Tell Me The Moon Poems
deerbrook editions
Caroline Sulzer
published by
Deerbrook Editions
P.O. Box 542
Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com issuu.com/deerbrookeditions
first edition
© 2024 by Caroline Sulzer
All rights reserved
ISBN: 979-8-9865052-8-2
Book design by Jeffrey Haste
Cover art; painting by Caroline Sulzer, Night Walker
For Jasper and Iris
Contents Generation 11 Inheritance i 12 Sometimes a Wall Sometimes a Cloud 13 Inheritance ii 14 A Cold Eye 16 Spider 17 Shoot 18 Inheritance iii 19 Where Are We Going and Where Have We Been 20 Your New World and My Shadow 22 River 23 Your City at Nine Months 24 The Child Becomes the Boat 25 Inheritance iv 26 80th Name 27 Dusky Seaside Sparrow 29 Inheritance v 30 Each Part of the World 31 Neighbor 32 Walking with Walt Whitman 33 Dog 34 Green Bird 35 Irises Before Heavy Rain 36 Mint 37 Inheritance vi 38 November 39 Scree 40 Fall 41 Inheritance vii, viii 42 Feathers 43 Reasons 44 Gone Fishing 45
Edge of the Field 46 A Modest Invitation 47 Inheritance ix 49 Blue Hill Fair, with E.B. White and Rilke 50 Ocean 51 Lost Cat Poems 52 Inheritance x 54 Inheritance xi 55 Inheritance xii 56 Shaker Woodshed 57 Tide Over 58 Cat’s 9th 59 Inheritance xiii, xiv 60 Inheritance xv 61 Ars Poetica 62 Thaw 63 Vole 64 Inheritance xvi 65 Inheritance xvii 66 Acknowledgements 69
Tell Me The Moon
The generous sun pours itself through her hair until she is mostly light moving through the forest.
If love is blind, how does it see how does it feel as though it could get close enough to give the sun a face?
How is it I can come so close to what gives her light, wear her felt fairy wings and fly backward through time’s heat?
Love is not deaf I still hear her voice.
Taking my hand, she said, Mama I want to leave you, no, she said lead you somewhere.
Close your eyes bend down low, now open.
And her small hand releases me into the orange, so close, of the first crocus.
11 Generation
Father’s ashes—where after we scatter you over rock and moss and I go home to the first snow— where do you go?
Will your particles adhere to the sphagnum through the coming torpor?
Here in Maine, the moss is buried. Most birds sing elsewhere but I don’t mind, it is peaceful in this tree house in the ash, built for my son, into which I have climbed. When the trunk begins to creak and sway in a new wind, I am afraid.
Who will sing to me?
Who will say, wait it is fear not the tree that is rigid.
12 Inheritance i
“Sometimes a Wall Sometimes a Cloud”*
The thought comes one day the last thought will come. What will it be?
This (unknown images here) was my life? Or, I should have! learned more songs sung long ballads in the kitchen for the children to hear in the next room.
There were times I moved too slowly, but more often not slowly enough.
The way the days shape our faces, is a slow story that goes by quickly.
Forster wrote, when we look at the future it seems sometimes a wall sometimes a cloud.
When I look at my children I see the walls of my heart floating in a cloud.
Sing me a story, Mama, they said, before sleep, theirs and then mine, reverse order of the old, young days.
*from E.M. Forster Aspects of the Novel
13
A January rain uncovers brilliant moss by the swollen stream the green overly bold among the white and the brown doing no harm.
* In Germany, 1932 my grandfather, a sculptor, crafted a desk out of ash for his wife’s sister.
It had a secret drawer I first could not find for his letters.
Stone was his medium—but for her wood and two brass keys.
* For decades after his lover’s death it stood in a house oppressed a small writing desk designed for love not marriage. Perhaps he snuck moments with it before a stroke swept his mind.
He died, his wife died and the desk sailed to New York to begin again, an immigrant in my father’s house.
14 Inheritance ii
What is it we choose to keep? And what keeps us?
15
*
A Cold Eye
Fear of not having said what they came to say, here, at the edge of the sea, the stones do not have it.
Quartz schist granite having chattered many long mornings and evenings, flaunting themselves when wet, now appear most fantastically mute, a uniform brown, shadowed against the bright light of dawn.
They are bells rung by sea asters rung by the masters assuring me that while it is not enough to have heard so much of what they do not say they would not ask for more they will make rings even when thrown by an unsteady hand.
16
She knows exactly what to do not knowing what she does searching with her whole being for a place to place her viscid thread, legs rays around the small dark core of her.
She carries this knowledge this history of success to kill to eat to make and each time it comes, willful seamstress, something out of nothing, delicate tough work that catches the morning light in which your hand slips over to cup my breast, the other under the side on which I may have slept though I don’t know for sure only that at some point in the gone night I turned to face the clear lines of her web as though from the inside.
17 Spider
At the edge of the wood, I see the laurel shoot.
We have a certain chemistry that arrests me into care.
Whatever is between us and I would call it love even if a one-sided love keeps me for a moment doing no harm though I still do not love everyone or sometimes anyone, with the exception of my children, for whom I make paths through these woods.
