A Memory of the Future

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by Elizabeth Spires


  to a room inside the earthlit by a sourceless light

  whereon a rough-hewn pedestalcarved from an ancient

  treea face stared out at mestared past me into Time

  someone had made the shrinea womanI thought

  like meher gray hair wild unkemptas she worked

  the wood with goldto make a precious overlay

  the shrine a place to kneel& pray for continuance

  like a giftanother morning camecool & gray

  bringing the chance of rainrain that would wash the earth

  clean of the summer’s dustbut I cannot forget

  the shrinethe facethe woman working wonders

  buried so deep beneath mein a roomin the center of the earth

  Dream Interrupted—

  The earth has many levels,

  and escalators descend.

  Figures are moving downward,

  mother and father and friend.

  So many are going down,

  quietly, without a word.

  One day they are here among us,

  and the next they have disappeared.

  They eat a last meal before leaving,

  a supper of wine and bread.

  And bowl after bowl of soup

  to prepare themselves to be dead.

  I serve and I sit among them.

  I eat the proverbial bread.

  Soon I will go down with them

  to the speechless land of the dead.

  Now I clear the plates from the table.

  I sweep up the crumbs of bread.

  But when I turn back to join them,

  they have silently gone ahead.

  Is it coldness or kind consideration,

  that made them leave as they did?

  Leaving me here among the living,

  not alive but not quite dead.

  Constructing a Religion

  Not the rising sun,

  but the setting sun.

  Not the father,

  but the mother.

  Not the cross,

  but the circle,

  drawn in ink,

  not blood.

  The Word

  inhabited

  but unspoken,

  like a bell unrung.

  A cathedral

  of the mind,

  gray and cool

  as Time,

  with doors

  so tall and heavy

  that I must

  tug and tug.

  Inside, marvels

  and terrors

  annealed in

  bright windows,

  and a bird

  sheltering in

  high hidden spaces,

  looking down

  on a soul,

  small, so small,

  prostrate

  on stone.

  Picture of a Soul

  A shirt I was born in.

  I wear it. Or it wears me.

  White, of course.

  A loose fit.

  Growing as I grow

  but slowly going dull.

  It must be washed

  once, twice, three times,

  then hung to dry.

  There, can you see it?

  Hanging high

  on the hill.

  Waving its arms

  in the wind. Beckoning.

  Sun shining through.

  Small Prayer

  If my heart were scoured,

  if my soul were remade

  into a new and shining garment,

  then would I have to die?

  Lord, if perfection is death,

  let me stay here

  a little while longer,

  spotted and stained.

  House of String

  Without hammer or nail,

  without planed plank,

  I will build a house of string.

  One airy room to live in.

  String walls, string ceiling

  that let the light shine in.

  A place to spend the hours

  where no clocks ever tick.

  Mine alone. Or ours.

  O who can understand? O who?

  How I have hungered for

  the unbuilt, the unimagined.

  How a piece of string

  trailing me in a long line

  wherever I go can be

  a sheltering abode, a dwelling

  place that is not a place at all.

  Come, let us go there now

  and sip the tea that is neither

  sweet nor bitter, listening

  all the while to the crickets

  singing. Or not singing.

  Safe in its flimsy walls,

  we will sleep the sleep

  we have always dreamt

  of sleeping, rain saturating

  our dreams, red leaves

  at the door signaling a final fall

  where all becomes nothing,

  nothing all, where, as soft snow

  begins to fall, one of us

  will stay and one will go,

  walking away from everything

  we know, casting a glance

  back to a house filling up

  with snow, wondering,

  O who is the lost one? Who?

  The sleeper coldly covered over?

  Or the coatless one who leaves

  no tracks, who stumbles in the snow?

  Snow, the Novel

  In the end it was the only story to tell:

  snow on the ground and snow silently falling,

  the landmarks of a life vanishing, the road

  erased, a house half-buried, a watcher watching

  from an upper window who knows she cannot

  stay and cannot go, she cannot stay or go,

  who, as evening falls, withdraws into a dark interior,

  feeling her way along the winding corridors

  until the deepening snow has overtaken all.

  When the last of the last ones go, if I am one

  of the last, the last to believe and the last to know,

  when Eternity unwrites me, when an unseen hand

  lets loose the pen that wrote my story, and directionless,

  I step out of the frame into a snowy unfenced field,

  my tracks filling up as fast as I can make them,

  then will I know the story in its entirety?

