Sufficient Emptiness Poet r y
Marjorie Power
deer br o ok edit ions
pub li s he d b y Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions Find our title previews at issuu.com f ir st e dition © 2021 by Marjorie Power ISBN: 978-1-7368477-1-8 Book Design by Jeffrey Haste
for Kathe Fox, Brigitte Goetze and Linda Strever: dear friends and inspiring pen-pals in the digital age
Contents I. Season Tickets Season Tickets 13 Vermeer’s Light 14 Two Photos Arrive 15 My Husband’s Birth Father 16 In the Play House: A Dream 17 Puccini 18 To Larry 19 There and Here 20 II. The New Chickens As If a Dark Cloud 23 Poem with No Egg 24 Poem with No Clouds 25 Before 26 As You Are Not Within 27 With Apologies to Emily Dickinson 28 Small Words 29 Happy To, He Said 30 Southgate Hardware 31 The Tour Guide Decides Not to Retire After All 32 Greta 33 Dream Exploration 34 Writing Back To a Doom Purist 35 The New Chickens 36 III. The Eyes: An Ekphrastic Sequence The Story 39 Figures Imagined in a Figureless Icon 40 Angel of Mud Season 41 Skies 42 Below and Above 43 Small Chest Painted Blue 44
Midwinter Night’s Dream 45 Double Trunk 46 Left at the Shore 47 Shallow Place 49 The Eyes 50 Oil Portrait with Added Rust 51 Portrait of the Word Remember 52 Portrait of a Gray Eye 53 As the Sound of Rain Increases 54 Dirt Icon 55 IV. Sufficient Emptiness The Lost Day 59 Poem with No Doorway 60 One-Eyed 61 Remembering Leonard Cirino 62 Ornamental 63 Interview Attire 64 Plains Cottonwoods 65 The Maple Watch 66 Briefly, On Occasion 67 It’s Pronounced Yah-hots 68 The Novel 69 Through 70 At Least a Start 71 My Yearnings 72 Sufficient Emptiness 73 Dust Motes 74 To An Atheist in a Spiritual Crisis 75 V. Walk Signal A Waning Walking Home with Groceries in Early December Partly Cloudy The Ferry
79 80 81 82
Although 83 Walk Signal 84 Leaf Shrivels Cling 85 Apartment Windows in January 86 Coexistence 87 Street Scene in Early March 88 The North Side 89 White, Falling Rapidly in Clumps 90 End of the Line 91 Poem without Color 92 Delicately 93 Myth 94 Notes 97 About The Author 98 Acknowledgments 99
Season Tickets
T he hinges of all our histories swing open . . .
Season Tickets Blouse repeats blouse, and boots, boots. Ten smiling singers shout. Each sex lines up to face the other. Men circle women. Women clap. The whole stage stamps, the audience hoots. Everything gets louder. My husband whispers it’s like a bad dream but this doesn’t mean we leave. He walks out of nothing until the house lights go on. In such darkness I sit quietly on the lookout for lost things. White aprons embroidered with roses, pieces of straw from cold barns, kettles hurled from their fires toward the end of time. These I gather for the old, old woman who restores each to its rightful use. In such darkness as my husband abides, she works.
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Vermeer’s Light Turning from the map on this DNA printout, I glance at my granddaughter’s face. 13 last month, she still brings to mind that light in Vermeer’s oils, a sunbeam falling just-so across a young woman’s brow, her gaze wide-eyed, beatific. Does she carry a smidgeon of history rooted in the painter’s turf ? I see my own portrait passed on via her father. I see the grandfather who made possible her russet mane who turned his back on my world. A small dose of Baltic States – her mother’s side, most likely. A hint of Scotland/Ireland – probably the grandfather who cut himself away from her beauty. Threads, wanderings, persecutions, half-hearted journeys unrecorded, frozen into silence. Russia. Sweden. Off the coast of Norway, dreams given over to fog. I have a friend who’s Egyptian she softly reveals, as if that friend must travel a life of fascinating secrets.