As for the others, they tell me I am caught in the spark of an ordinary lie.
18 Shoot
When the young sleep, they sleep total as moss.
Disturbed ground, you lie awake uncovering the distance between yourself and the sun the word and the thing.
Aphasia is its own kind of place, father, where you wander like your father among the misplaced.
A knife becomes a fork so there is nothing to find.
I would like to sweep for you your mind, clear, bare as a monk’s cell my impulse both generous and murderous.
19 Inheritance iii
Where Are We Going, And Where Have We Been?
Sentences are violet moving toward or away from the violent.
They ride into the sunset. They have the peacekeeping guns.
I’m gonna get you, to protect you: pop, pop.
I played tag with two children on the lawn, faster than me.
The suspect was shot.
The chicken and egg are alone in the yard never to meet again.
The rooster has gone to Tahiti.
The rain drip drips into the metal tub like the one we bathed in as children.
This one is a collector of rain and a pot for dead leaf soup beautiful colors stirred by the smallest hands.
Someone took a picture of my naked limbs spilling over like spider legs from a thimble.
20
Onto the forehead day breaks.
Slice of pear upon a plate like a white wrist
moving toward or away.
21
Your New World, and My Shadow
The size of my shadow surprises me as I rise to find your breath, such relief at its rising and falling.
Your breath warms the back of the small animal you hold.
You don’t know this is the first snowfall of your life or hear the electric wires creak under its accumulating weight.
* Months later, when you step into the sea for the first time it surrounds you, as things will.
A gull flies low, distracts, takes you away from the effort of verticality.
I wasn’t thinking about you or the sea, when you fell. But my breathless shadow led the way, and then skin to skin we inhaled, exhaled, and held.
22
Acknowledgements
Some of the poems (or versions thereof) in this book first appeared in the following journals:
“November” Puckerbrush Review Winter/Spring 2009
“River” Thatchwork Delaware Vallery Poets, Inc. 2009
“Lost Cat Poems” Wolf Moon Journal Issue#35 Summer 2009
Generation (under a different title, and edited) Puckerbrush Review
Summer/Fall 2010
“Inheritance” was previously published under the title “Tante Hilde’s Desk”in the chapbook Paperweight (2010 with Andrea Sulzer)
“Edge of the Field” The Hollins Critic Vol. L., No. 4, October 2013
A prose adaptation of the poem “Inheritance” was published in
TriQuarterly Summer 2015
**
With gratitude and thanks to poet John Peck for his careful attention to, and appreciation of, my work over the years, and to the late Galway Kinnell for encouragement at crucial times. Thanks ever to my husband, David, and to my children—to the moon and back, always.
**
Caroline Sulzer is a painter and writer. She lives in Maine.
Also by Caroline Sulzer
In the Disappearing Water (a novel 2009)
Paper Weight (poems and images, with Andrea Sulzer 2010)
69
These are poems that come from a long, introspective listening to life with its gains and loss. Anchored by a long poem, Inheritance, Sulzer looks with unflinching honesty and tender regard at the gifts and burdens passed across generations. “Love is not deaf/ I still hear her voice,” she writes, and we sense the quiet reach of her probing eye. “Close your eyes/bend down low, now open,” she recalls in the opening poem, an image that conveys the subtle contours of this collection as a whole. These are poems that arise from a patient remembering. They invite a slow reading as they evoke themes that span the tensions of melancholy and longing—in the poet’s journey and in ours. In her wondering about how “inheritance” shapes us, she asks: “What is it we choose to keep?/ And what keeps us?” Whether remembering her ancestors or reflecting on her own children’s journeys, Sulzer writes with an unflinching and sometimes fierce honesty, but also with a tender care for the quiet joys that come unexpectedly.
Her poems drift between melancholy and those moments of startlement that come from life closely observed, suggesting again and again how the outer and inner worlds meet and mingle.
These are poems that muse in the remembering and beckon in the pondering; they wonder with us about how to live with inheritances that refuse to let us go, and those we only dimly grasp: “I do not yet understand his loneliness,/the loneliness of the open heart.” Sulzer discovers glints of light rising from the shadows that refuse our clarities and yet somehow hold the secrets that carry us.
—Mark S. Burrows, author of The Chance of Home. Poems and translator, most recently, of The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin
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Praise
From the buzzing lights of The Blue Hill Fair to a well-stacked woodshed—from the bleak hush of winter to the first laurel shoots of spring—the poems in Caroline Sulzer’s Tell Me The Moon describe the seasons in Maine as deftly as a spider weaves her trap, “delicate tough work that catches the morning /light.” With equal care, Sulzer chronicles the seasons that stretch from childhood to sundown. Meditating on motherhood, eldercare, and loss, Sulzer serves grief and joy in the same cup. Heartache falls from a desk drawer, a man falls from the world, children fall into a sleep as “total as moss.” These poems ask, “tell me the moon” and “where are we going, where have we been?” They promise to keep the secrets that slip from the “blue violet tongues” of irises.
—Summer J. Hart, author of Boomhouse