Western Solstice by: Leonore Wilson

Western Solstice

Western Solstice

L e o n o r e Wi l s o n

H IRAETH P RESS Danvers, Massachusetts

Copyright © 2011 Leonore Wilson

All Rights Reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages.

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First Edition 2011 Cover and text design by Jason Kirkey Cover painting: © Langelo ISBN: 978-0-9835852-1-3

Poems from this collection have previously appeared in: Pedestal, The Misfit Library, Blue Fifth Review, Conte, The Benicia Herald, Women’s Art Quarterly Journal, A Prairie Journal, Written River, Prism Review, The Prose-Poem Project, Innisfree Poetry, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse, Identity Theory, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Rock and Sling, The Furnace Review, Press 1, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Poetry Super Highway, Rattle, Red Wheelbarrow, Squaw Valley Community of Writers Review, Arts Council Napa Valley, Wild Earth, Quarterly West, Chrysalis Reader, Mayday Magazine, Manzanita Review, Madison Review, Third Coast, 2RiverReview, Reed, Nimble Spirit, Poets Against the War (Sam Hamil Anthology), Writers of the Wine Country (Heyday Press), Charon Review, Yellow Silk, Magma, Boxcar Poetry Review, Haight and Ashbury Review, X-Connect, 13th Moon, Umbrella, Fringe, Small Pond, Heyoka, The Adirondack Review, Ascent, Poems for All, Wicked Alice, LanguageandCulture.net, Terrain, Poets West, Wild Apples, Mississippi Crow, English Journal

Published by Hiraeth Press Danvers, Massachusetts www.hiraethpress.com

• Contents page The Spring Bearers Force and Beauty Tomoko Uemura is Bathed by Her Mother Theotokos Western Solstice Land Reform Meeting, Estremedura That Easter Sweet Substance June Morning The Coyotes The Dried Pools The Orchards Orpheus Soft Gesture Inheritance Lieder Listening to Martinu Small Portrait The Snake Hortus Conclusus Letter A Benevolent Morning Toad My Country Swooning Spring Gods Sky Matter The Creation of Desire World as Church Linden What the Grasses Wear Lake Havasu City Salton Sea Covenant The God Module Vetch Black Dawn Dark-in-Light Athene Noctua Gutted Buck At the Grave of Abdul Hassn, Baghdad vi

3 5 6 8 10 11 13 16 17 18 19 20 22 23 24 25 26 37 28 29 31 33 35 36 37 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 50 52 54 56 58 60 62

page Window in the Morning Pig Spit The Roses Soft Object Winter Russulas Female Elegy The Cattle Their Genesis Broken Symmetry Early Universe Cadere The Monarchs The Ptarmigan’s Dilemma Temperate Place Seep-Spring Monkeyflowers

63 65 66 67 69 70 72 74 75 78 80 82 83 85 86

About the Author

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Western Solstice

The Spring-Bringers for Susan Edwards Richmond

Are vanishing; take for instance the turtle dove unable to breed as it once did principally due to the weed seeds’ diminishment; and the cuckoo whose calamity continues as a tide of pesticides skiffles across the fields triggering the wooly caterpillar decline . . . .

Try to imagine a world without wood warbler, flycatcher, wrentit, jay; no longer a stubborn rustling in the underbrush, that unfailing pleasing semitone akin to flickering bereavement and regret.

And when our soundscape disappears . . . what of further loss: rivers, running water; and what will be greater — the demise of skinks, chicory, or dusky wings,

when promised seasons have no boundaries, when budbursts begin too early, when wild landscapes shrink to islands and when

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darkness covers light; will that mean there is no privacy, and every residence a nest exposed . . . .

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Force and Beauty

If a woman hadn’t been out walking her dog, they might never have found the body among the miner’s lettuce and jimson weed, the young nurse may have lain at the base of the creek invisible to the naked eye for months, years— unfolded thing becoming a part of the hypothetical West, her blue-violet flesh cleaving like roots to soil, disappearing into the unconscious season when lovers wait for the cleansing rains to pass like a row of low-lying goldfinches over the reborn lavender . . . .

But nothing is quite transparent in these California hills where the mist gathers and vanishes, where one still finds toothed obsidian flakes, beads and bones of those long ago who knew the trails exquisitely well, for here we all walk over burial-grounds without hesitation or reverence like ravening swine in a slippery mire knocking down the prevailing trees in our wake, mangling the grasses, branding everything mine as that girl was branded, the one who had been stabbed twice through the heart, whose probable killer is still on the loose; how the blood shudders knowing he looks up and sees the same paternal heaven, the same cardinal clouds, that he journeys here and there with the living sun on his back, someone like us created in the likeness of God defined by his own piercing, his own unbearable shape.

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Tomoko Uemura is Bathed by Her Mother after a photograph by W. Eugene Smith

The small shoulders of Tomoko sprout hands like the beginning of flowering, the first leaves on the Aesculus californicus in February . . . .

But this is not beautiful or meant to be, thin girl blighted by nuclear fusion, deformed as some might say: a travesty, limbs not really human, crooked as found in the most wild landscapes of the Pacific, pine-bent, cypress twisted, but this is not beautiful, or meant to be . . . .

And yet the mother whose daughter is stretched across her lap like Christ has that beneficent Mary face as she looks down at this one she has created; she has placed her maternal body naked inside the bath water too as if saying I am a part of you, I am the sponge that absorbs the outlandish pain, the unimaginable human cross of what war creates; our bodies are one again, as trunk is knitted to branch to twig . . .