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Two Photos Arrive
for Max
In the first it’s 1921. The man is 33. Long face, strong jaw like yours. Ears, small and elegant like yours. Nose, photogenic in the same way as yours. Wide mouth. Narrow, well-balanced lips – same as yours except his are pinched shut. He will never tell. Never has done. Now we come to the eyes. Light, clear, swimming with secrets, almost daring the viewer to pry. Oh, he would have been a handsome cuss. Subtract the secrets, and these eyes still don’t quite resemble yours. Perhaps you got your mother’s. 1950-something. A wedding anniversary. Siblings, five grown kids, spouses, a row of grands. The lower half of his face looks even more the-same-as, though he’s younger here by a long shot than you are now. The secrets are just about ready to take him to his grave. They pull hard at the corners of eyes and mouth. Down, they seem to say. We’ve done our time. His wife tips her shoulder to his, smiles broadly enough for them both.
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My Husband’s Birth Father Now that we have his name we can see him online.
He’s here on my phone! We’ve got him right this time because of these birth and death dates. Plus his uniform. And Texas. I want to show Keith. He’s been my husband’s friend for 60 years. All three of us are in his car. I must wait till we exit the freeway to reveal this father-in-passing. Must wait till we get off and reach a full stop. Must not distract the driver with the gaze of Joseph Arthur Conner, whose bio note simply reads: Spouses, unknown. Children, unknown.
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In the Play House: A Dream The man in my dream has no eyes, nose, mouth. As if in a hammock he lies on the air. He’s quiet like viola strings that wait for touch. He has no name, no address. My mother sits near. Back from the dead after twenty years she’s a smiling silence filled with sunlight. He has become her truth, her answer to feeling a failure. My mother, this man with no words, and myself in this tiny house close to my childhood home. The play house is what my family called it. Meaning reprieve from achievement. I want my mother to share her peace with me. And who is the nameless stranger? If I were outside I’d find a door. I’d knock and knock until someone let me in.
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Puccini My mother waited all week for Wagner or Verdi on the radio. She was a regular at the New York Philharmonic – joked annually about having to abandon strains of Vienna for the maternity ward. 1947, my birth year. A belly out-to-here was rare in Carnegie Hall. She had a bright orange quality that frightened me as a child. Westminster Abbey, the Louvre, Versailles, an opera outdoors in Rome. Occasional trips and not long and always alone. Decades later, after my father left this world: Mumbai, Saint Petersburg, Istanbul, Reykjavik, African cities whose names I didn’t track. She rode a camel and then an elephant. Did loop-de-loops in a plane in Australia in her late 70’s. Home again she’d walk for hours, window shop, keep walking. No amount of foreign adventure satisfies a woman whose bones are bright orange whose husband wished to settle her with pearls who lost a son she was sure would be a diplomat traveling everywhere, unimaginably important. I dreaded opera – its darkness, its fires, its grip – until a phrase of Puccini caught me off guard not long ago and broke my heart.
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To Larry we two wander, white-haired, a heartbeat between us, its pulsing silence our teenaged brother
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There and Here I had a father who had no guns. Nor did he use the word guns. Each autumn he’d tell me, Don’t play in the woods. Wait until hunting season ends. Once, before I was born, my father bought a house. Our home on a hill at the edge of the woods. These days, at the edge of my life, there’s a man who says, You should write a poem about that. Not the home I mentioned or its autumns. He wants me to write about misplaced keys, seeing my dentist, vegetable stands by the roadside in Oregon. Good subjects, I reply. You need to write your own stuff. My childhood home was not for sale when my father purchased it. He knocked on a door and encountered the owner, gun in hand, a solitary senior who was soothed into listening, laying aside, letting go. The seller had never lived anyplace but there. The man who wants me to write his poems has lived in two places, there and here. There, everyone in town kept guns but no one dreamt of shooting a neighbor. Here, it’s populous and sprawly with artists and other god-only-knows. But he likes me. Or did until I mentioned how my father conducted business. Two Places called me divisive, stormed off to his cabinet to brood. I wish he’d unlock it and lift out his fear, stock by barrel by gleam. It’s good to forge poems from the molten steel of fear. I go visit the man at the edge of the woods who has never lived anyplace but there.
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The New Chickens
Time is slippery stuff. Before you can name it, it’s gone.
