Subterranean Address

Subterranean Address

Judith Skillman

published by

Deerbrook Editions

P.O. Box 542

Cumberland, ME 04021 deerbrookeditions.com

preview catalog: issuu.com/deerbrookeditions

first edition

© 2023 by Judith Skillman

All rights reserved

ISBN: 979-8-9865052-2-0

Book design by Jeffrey Haste

Cover art: Sunken Boat, oil on canvas, 11 x 14, © 2020 by Judith Skillman

Credit: Judith Skillman, poems from The Truth about Our American Births (Copyright © 2020) and A Landscaped Garden for the Addict (Copyright © 2021).

Reprinted with the permission of Shanti Arts LLC.

for my children—

Alissa Regen Tuininga, Andrew Lee Skillman, & Jocelyn Ann Skillman

An afterimage remains Of ocean cities

Brides of the sea Of blue-black clouds

Flying over a cornfield .

Marie Luise Kaschnitz, “Making A Fuss”

from House of Burnt Offerings

The Turnip

Once more you force its fisted mass. Blanched white with a feather of pink— the bloodless promise? Has the chemistry of want exploded the dreamy cluck of that heart in your chest? Under the sky, the grave of dawn’s planted again— its beginning wed to the same milky stone.

Child’s Pose

Never the children we wanted to be, we ran away, sat on porches, hobos holding sticks with makeshift bags.

Unable to stop the arguments, we left, returning only when hunger crept too close. Huddled alone, salt in our throats—

that telltale taste infected our thin clothing. Scared to return a boxed ear, a hard pinch, or the tickling torture of relatives, we began

to learn, like peasants, all over again, how to finger an amulet of red beads. Evil, when kept at bay, seemed almost good.

Then rain whet our appetites for heartsickness and we grew up. A big wind came, trees blew unfettered, their branches lifting as if

to reveal, beneath green skirts, what it was had to be hidden from all the eye-lamps that lit up our bright brothels

of emotion. Were we objects attached like chairs to table? Had we fallen asleep after eating the best dreams in the house?

Comes the Solstice

Yet somehow the moon remains only a mirror. Meant to reflect, as we do at the worst times of our lives, on something larger, more angry than we are. The sun—no more terrestrial than tape grass. A star holding four rocky globes in orbit, a furnace whose desserts glint from water, windows, and the brown eyes of my father, who studied its flares and prominences even as he raged against the casserole dishes placed before him when the cancer grew larger than his own esophagus—the formal source of all his pleasure.

Coming from right and left tent-skirted all night dreaming of how many like hyenas braying scuffing dirt magic-eyed to the no sidewise to the no the juvenile smile of a pumpkin

the orange fear until I am on a par with of an age the same as jealousy buying everything with nothing

not pretending in my clothes my double chins how childish the dotage the hose pulled up

belly fat with failing muscle tone as the auntie’s wheeled into the garden given another can of Ensure

come closer to dreams where tall flights of stairs make labyrinths and tunnels

Lethe-winged meeting dogs shaking hands with the other in green envy deep killing where the coming rough on hoards of sunny dollars

singing through tree leaves about to brown over as with infections of the inner ear

Comes on its tracks of bronze and wood ties carrying the dead, carrying the living— a cargo of trash instead of diners.

Comes the train on its twin tracks of silver angled into the distance, perpendiculars growing dark.

I am on the train watching two young women talk, laugh, and flirt.

I crochet my childhood. It falls like cream into my lap. I make the same shawl over and over but it never warms me or keeps me from harm.

Comes the train to Montreal, to Paris, out of the chalk cities headed straight for those lands ripe for picking, and into the ghetto to find a miscellany of Jews and Gypsies.

Whistle trembling, fraught with meaning. Comes the train into sickness

to succor the ill who will not get well. On this train babies claw at their mother’s breasts and all is barren, the milk only crust in a dry century full of dross and wailing.

My husband rocked four years in his little boat on the land, lost in the strawberry patch. His fingers calloused, hands stained with dirt, he worked close to earth, made not a dollar, befriended no one, and was no one’s friend. Only the rocks— glacial till—kept company. He managed their smooth sides, hefted them into the other half of the acre. One day he painted black borders on window moldings. Another he filled holes with dirt the mole had heaped up from its tunnels, entrances, and exits. The strawberries put out runners. These pale ribbons my husband inserted carefully into dirt, as if braiding the mane of a horse, or testing a patch of ice to see whether it would hold his weight.

from Angles of Separation

A Sliver of Heat

From the tar bubbles comes the Cyclops sun. Come grasshoppers, sleeveless girls, yellows imbued with the cries of childhood.

