| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
Rick Cushman (TICKLECHAIN) SELIG FLOWERS IN THE SNOW Steve Phillips (STVEN)
SULTRY DREAMS
sultry dreams
on this slow train
will take me
where they
need to go,
on familiar routes
on different days
where scenery changes
yet stays the same,
past black men
perched
on a split-rail fence
like cawing crows
upon the shoulders
of the yawning road,
past a dark-haired girl,
her face eclipsed
by the half shadow
of live oak arms,
with one eye
piercing
past the brow
as if to say
if she drops
that shawl,
she will reveal
the hidden desires
of every man
to pass this way,
but she fades
in shimmering waves
of August heat
as this slow train rolls
with sultry dreams
taking me
where they need
to go.
THE SMELL OF BUTTER
The butter was never sweet
It tasted of salt
I remember the smell
It was sour and seemed
to gather in pockets, so that
as I walked from one room to another,
I was sometimes overwhelmed by it
The day they killed the pig
I lay on the kitchen floor,
feeling ill and watching her hands
She sang in gaelic about the winds
and the cliffs on the west coast
Her hands had no music in them
They slapped and slipped through
the bowl squeezing the curds
“Sugar Nanna?” I asked
“Will you put sugar in?”
She gazed at me
“You don't need sugar in butter child”
My father called her The Last Drop
Never happy till she used the last drop
I watched him stare gloomily into his bottle
“The last drop” he said “is always the saddest one”
“Never waste anything” she told me
“you'll never enjoy things if you waste them”
In the afternoon heat
It seemed the only thing that moved was Nanna
She was the bustle
in a house of silence
And when I think back
She is the only image that remains
She is the chimney, the northern wall
The last thing standing
When life crumbled
I would ask her if I could
“If you enjoy something Nanna,
is it ever wasted?”
In the early morning you say a few words, like soft rays
and in that prayer the children nestle, the way silence
sometimes settles in the moment after words,
the way stars seem adrift in the night ocean,
searching for understanding, tentative.
I say the children nestle, but it might be bluebirds
or caravans, softly creasing the desert with footsteps,
or waterfalls. It might be daffodils hopelessly
yearning for timber wolves, or seven candles in a dream.
I think there will come a time when all will shatter,
a landscape painted on glass, and the jagged pieces
toss and tumble in rainbows of their own dispersion,
diffracting all the love that ever came to pass.
Then the waterfalls will be like hummingbirds,
graceful, almost delirious, piercing the nectar
and moving on. Red vestal flowers stain the snow,
trembling. Your lips are granite promises.
N'y pensez plus.
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