Poems from The Holyoke

 Ernestina The Shoemaker's Wife

“You have his eyes,” she’d say to me,
and then to my old aunt, “Those are
the eyes I saw!” And she would tell again
how Saint Francis caught her in the woods
when she was a young girl. Dominic,

her husband, would never sit still
when she spoke of it, would rise slowly
from the Morris chair and go outside,
down the rows of kale and corn
to his barn, his hammers and lasts.

“He took the breath from under my heart,”
she said, her thin fingers crooked at her breast.
“It was not what you think, He was a power,
a beast. And the rain came down, and he held
me there, my dress sticking, my body showing.”

When I wanted to wander out the door
and sit among the sharp-smelling hervas
in her garden, they let me go
and kept talking behind curtains
that breathed in and out in the slow air,

and they prayed the Rosary together,
droning through the Mysteries. “Don’t cross her,”
is what my mother said. “She’s a bruxa
and can give you the evil eye herself.”
“That kind of talk is foolish,” said my aunt.

Whenever we left, my aunt would take
my arms and lean to me─”Remember
that she is only talking about a dream!”
But I remembered Dominic’s hammering like a bell,
and how she said even the wet trees shivered.

 

 Diving For Money

The coin cuts
the air and leaves
its fast trace of light.

You must never move
your eyes from it:
thrash with your hands,
your feet, watch

how it enters among
the grains of sunlight
splashing on the flat water.

The water pushes you up,
the air in your lungs
makes you fly
here in this green world
you fight to stay down.

Your hair rises like the soft weeds,
your hands cup
in rigid prayer,
your heart falls to your throat
and sings, Breathe,

as the thing touches your skin
and your fingers close
around it.

How the surface is like
a perfect sky
when seen from here,
how you rise to it
on your beating legs.

Over and over
it is all there for you,
all you could ever want:

They reach into their pockets
and stars fall around you.
You scoop them from the world
while the quiet longing

comes to you, aching deep
in the lobes of your chest

 

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poems from: Night of a Thousand Blossoms | The Holyoke |
A Field Guide to the Heavens | Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death

 

 

 

Frank's photo by David A. Lipton