Where You Happen to Be poems
Leonore Hildebrandt
deerbrook editions
published by
Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions
first edition
Š 2018 by Leonore Hildebrandt All rights reserved ISBN: 978-0-9991062-4-2
Book design by Jeffrey Haste Cover painting by Susan Hammond Author photo by Ann Arbor
for Mareike, Nicole Diana, and Emily
Contents
I Reading at Night 15 After Learning 16 Rock Me 17 Terminal Moraine 18 Statistics 19 Milford Motel 20 In the Bath 21 Thinking Potatoes 22 The Landscape Artist 23 On the Way 27 Mammal 29 Mind Work 30 The Shelter 33 II Passing 39 Where You Happen to Be 41 Thresholds 46 Calling Her 47 Sand Hour Sand 49 Hydra Endures 53 III Blood Moon 57 On the Admiral’s Bridge 58 SALT 59 Girl Upon a Time 60 Song of Sixpence 62 Domesticated 63 We Were Doing the Best We Could 64 The Sights from Below 66 6
Anatomy of Song Baby and the Bright Machine The Living
67 68 69
IV Begin Again 73 Enfolded 75 Win-Win 78 The Woman Who Paints 82 Counterpunch 83 Hunger’s Dream 84 On Days of Disorder 85 The Book’s Secret 86 Buddha at the Crossroads 88 Where the Lost Things Go 89 Collaboration 90 Notes 93 Acknowledgments 94
7
Where You Happen to Be
But surely it would have been a pity not to have seen the trees along this road . . . Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel�
I
Reading at Night
in a house in which no one stirs warlords come and go a detainee recants a forced confession women bring solar lights to the village a father waves a hand irrevocable earth spins its flustered cities snow squalls and deserts scent of lilacs— wind knocks the house where we breathe the wanted and unwanted words
15
After Learning
I ran to the margins bordering north where the land ends and the sea ends. In the quiet, I could hear my own heartbeat. When I tried to stop thinking, space rushed in, uncontrollably. The water at my feet did not trouble itself over me, so I stayed— at least the ocean was right in its fervor. The wind was friendly sometimes, sweeping through, cooling heads, but terribly, I doubted my own clinging—that history might have taught us.
16
Rock Me
I have always done things the hard way— cutting through razor wire, sitting in protest until the cops yanked us by the hair. After turning down the millionaire, I boiled the baby’s diapers on the wood stove— but in summer I danced into the pale light of morning. There were men, there were women— mostly I lived more fiercely than that, my head full of road-songs, the secret of seeds, Masters of War. Once I climbed an oak tree I had planted thirty years before. The leaves, like orange hands, pulled me high and higher. When I went fasting in the woods, the hours would open their mouths wider, the verge of the pond carried on endlessly. I know of padded cells and stifling nightmares. But age is ageless. So rock me—like glass, we are sharp, molten, shattered, redone. It’s like the death penalty— once you have handed it down, then do it, already. Don’t let it drag on.
17
Terminal Moraine
I worry about gutters, the washed-out road, corroded pipes. And squirrels—they are everywhere— on edge, just like me. “Go home,” I yell at the neighbor’s dogs. Naked-pink, they scramble into the woods. And what is wild about berry-fields? My friend and I walk the barrens, the esters and kettle holes look different—almost rearranged— with the sweep of new roads, piled rock, machinery and warning signs. My neighbor breeds the dogs in kennels—all day they yip and wail. Finally the plumber shows up, tells me about his blocked arteries. Landforms can be read, flow rates measured. Go touch the wind to see how it blows.
18
Statistics
She found them on the tidal river not far from the house— Winchester cartridge, duck and pheasant load, and the extra-light Michelob, its metallic hues gauzed in mud. In the yards scattered along her road, poverty is laid out casually—yesterday’s engines, a trailer’s soggy remains. Odd goods and small cash travel hand to hand. Census workers muddle through—what is a residence, a garden shack, a bathroom? (Her wooden throne, screened in, balances above a composting bin.) She needn’t be afraid for lack of walls. Hunters keep their eyes on dwindling flocks. Black ducks drift in fog.