From the white birch trees’ inset eyes comes the burn-wound of remembered infant-song.

There grasshoppers, strewn like paper clips, flew up when foot falls disturbed dead calm. Wings so light it seemed they were made of paper

appeared to glide in childhood. At night the earth collided with comet hair and you wanted to tip the Milky Way

into your parched throat, drain the cream as well as all that curdled in argument grown full with midday.

From the burn-wound of childhood, its cicadas, second-hand cars, and oil siphoned into engines where a storm came and dropped its thunder-rain. There the rainbow would swim grudgingly in a little pool of grease.

Framework of wild carrot, cluster of stars, obsolete sunshade, diminutive of autumn

harbor us now as we wander into darkness— far from the sun, its ray and disc.

Inside out umbrella, keep us in this winter and from straying toward those others where the snow-berried grandmother feathers a nest for the mole.

You could look through the length of its doubled spiral. Jump over its span into the vacant lot beyond.

It’s no man’s land—a contested territory—you long for. To hitch your heart to a cause, to parachute

into that place neither side wishes to openly move on. The hitch: horse apples ooze white latex sap.

Cows can be kept from falling into the canal by Osage orange Learn to care for an odor reminiscent of oranges,

to covet ugly heads—male and female, spherical but bumpy. Call it sadness, these few cars rusting farther away than the past.

A ‘58 Chevy: orange sedan raising heaven’s chrome wings. What war, this bright season? Borne in whose cold fist?

Nothing to steal but the music booming from Scott’s Dairy Queen. Two boys with their father, bike-settled helmets.

Two brothers eating ice cream cones, tall and fluted. The father tattooed everywhere his clothes end.

Almost you remember, though you weren’t yet born, Dannert wire, invented by the Germans.

A heavy ring that concertina’d out into ten-yard lengths. If it hurts it must be entangled. Certain go to’s:

chronic illness, inbred laziness, and an especial varietal: that pain born of summer. Wind wound into every kind of tree

and no money in any leaf, not even a dollar to wave a flag at. Some days you think you were born in order to be torn apart.

Elusive Mysteries

Again she is gone, Kore, the maiden who held a sheaf of wheat in her hand, a flower. Cold fogs the yard, the dog barks at hoarfrost.

Once more she has been abducted— how cold she must be, beneath the earth, shivering, her room so small it could be a grave. How many seeds will she eat?

And yet I remember her singing, empty-handed, playing at being pretty. I remember the feathers in her hair, how soft the green trellises

of trees knitting themselves into willows above her head. As if it were yesterday I recall the sound of her name in so many languages.

All the mothers calling, searching their cellars, looking for stairs down into the earth, and she already complicit with the underworld.

She the go-between for a hare, a golden dog, a sick woman on a thin mattress, and twin owls whose yellow eyes hold prey in oval pupils.

The blue trees of winter stand at intervals with naked branches.

Even when the sun touches them like the third circle in the archer’s target, their burnt cherry twigs hardly flinch.

A train passes in the distance, carrying its cargo of smokers in black jackets.

How seldom, the moments when anguish lets go its hold on the little chlorine pool, the trellised courtyard.

And it must be so for me as well.

My break with the past will be taken customarily, as a crust of bread or a few flakes of snow falling surreptitiously into my mouth to sever my tongue.

Lengua

They called it, after it was boiled and skinned, the pink and gray moss cut like a banner from the rest.

Because they—happy, healthy, ran to the plank— a wooden table like the talking dreams I had the night before,

I ate the pick-thin pieces on my straw plate. Not too hot nor cold, Mediterranean, roomtemperature. There’s a certain conceit in holding a fork so small. Once the fingers touch the lips,

a bit of grace comes into the body. Sometimes heavily seasoned. Other times with mushrooms

and watercress picked just hours earlier from the creek— like a salad perched atop an island.

A woman is the same in another language, and also a man with his knife. This organ of many names,

a bit tough, harsh with the Polish horseradish, I could say it never melted. But that would be facile—for a complex

problem such as eating a cow’s tongue far more argument is required, more discretion, a pinch of salt, a salt lick or a lame horse, all the ways lies stick like feathers to the back of the throat.

from Kafka’s Shadow

Every limb as tired as a person

from Kafka’s “Conversation slips”

You must understand, for the time being, that I am without flowers. The Viburnum

outside the window sways. Its throbbing keeps time with the wind and the ravens.