  Know all that I need to know?

  The now that is snow.

  Sake

  A squat bottle,

  two cups, and us

  toasting an anniversary

  although we know

  the wind may blow

  away these walls

  of paper, wood, and rock;

  and if they fall, we’ll rise

  and quickly improvise

  a journey down time’s

  cold silvery musical stream,

  slipping on dripping

  stepping-stones, drenched

  to the bone until,

  shades of our former selves,

  we give up the ghost,

  our ghastly smiles belying

  the cold finality of lying

  through centuries side

  by side, cheated by time.

  What is a marriage?

  A promise, a vow never

  to forsake the other,

  and love a little realm

  of light and shadow.

  But here, while the sake’s

  warm. Drink again.

  For your sake. Mine.

  Starry Night

  their light keeps traveling onit will never darken

  forever will it travelinto far reachescold corners

  farther than lighthas ever goneall the stars that have ever

  shone are shining stilltheir light doesn’t die

  no neverthe stars assurein darkness is no peril

  like lighthousesno longer therestars that went dark

  a long time agoare shining somewheretheir light travels on

&nbs
p; something to hold& keep holdingas we hold on

  to ones who have gone onlike lighthousesno longer there

  their lightdoesn’t dieno neverkeeps traveling on

  as we stumble& shine& rememberlooking up

  Riddle

  You are the bright one,

  my dearest possession.

  Speechlessly,

  you offer up

  your pictures:

  joy, sorrow, terror, too.

  You are both

  one and many,

  a hoard,

  a chest of jewels,

  some light-giving,

  some taking

  the light, until

  I lose myself

  in darkest night.

  O who will perish

  first? Me? You?

  Though some do,

  I pray never

  to outlive you.

  A Memory of the Future

  I will say tree, not pine tree.

  I will say flower, not forsythia.

  I will see birds, many birds,

  flying in four directions.

  Then rock and cloud will be

  lost. Spring will be lost.

  And, most terribly,

  your name will be lost.

  I will revel in a world

  no longer particular.

  A world made vague,

  as if by fog. But not fog.

  Vaguely aware,

  I will wander at will.

  I will wade deeper

  into wide water.

  You’ll see me, there,

  out by the horizon,

  an old gray thing

  who finally knows

  gray is the most beautiful color.

  My Life

  A cracked bowl I hold in my outstretched hands.

  A heavy cloak thrown down like a twisted shadow.

  A book, its pages full of writing, a few unwritten on.

  A book, its pages turning blankly in the wind.

  A dream I had once, vanishing as morning comes.

  A leaf upturned to the sun.

  Rain, rain falling without discrimination.

  All this and more so that today I kneel and ask,

  Small fish, small silver fish darting in the stream,

  where now are you going?

  Crab

  —Again, the dream of prey and predator, I can’t remember

  when or where, only the pursuit, I am the one pursued,

  for minutes, years, until I wake to familiar slanting eaves,

  to a ceiling where knotholes look like curious eyes,

  and doors hang crooked on their hinges but still are doors.

  Once more, by grace or luck, I have escaped capture. I am safe.

  Or am I? Now I must navigate the solid world of stairs

  steep in their disregard, each thing in this house a fact to hold onto.

  O yes, to live I must believe in the solidity of this red rocking chair

  on a porch in Maine, this cup of coffee steaming in my hand.

  I must believe.

  The sun is burning off the fog, the islands slowly coming into focus.

  A kayak tied to the dock is bobbing gently, a splash of red

  in the day’s blank canvas. Small boat, I will go out.

  I will paddle beyond the seeming solidity of this porch, this house.

  I will go out.

  Often now I wonder how far can one go, how far?

  Horizons exert a pull. Uncountable islands suffer fog’s erasures

  and then come back. Beneath the water’s glossy shifting surface,

  traps. Sleek boats in the distance race past unaware,

  leaving me bobbing in their wake. The tide takes me out, far out,

  the day’s debris floating past, a bottle, a buoy,

  and one small shipwrecked swimmer expertly skimming

  the waves, carried along, or carried away, as I am today.

  I scoop it up, small crab, wondering, Are you alive?

  No. You are dead, dead, dead. You hang, limp and dispirited, in my hand.

  A hunger, ravening and unimaginable, has sucked body and soul

  out of you through an empty eyehole, leaving your shell intact,

  so that you only masquerade as crab. O crab, I understand you.

  Too often I have done the same.

