Other books by Mimi White from Deerbrook Editions The Last Island Memory Won’t Save Me: A Haibun The World Disguised As This One: A Year in Tanka
T he Arc Remains
poems Mimi White
deer br o ok edit ion s
p ublis hed by Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions wwww.deerbrookeditions.com
f ir st e dition Š 2019 by Mimi White All rights reeserved ISBN: 978-0-9600293-7-2 Book design by Jeffrey Haste Cover art: part of Sinking House by Sarah Haskell. www.sarahhaskell.com
You’re going to get a lot of poems out of this. Steve White February 24, 1946 - August 27, 2017
Contents I The ER Everlasting Journeying with Wang Wei Autumn, an Interior View What the Wind Says The Pond 1918 Influenza Plague Norway, Maine Radium Sacrum Parable My Dog Runs Back and Forth While I Do Nothing Goodness
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II I am studying Even in winter Boats face into the wind Trust the body When you said, go Remember when I tend houseplants All night I waited How many years How brief the time My body When this practice ends
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III The Return Only an Auditorium with Potted Plants Beyond the Limits of Time and Space That Which Approaches Infinity
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An Unintended Unenforceable Prayer November Winds Down and So Do We Late Afternoon Under the Maple Tree Music for Living and Dying That I Might Find You A Stranger Cradled Your Legs and Rocked You Back To Sleep What the Dog Knew The Last of Everything Dear August, Four Days Later I Met a Friend Goss Farm at Dry Point Milagro Disembodied Lyric The Idea Through My Eyes Your Eyes See Last Day at Middle Dam Nine Little Bags of Dust Domestic Life At the Meditation House To Glean Benediction
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Notes & Acknowledgements
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I
The ER I meant to stop at the deli. I meant to buy a box of pansies. I thought a birthday note for Kay would be enough. Ed’s voice sounded like an envelope without a letter. His face keeps showing up when I rake leaves. The dog’s body left an indentation as if he had just stepped out the way people do. I think a house wren is watching me drink my morning tea. In passing the east windows I stopped for the bloody dawn. Last night’s rain in a shimmering puddle on the oval table. Did I mention the two chairs? 11
Did I tell you there are sixty-eight needles in six white boxes on the book shelf ? How else does one live if not this way, looking out and in. When I buy eggs from my neighbor I can’t wait to come home and hold the small blue one in my hands.
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Everlasting From the orchard to the barn from the barn to the workshop from the workshop to the woods in every kind of weather in today’s, for instance, walking on crusted snow from the harbor to the sea from the garden to the gate every thousand steps the view to the orchard everlasting an old dog sniffing a young dog straining at the leash
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Journeying with Wang Wei I’m slowly rising through mist and mountain pine as autumn outside my window deepens. Could his oriole be my oriole, the one we both listen for in spring? Some words are a path we walk with others. Some a river that carries us. I’ve read that ancient elephant paths still cross parts of Africa where elephants have not been seen for years. They lumbered toward feeding sites and watering holes. And after their long hot trek, after eating and drinking would playfully spray each other well past the need to cool off.
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Autumn, an Interior View at Arco Dei Tolomei Marco unlocks the black door Here you will have quiet A kitchen to make tea (small silver spoons, white cups) And a private terrace For your own thoughts (large orange tree dropping gray leaves) Later the moon Later still Thousands of birds Over Plaza Navona Roma Caput Mundi When I peel the fruit’s amber skin October loosens more leaves And more leaves fall
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What the Wind Says There is no sadness when wind topples a pine and leaves a hole for light to find and darkness too, the letting go of boughs across the century then the long return. The mind inhabits, slowly, methodically birdsong, shelter. But imagine a vast emptiness, (no forest, field, or rabbit hole no warren, den, or hollow log) no voice in the wilderness, who then will scribe for the wind when the wind has nothing to say and no place to go?
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The Pond years later the pond remains the idea of loneliness the way a wolf is a head hidden among branches * Memory is a music box, a little coffin filled with song * The air parts yes, the body wanders in the wilderness how else to find the simple gesture
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1918 Influenza Plague Norway, Maine as told by Hugh Pike They had women on one side men on the other, just a sheet between us. They brought in the bookkeeper from Beal Street down by the mills, lots of mills back then. I could see the black shoes of the priest on the floor by her place near mine. Then I heard them whispering in that sing-song way. They went on for a long time then they stopped. And then they came with the basket. Have you ever heard the death rattle? It echoed up and down the floors of the Grange. It was like a dream. I was on a bus. I was happy. I didn’t recognize the people, but they were friends. We were driving by the water. It was sparkly, you know how the sun bounces off the little waves. I could see white sails and the light. I was dressed in nothing. Someone was washing me. I could feel heat. Their cool hands. I was thirty-three.
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Radium The young doctor asks, you are an engineer reading from your chart his voice lilting upward. Friendly guy, black glasses not certain of his aim when he threads the radium into your hairless wrist. Yes I understand half lives less and then half of less the diminishment, your voice forever in my head. I am calculating the opaque uselessness of time as I watch the medicine entering your body through a tiny plastic tube.
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Sacrum It’s in the bones, the doctor said, traveling he said, as if it had a mind, a fierce, unbeautiful mind of its own, I thought staring past my husband’s face. My uneasiness with time, the vast invisible. I substitute now for never-to-feel the heft of it
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Parable A child crushed an egg in a nest placed a white marble in its stead. Perfection meant everything when her walls collapsed and she grew smaller than a thumb. Little one, where did you hide when death skipped off toward the sun? The marble smooth as an eye that cannot see hands in front of its face. The shell has no memory, time took care of that years ago. Speckled, crushed, almost like dust, weightless at last the marble on the tongue counting backwards from one hundred.
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My Dog Runs Back and Forth While I Do Nothing Morning clouds shred themselves paste themselves back together cold air bruises my neck cold I’d like to shatter with my hands though I am gloveless fingers stiff, some might say gnarled the ball harder and harder to throw again now please Scout says with flattened ears chickadees whir by with blue-black wings jays make a racket in the woods I want my gloves I want to fill the empty feeders I want to go back to when clouds were lazy animals and our kitchen a periwinkle blue with or without a broken clock 22
but isn’t it time to see my husband’s face to say something kind look at him as if he were the tall pine that marked the furthest boundary of our land
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Goodness All that is good comes silently like the snowy owl perched on stones at low tide and then stays for as long as it can or as long as you need it. You can’t ask or pray for its wild presence. Either goodness chooses you or it does not though it does not hurt to come at dusk and wait.
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