Here and there yellows turn brown, rust as if with illness. The doctor has found no cure for moods. I used to like to walk downstairs into the world. There a family

ate and drank. My sisters’ cheekbones high, their eyes bright and well slept. I was punished

for not being an entrepreneur—for wanting to write. You must remember me now.

The stories waited to be born. Labor after labor between bouts of illness.

I ask my awful god for an appetite! I lift a bowl from the wooden table to the cupboard fitted with glass panes. My arm weighs more than all Mama’s fine

china gathered in the low boy, hemmed in. Father was handy with his hammer.

Would that I might sense a little passion. I’d take up the charcoal stick, shave thin rounds

from its black tip, and sketch this famous tree whose arching stems hold snowballs.

When will Kafka’s father step in one of these piles? When he walks home from working at the Jackdaw, his meal will be waiting. He’ll be fed and warmed even as he satirizes his son.

You’ll find him cursing as he enters the rented flat, two stories, and hardly enough dowry money to pay the servant girl.

His wife’s standing over a pot large enough to hold all the earth the mole has heaped up in Prague. Instead of dirt: carrots, noodles and strings of meat.

Hermann, the father-monster, sits in his chair at the head of the table drinking a mug of beer, nodding off until, with a little prod from the skinny boy, his mouth turns foul and blasphemous.

If this is Kafka’s mole, perhaps it is yours as well. It could be you’ll recall, among the fecund scents, that incident from a childhood long ago forgotten.

Toward sunset it bleeds orange, plums, and wine. His father always at table with mug in hand. How long must a son allow the city to unwind its long avenues, branching rivers

full of walkers insular with autumn. It’s true the blade took garlic cloves from their little white coats, so pliant, the stems beneath that fat knife wolfing into the core of the matter.

It’s true there must be a mother in the story—her stringy hair, her roast burning inside the oven. He sees the clock tower in the square, glances up to find a rim of moon. At least, for now, the hole’s been bled

of what it holds. As far as a man can walk the shops stretch, their signs reversed. Closed for another, longer night. Withholding exactly that porcelain— that Jan Becher Karlovy liqueur cup

one needs to clamp between finger and thumb. He’s learned one lesson. This wound must be purged each day. Else the stench of what it carries comes from his mouth, and others turn away.

Hermann Kafka stands at his son’s door. “Franz, we are late,” he says. “We must go—you are to be sacrificed today.”

“But father, two other sons died in my place to spare you the need. You must be mistaken— it is I who live here now, in the flat, among the cabbage roses and the little sisters.”

“I was told by God to sacrifice you, and I must obey,” replies Hermann.

Together the two begin a journey of years, months, and days. Remarks are exchanged, bitter innuendoes hang in the air like smoke.

This land, candle-lit by the moon, full of dust storms, hardly resembles Mt. Moriah.

Father and son walk the path that winds around a hill toward the altar where the son will be bound and burned.

When God cries out—

“Stop! Hermann, I was only testing your faith! Your son is spared, slit the throat of a young ram and go home,” the older Kafka, his hands around Franz’s neck, replies, “Too late.

I am far more obedient than that clown you took me for— the other, named Ibrahim.”

“And everything around me is subject to you. The table presses against the paper as if in love with it . . . and the clock strikes like a bird.”

—from Kafka’s Letters

He misses the fur coat she wore that summer because in winter it may turn cold, misses her agitation, her not so sotto voce murmurings about returning home when they walked that last time through the square in Triesch.

Now she will come to visit him: . . . you will be in this damned city. A pendulum swings whether one wills it or not. And bars of music, time measured out in quarter and half notes.

Imagining the presence of other suitors at her side:

(At what time did you arrive, how were you dressed)—his pique borders on illness, cheeks wear high coloring of the artist who lives with every time at once.

What’s wrong with this simple girl who comes to bite the hook he’s dangled with exquisite delicacy into the waters that separate them?

Will she, in white dresses and sympathy put herself in front of him and force the issue?

—(it takes more courage not to hope than to hope).Yes, she’s fallen for the bait of letters, and will come the night before to jangle the puzzle of time and place.

He goes to the station twice in two days, waits the extra hour, watches

as she does not descend, her hand lacing the porter’s arm her luggage carried by the attentive steward.

. . . a little frustrated expectation put me to bed for two days . . . I wrote a dainty fever-letter to you . . . The letter he later ripped up while leaning on the windowsill.