As If a Dark Cloud had funneled into the meeting room starting in one corner, no, excuse me, starting from the fireplace, so it must have come sliding down the chimney very slowly over many seasons. No, wrong again, the thing didn’t seem like a cloud except for an ability to sidestep, and its grayness – if it had a color, which it did not. Two of us, relative newbies, felt prodded this way and that as if by sharp tusks, as if we were held to blame for not seeing the obvious: all along there’d been an elephant. Which thanks to us would need to recover.
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Poem with No Egg If I had only one fish, I’d listen more carefully to birds. With only one bird, I would stop eating crab. Only one cat, I’d quit barking at snakes. If I had one lone bird, I’d keep it fluffy and young. I would not allow my granddaughter to go climbing the backs of beached whales. I’d teach my grandson to stop eating plastic bags. But where I live, you’re dead meat without your big place full of peacocks ready to scream for the right to bear.
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Poem with No Clouds Through a window washed just yesterday a half-hidden sea-color glows in the needles of an evergreen, a city tree on a busy corner, a tree large and dense enough to shade me – blinds wide open, breasts and thighs bare – while I scribble through an endless June afternoon and my blue spruce luxuriates in sunlight. Earlier today at a different window, one that calls for clothing, I glanced across the street and saw an ambulance. It sat gleaming a long time. On the arm of a paramedic a woman emerged from her apartment. Ice pack held to one eye, she stepped into the gleam. This took a long time. The vehicle stayed put, all doors shut then moved forward.
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Before Before the woman next door took her last walk with the last man who’d break her heart. Before this record heat and the shooting just south of here. Before drought took the vineyard. Before the hurricane and the waves that took the store. Before the retiree across the street lost his sense of wonder, before he and the woman next door each bought a snow globe at a local secondhand shop. His holds a trolley car. Hers, a manger scene. Before both these pleasant people kept mostly to their homes and each slipped into hearing the rest of us like this: Listen for the chuff of a steam engine – shiny, newly revived. Try to catch the sounds of a fairy tale clockmaker’s shop. Try for any reminder of Eden before the snake slithered in. When this works, respond with a shake of the globe. Shake it again before the snow quits. 26
As You Are Not Within Only three percent of my friends will bother to read this all the way through even fewer will care enough to share it on your timelines and I know who you are and I know who you are not I’ve swallowed these truths, no need to taste, as you are not within hearing, or view, or reach of my hand the scent of your freshly washed hair is a lost cause.
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With Apologies to Emily Dickinson Hope is a nuisance, if you ask me. Which you probably won’t. People rarely ask my opinion. So all us feathered things are better off. Hope has claws, tentacles, sharp little teeth. It scrounges in the soul, making a noise like yellow jackets caught between an exterior wall and a sheet of plasterboard. Hope may starve, but it doesn’t quit. All winter it circles a basement with a Mason jar full of fireflies, releasing one for each upstairs light that fails.
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Small Words When a culture goes virtual, no individual word should maintain too many syllables. Small words get to have a big shine. They need no dimmer switch, cast no shadows. A perky little phrase makes people feel tall, sparks a starry-eyed state. Strangers unite, stripes become clear. Cantankerousness drops off the screen, leaving those who belong here to cantanker among roses without thorns, without color, without scent.
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Happy To, He Said I asked a favor of a man. A quick come-and-go, you understand. Bigger than a bread box? No. I hoped for a bit of his own just-so: a bottled message for the tide a trace of deep or maybe wide a gleam upon a vacant shore a crack of light beneath a door He’d be happy to, he said. I hadn’t known him long so I was glad. Came a silence I can’t diagnose. There’d been a time frame. An outermost. Now he clicks like on my Facebook posts.
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Southgate Hardware Windex. Pyrex. Latex. Goo Gone and Clear Solution. Plump rollers. Flat or semi-gloss. All-purpose fertilizer. CarryAll canvas laundry bags. Natural bristles, fiberglass ladders. Drain openers, chain by the foot, sprinkler valves, drills. Cans of a liquid made by Cabot since 1877. The store remains compact so they carry everything, any orange and black sign you happen to want. No Smoking. Private Drive. Keep Off The Grass. There’s a saver’s club, too. I’ve meant to join. Sometimes I need paint, and this is where I buy it: most places I go, keep off the grass would be open to interpretation.
