? This was months ago; why

I stopped the truck at all

remains a mystery, as well

as why the image floods back this morning, the first

hours of my birthday,

though I was not born

until late afternoon—and so today I wonder

how my mother

must have felt waking up

—sensing something would change soon, resting

on the cusp as she was

of a language no one could foresee.

My god, how lucky we are, those of us who make it, who rise

again to catch a sweet waft

of twiggy silver sticks

growing soft to burst . . . this world nothing but a text

for someone to read: I see

I’m blessed.

Grace Absentia

What you could never know nor plan began

long before conception, though, now you can hold

each eidolon in mind—triplicate sisters

never to be yours, never to be—clouds from above

with erose edges, notched like mutable leaves;

every leavi...