I could think of nothing better than to go to bed. Who does the Fraulein dance with? How does this play within a play mimic Felice in Berlin, the wrestling away from, the pulling towards.

Didn’t he always lean towards the quadrille, one of those figures in which couples bow so much they do not come together, who always make the same final decision

In my empty room in which two flies against the window are making noise Yes, in this, his labyrinth where he loves the bird more than the clock, he writes: I close my eyes and kiss you.

Father’s in the room. Here, living, breathing, listening to the opera—

The Tales of Hoffman, where another sad man sings sorrowfully as if the worms in his heart ran amuck through his intestines.

Jacques Offenbach’s Fifth of May becomes only another plaintive cry from the street, where an animal lives on garbage pulled from the farce of a bin. Now three seasons make a year and the invalid’s arm rots.

“…when in spite of everything the late-afternoon sun comes out and casts my long shadow (yes, my long shadow, maybe by means of it I’ll still reach the kingdom of heaven)…

—from Kafka’s Letters

Late summer, he lies for hours on a vineyard wall, staring at rain clouds, he chews a stem of grass, looks out into the fields in which no message is written, no letter comes flying like a bird nor is one given to the hand that would take words.

Last night he sat at his desk, kept silence even when the maid came in to lower the blind, which was heavy, unwieldy. He helped her without talking and she went away. Another hour of sitting, of pecking and scratching. A few words written and scribbled out.

Late summer. He rests for hours on the wall in the vineyard, wanting his footprints to matter. Admires Goethe, dares himself to grow, even as doppelgänger, into the specter that kills what it perfectly imitates.

He drops to his feet like a cat and starts across a field, the late sun lengthening his shadow—the same rawboned twig his child-self assumed under the scrutiny of the father, whose weight blots out the sun punctually, each curse a blow to lift another pound from the papery boy

who must remove layer after layer, peer farther into the text of himself

until it too disintegrates and rises like mist into the joke of loving or being loved.

Acknowledgements

House of Burnt Offerings, Pleasure Boat Studio, 2014; Angles of Separation, Glass Lyre Press, 2015; Kafka’s Shadow, Deerbrook Editions, 2017; Premise of Light, Tebot Bach, 2018; Came Home to Winter, Deerbrook Editions, 2019; The Truth About Our American Births, Shanti Arts Press, 2020; A Landscaped Garden for the Addict, Shanti Arts Press, 2021

Thanks to the following journals where these poems first appeared:

Bracken, “Avenue of Birds”

Descant, “Incunubula”

New Feathers Anthology, “Demolition”

Nocturne Magazine, “For a Delirious Child”

North Dakota Quarterly, “Any Hospital, USA”

One Magazine, “A Portrait”

Plainsongs, “Forty Years”

Poetica, “Diaspora”

Sage Cigarettes Journal, “Silver Years,” “The Five-Fingered Root”

Short édition, “Ophelia Afloat”

Tar River Poetry, “Palmetto Bug”

Terror House Magazine, “The Frost,” “All We Took,” “Sandpipers”

The Poetry Box, Poeming Pigeon: “Subterranean Address”

THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays, “Sunday Afternoons”

Voices Israel, “Great Northern Fur Seal”

With gratitude to my colleagues in writing and the arts: Christianne Balk, Janée J. Baugher, Lendy Hensley, Sharon Hashimoto, Tina Kelly, Susan Lane, Linera Lucas, Kurt Olsson, Anne Pitkin, Michael Spence, Diane Ray, Joannie Stangeland, Mary Ellen Talley, Ruthie V., & Lillo Way.

About the Author

Judith Skillman is a dual citizen of the US and Canada. She holds a Masters in English Literature from the University of Maryland, and is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry and a “how to”: Broken Lines —The Art & Craft of Poetry.

The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, Washington State Arts Commission (Arts WA), and Artist Trust, Skillman’s work has appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, Shenandoah, Zyzzyva, We Refugees, and other literary journals and anthologies. Judith’s Oscar the Misanthropist won the 2021 Floating Bridge Chapbook Award.

Skillman has been a Writer in Residence at Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington, and Hedgebrook Foundation on Whidbey Island. She is lead editor of When Home Is Not Safe: Writings on Domestic Verbal, Emotional, and Physical Abuse, McFarland Books 2021. Also a visual artist, Judith is interested in feelings engendered by the natural world. Visit www.judithskillman.com