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The Tour Guide Decides Not to Retire After All I tell Gabriel it’s time to get back on the road. So we trespass. We drive that private road right to its end. Traditional squirrel stew on an open fire. If it’s cooked, eat it. Why not, indeed. The highlights of the trip are always accidental. An intense, even savage attention to life’s fine print. Bluegrass and moonshine. The man in the chair spits shave lather into the air. It swirls through the smoky restaurant and darkening courtyard. This fall, these mummies will be shown. The mummies feel like family to many people. The decision to push on despite being lost. You won’t find my tips in any guide book. Avoid poring over a large map in public. Stay vigilant. Watch your wallet. Most importantly, move on.
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Greta —after hearing Greta Thunberg’s speech to the U.N., 9/23/19 She’s a lungful of cold clean air in a foul-smelling wind, the great-great-great-greatgranddaughter spirit of a healing witch, the voice of one crying in our plastic wilderness. A little child shall lead them. They won’t burn her at the stake. The foul wind works fast, and will suffice. She’s the last word. Our gabble continues.
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Notes The epigraphs are from Stumbling Through the Stars by Fredrick Zydek, Holmes House Publications, 2004. Starting with the first and proceeding in order, they come from: “Photographs from the Hubble Space Observatory”, “A Few Words About Time”, “Terra Firma”, “The Planets Know You’ve Seen Them Dancing” and “The Stuff of Stars”. The inspiration for Section III was a traveling art exhibit, Icons in Transformation by Ludmila Pawlowska, a Russian-born artist who lives in Sweden. I had the pleasure and privilege of seeing 100 of her works in Denver, Colorado. These included large and small paintings and sculptures. I saw the exhibit several times and then worked from my own photos as well as those on her website. Because I have reached my 70’s and moved more times than I’d ever expected, numerous landscapes have become familiar to me. I maintain friendships with people rooted in one place or another while feeling I connect with several. Home has become a spiritual place with widely varying foliage, light, weather, rocks, buildings, and habits of thought. Taken together, these poems reflect this. “The Maple Watch” explores the topic.
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About the Author
Marjorie Power grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. She graduated from San Francisco State College in 1969 and did graduate work in the Oral Interpretation of Literature at the University of Washington. Her first full length collection was Living With It, Wampeter Press, 1983. Others include Seven Parts Woman, WordTech Editions, 2016 and Oncoming Halos, Kelsay Books, 2018. Her chapbooks are Birds On Discovery Island, Main Street Rag Publishing Company; Faith In The Color Turquoise, Pudding House; The Complete Tishku, Lone Willow Press; Refuses To Suffocate, Blue Lyra Press, and three others from small presses. Many journals and anthologies have used her work. Marjorie lives with her husband, Max, in Rochester, New York, after many years in the Northwest and five in Colorado. They have two sons and six grandchildren, ages 14 - 22. She can be found at www.marjoriepowerpoet.com.
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Acknowledgments Thanks to the editors of the following publications in which these poems were published, some in slightly different versions. Artemis Journal, “Shallow Place” Blue Unicorn, “End of the Line”, “The Ferry” Blueline, “Ornamental” Caesura, “Interview Attire” Commonweal, “Coexistence”, “There and Here” The Comstock Review, “As the Sound of Rain Increases” Former People, “The Tour Guide Decides Not to Retire After All” Ginosko, “The Maple Watch”, “Poem without Color”, “Remembering Leonard Cirino”, “Street Scene in Early “March”, “Two Photos Arrive” The Hawai’i Review, “Season Tickets” Mudfish, “The Novel”, “The Story” The North Dakota Quarterly, “Apartment Windows in January” Selah, “Oil Portrait with Added Rust” Slant, “Before”, “Dream Exploration” Southern Poetry Review, “Although”, “Walk Signal” Sugar House Review, “As You Are Not Within” Turtle Island Quarterly, “The New Chickens” Whistling Shade, “At Least a Start” Willawaw Journal, “Delicately”, “It’s Pronounced Yah-hots”, “Poem with No Clouds”, “Puccini”, “To Larry” “To An Atheist In a Spiritual Crisis” appeared in Odd Angles of Heaven, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1995. “My Husband’s Birth Father” appeared in Show Us Your Papers, Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2020 The poems in Section III appeared in a chapbook, Refuses to Suffocate, Blue Lyra Press, Delphi Series Vol. VII, 2019
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