Poetry |

“To the man in the pickup truck who screamed obscenities at my 15-year old sister,” “Full Moon and a Storm Coming, You Tell Me” & “Winter”

To the man in the pickup truck who screamed obscenities at my 15-year-old sister

 

When the end comes for you, know this:

Mercy is the girl in an ultramarine dress.

Mercy is the girl with a Renoir face

bending to speak with a small boy

who helps her water the sun-withered garden.

Mercy is blithe, beams unburdened

because I will be the pool of twilight sounds

cloaking the noise of your crawler’s shape,

I will be the moonlight’s crescent

tendrils lashing you in place,

I will be the sphinx moth she follows

away into hours of delicious rain.

Look: streams of blue roses trail

from her hem, pour into a widening sea.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Full Moon and a Storm Coming, You Tell Me

 

Your grandma used to call them hurrycanes

in her foamy Cape Cod accent. She knew

the slower the storm, the greater the loss.

Her house was near four hundred years old, built

in a town the glassworks chose not for sand

but for its trees, long burnt. Under tough boards

and rag rugs she braided nor’easter nights,

surges washed through the dirt foundation, seeped

out, harmless. On the street the marsh pooled high

as her back’s mean swerve—but her raspberries

spared, you made jam. Paraffin seals cooled white

like the cones empty berries leave behind,

white like this sturgeon moon’s spring tide, white like

the ice she slipped on, the day she should’ve died.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Winter

 

No matter what I say,

All that I really love

Is the rain that flattens on the bay,

And the eel-grass in the cove;

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Eel-grass”

 

 

In another life we were orchards

or we were storm-battered

shores, you say, peeling an orange

as if erosion and rootedness

were the same long sentence

ending in harvest or decay.

A train’s late. A long salt road

runs through the room, through us.

But you promised not to stay

no matter what I say.

 

Not that I would beg,

after days spent tallying

the expected dead,

to watch your fingers test

the eel-grass beds, or ask

to walk the slanted grove above

the wrack. When the wind blows

west my voice gives out:

if I wanted to, I couldn’t speak of

all that I really love.

 

The telephone cord’s tangled

again, silence waiting on the line,

and you’re the kind who trusts

herself to split rind from pith

without a slip. So tell me

to forget your taste, beaujolais

and brine, tell me to lose

how sunlight caught the steel

in your eyes. Tell me now — delay

is the rain that flattens on the bay.

 

When you go, nothing real

will change. I’ll still work late.

The train will still race

the road. I won’t miss you.

I’ll buy salt, I’ll make

soap from oranges and clove.

And when the tide’s laid low

you’ll remember where to find me:

embedded in the slanted grove

and the eel-grass in the cove.

Contributor
Carolyn Oliver

Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, forthcoming 2024) and Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022). Her most recent chapbook is Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). Carolyn is a 2023-24 artist in residence at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Posted in Poetry

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