19
Milford Motel
My neighbors are lively: she talks, he laughs. Together they ride the truck, Synchro Systems, which is warming up now, barely visible under plumes of steam, a flying dragon’s bold display. Subzero morning, and we are small among the elements. To raise the mind from earth-bound routines, the early balloonists would bring champagne, parting with it only after the tools, the life boat. Sophie Blanchard ascended with hydrogen to set off fireworks for the emperor, her small white-feathered figure rising above the cheers. In back of the building, there are single pines, the half-frozen river. One could hole up here while balloons in peril bump over the waves of Lake Erie, and trucks billow like steam plants. One could get lost with moon and memory, pecking at cans of fish like a recent retiree discovering his loneliness, or a salesclerk tired of lights and crowds. On a windy night, Sophie’s pyrotechnics pierced the balloon—burning, it collapsed, “a moi!” and she fell to her death. Now it is quiet, the parking lot empty.
20
In the Bath
The dress comes off, and she unfolds, knee mountains rising from steam beds,
clouds gliding over snow ridges.
Yellow duck bobs in the bubbling air. Baby says, “We don’t want to live in the sky.”
They sprinkle essential oils: lemon and rose.
A woman’s shapes are fickle— too round or pointed, too large or small.
In the bath she retraces what is,
tidewater glaciers, tongues of rivers, a sandbank jutting into blue. Her fingers, caressing,
find that skin suffices. She empties the water
and puts on her robe—like gravity, the common appraisals assert themselves. The baby is also a boy.
She readies him for a piece of land.
21
Thinking Potatoes
French Fingerlings. Magic Molly. In a shallow box by the window this year’s tubers warm to the thought of growing. They understand fertility as a sequence of moves. Fuzzy sprouts push from the dust-shriveled skin, eyes urge toward an opening. Obliging, I will place each tuber into the soil of their dark-days like others before me—a line of planters who have bent over shallow trenches, who have hilled and watered and in summer marveled at elegant plants bearing white and purple blooms. The strength of these earth companions— to burrow down and resurrect. In the Andes, the world-mother is offered a meal and a sprinkling of chicha. Does she fathom the depth of our hunger? Cradled in my hand, this nightshade offers something like a future.
22
The Landscape Artist
They are stacking blocks —
steel and glass flatter the sky at rush hour cosmopolitan planners spill out of sleek towers streets team with certainty and glamor the work topples expectations as they cut ribbons press headlines to facades—when it rains
a poster stripped of its luster peels off in wet shreds.
*
*
*
At night her skull holds forth —
“stay on boardwalk” mud rock and gravel “madam this way please” dust swells around her a sound wall as they carve out intentions pressed for time the light slips between black clouds
she claps her hands for a moment dispels the hammers’ blunt collisions.
23
The walling of the world needs the small brick— industrial visions work the transitive relation a valley is a valley until the mountain is scraped off successive members of a sequence relate to another in order and as they do the numbers turn into stories brought to her in triumphant brochures
—when A is larger than B and B larger than C— coal fields in the fog look so gloomy.
*
*
*
Tonight they step out into a blue wind— behind the garden’s bulging shadows an arch rises and descends fog-bank of stars—gauze of silk-light the guests have never seen it they talk of navigation Vega the seven in Taurus
24
until the galaxy unsettles ambitions and the known constellations vanish.
And so she ventures into brush styles — spontaneous florals in hand-ground color gold-leafed boards from Japan her darkness flowers behind the peonies it curls into slope and tilt but figure-and-ground are towering over
her bravado falls away like withering leaves into hostile margins.
*
*
*
A picture is shaped by the willing hand—
it lies wide open a valley of grasses until the frames and fences arrive blueprints crowding in three dimensions the teacher says “today we have the case of nouns declaring their possessions—Hogan’s mill and Reeses’ land”
she dreams of islands scattering like birds beyond the glacial ridges into a marvelous sea.
25
They have come so far— wind is feathering clouds as in Brueghel the Elder when men return from the hunt women tend a fire wind-swept and fierce in the distance the lake is frozen the light softens as they walk without satchel
26
a hollowed road—sky marred by ice-clad branches a hand is a cloud-catcher— boundless.