  I make you my compatriot for the day. Set you on the bow,

  like a figurehead, but facing the wrong way, so that we are eye to eye.

  Speak, crab! Be oracle. Interpret the depths of my dream,

  the day’s dark portents. But you are mute to all entreaty.

  You seem to move a claw—are you alive?

  No, it is only a trick of wind and water. And so I paddle out

  to where no cry can be heard from helpless prey or predator.

  I cry.

  The wind is picking up, the sky clouding over into gray.

  Waves restless as thoughts that won’t stop threaten to swamp me.

  I am prey. Return, I must return, or be completely swept away.

  Someday I will merge with this landscape supreme in its indifference.

  I will be as crab.

  Leaving this place, another summer gone, I won’t

  take you with me. I’ll leave you facing seaward on the porch railing,

  your throne a clamshell, to cast your eye out over islands

  leapfrogging to the horizon. I’ll say goodbye to a season

  quickly disappearing, to a house that only exists in summer, for summer,

  under a spell all winter not to change, to change, to change.

  Next summer when I come back, warm flesh and blood

  or insubstantial spirit, will you be here to greet me?

  Pincer and claw, will you have held on through winter’s worst, intact?

  O Cyclops, teach me, teach me, teach me, to be dead

  and believe in resurrection.

  NOTES

  The quotation from Dōgen used by permission of Steven Heine, Zen Poetry of Dōgen: Verses from the Mountain of Eternal Peace (Tuttle, 1997).

  The answers to the riddles are “ego” and “memory.”

  “On Riverside Drive”: The statue of Shinran Shonin is located at 332 Riverside Drive in Manhattan.

  The poem “She Leans” is based on A. Aubrey Bodine’s photograph of the same title.

  Photo by A. Aubrey Bodine © Jennifer B. Bodine courtesy

  www.aaubreybodine.com.

  Ensō image used by permission of Madison Smartt Bell.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The poems in this book first appeared in the following magazines, online publications, and anthologies:

  The American Poetry Review: “Cloud Koan”; “The Sound of the Sea at the Shore”; “My Life”

  The Atlantic: “Riddle”; “”; “A Memory of the Future”; “Small Prayer”; “Small as a Seed”

  Ecotone: “Gold Bug”

  Five Points: “The Amiable Child”; “On Riverside Drive”; “Ensō”

  The Hopkins Review: “Snow, the Novel”; “Island Graveyard”

  The Hudson Review: “The Streaming”; “Dream Interrupted—”; “Starry Night”

  Image: “March: St. John the Divine”

  The Iowa Review: “Sake”

  Kenyon Review: “Mountains of the Heart”

  The New Criterion: “The Shrine”; “Picture of a Soul”

  New England Review: “Light Like Water”; “House of String”

  Ploughshares: “The Road” (under the title “A Life”); “Constructing a Religion”

  Plume: “She Leans”

  Poetry: “Pome”

  Poetry Daily: “Pome”; “Picture of a Soul”

  Transmission (Satellite Press): “Magicicada”

  Southwest Review: “Zen Sonnet”

  “Riddle” (memory) first appeared in Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2011 (Alhambra Publishing, Belgium).

  “A Memory of the Future” appeared
in Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2013.

  “Constructing a Religion” appeared in the anthology The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing, London).

  I would like to thank Jane Gelfman and Deborah Schneider, friends and agents through many books, and my editor Jill Bialosky for her sustaining belief in these poems. My gratitude also to Phillis Levin for her generous insight and suggestions. And to Madison and Celia who have always been there when I needed their help.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ELIZABETH SPIRES (b. 1952 in Lancaster, Ohio) is the author of six previous collections of poetry: Globe, Swan’s Island, Annonciade, Worldling, Now the Green Blade Rises, and The Wave-Maker.

  She has been the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Ohioana Book Awards, and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2011–12, she was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and in many other magazines and anthologies, and have been featured on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac.

  She has also written six books for children, including The Mouse of Amherst, I Am Arachne, and I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings.

  She lives in Baltimore and is a professor at Goucher College, where she has taught for many years.

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH SPIRES

  POETRY

  Globe

  Swan’s Island

  Annonciade

  Worldling

  Now the Green Blade Rises

  The Wave-Maker

  FOR CHILDREN

  With One White

  Riddle Road

  The Mouse of Amherst

  I Am Arachne: Fifteen Greek and Roman Myths

  The Big Meow

  I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings

  EDITOR

 

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