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your suppurating skin, the sap that sticks to my flesh as the colostrum that once oozed from my breasts, and this water that is taking our blood, our chaff , is ours exchanged as when I first created you in my womb, when you were merely a speck of light, a light of pure goodness with all the potential of that goodness, my darling that I still see in your blinded eyes.

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Theotokas

Light coming out of the darkness, out of the earth out of the blue throat of the little owl mouth, and in the center of that light, she covered with dirt like those who work the death-mile fields of the San Joaquin; flushed out dove from the wild pyracantha, Persephone ascending from Hades like a wounded Billy Holliday tune spilling from the jukebox; La Morena, Nuestro Senora de Guadalupe, black twin of Lazarus, how do you explain to the teenage daughters of Albania that they are loved but basically inessential, that a woman is just a sack of rice made to endure, how do you explain to the bride at her nuptials when her parents give her new husband a bullet as a gift a symbol of his power over her; Heavenly ladder, they cover you in white, they have Made you asexual, castrated you Mary, called you Regina which keeps you confined from us, keeps you passive and inferior and impossible; they have argued over your hymen if it is broken or intact, they say Salome insisted to examine you but her hand caught on fire but Christ saved you so your hymen’s intact, so what, and what makes you want to return

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to us now when the earth has lost so much of its beauty, its fruitfulness, when it is scarred like a child beaten and left in a closet to lick at its wounds; better Mary to stay like water at His side, better not to appear in tortillas, glass buildings, what assurance can you give us that our bodies will heal?

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Western Solstice

Here the scrub oaks’ shadows veiled the propitiatory flowers, The meadow never seeing lean-tos or ramshackle chicken coops, Tangles of barbed wire; here one summer I rode a cutting horse out Where the acreage was free of cattle, and almost took a spill Because of a rattler like a prophetess that reproached me.

Now there is no calling of frogs or chipmunks or sparrows, No black glass chipped into the pure accuracy of arrows.

Someone is chopping wood non-stop with a trace of blood On his chin, tossing limbs here and there like unfinished sentences.

Someone’s mind is on fire to possess, uproot, subdue, While another riding a bulldozer, hums a little tune to himself, Leaving in his wake, gleaming trails of spit like pneumonia.

The days are becoming shorter, not simply because it’s winter.

Oh poor trapped earth, the sun grips the map of your death While the recoiling wolf at your core, continues to howl and shiver.

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Land Reform Meeting, Estreme after a photograph by Seymour David

Her face looking upward as the child nurses her face half in light her face focusing on authority as if authority could be a miraculous revelation as if the figure who is speaking could save her save her family her flock gathered round her as if those who work the land those whose flesh are part land dry as a hard sack of bread are never entitled to a basket of provisions of cold peaches dipped in sugar a fortune of grapes and cabbage-heads eggs that reflect in the eye like a scrapbook of ribbons simple provisions like the light on shack boards or the ready-made moon but no not now in this year there is the declaration of powers Franco’s Spain depletes into shadow burning itself down as carpets are rolled up after the dead and yet in the face of the mother dawn is always reconstructed she the pulse of escape of what cannot be broken she who wakes with her lantern faint as a web in dew she who finds the scraps in the cupboard finds the preserved roots in the attic wrings them like the necks of chickens pierces the black soil she who heats the kettle she with her survival her washbasin of measured 11

order though there are those who whisper sit at her table drinking coffee and finger her with scorn.

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That Easter

I remember how cold it was that Easter, a cold that kept us all in as if it were winter, but the sun was out, the sun was a big deception in the sky. We were all at dinner (picture the ham, the mashed potatoes, the dyed eggs and the jelly beans), when the phone rang. It was the police, my mother said, the police said people saw a naked woman running through traffic, she was running like a scared doe in headlights, they couldn’t shout her down or weave her in, had we seen her, she was last spotted running into the field in back of the house.

The police wanted to know if they could come up and find her, if we had seen her: a naked girl running or was she a woman, it didn’t matter. I saw my husband leave the table as if he were a doctor and this was his call; he ran and so did his boys.

I was left with my mother at the table, we were women; all the food like a big accident before us. We ate the ham, the salad, drank our milk in silence to the sirens. Then my husband came back, said something about her

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only wearing underwear, big panties, nothing fancy and that she had lived in the field three days. She was nothing to look at really, like a dog, dog-ugly, but would I give her a sweatshirt, some pants. I picked out the pink ones I hated, the color of peonies. I saw her at a distance, they had her handcuffed, they were taking her down the mountain, it was starting to rain, she had her head down, the way Jesus had his head hung ready for the crucifixion, she was that scrawny.

I put my body in her body. She was wearing my clothes. My husband told me later how she kept telling the cops she was a mother, a mother, no mother should be treated with handcuffs, she was no danger.

She was covered with bruises, her husband had beaten her and left her on the highway, she wanted to die in the field where she first met her husband. A cop later said she was on drugs, she was loony, she went back

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to her husband. She has my pink sweatshirt, my pants and I am wondering ten years later who she was and how she is doing; I wonder ten years later if I put my body in her body, whose body is mine.

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Sweet Substance for Do Gentry

Perhaps feminine wisdom starts in the gall, in that benign tumor, scrub-apple, Eden to the wasp, shelter and elixir, where she sits like a crystal queen drunk on the sweet substance of thought as Eve was drunk on the snake’s plum tongue, the knowledge he gave her, so that she swayed in her garden cradle, as does this very insect fixed, hidden in her soft chamber until fall when she emerges head-first— bruised flower, winged Sophia birthing the layers of her own bright soul, before each female egg, unfertilized, drops from her slowly, prophetically, black spark of gold.

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June Morning

He tells you while you were dozing, he had taken up the opera binoculars, parted the gauzy Chinese curtains, and looked through the kitchen window, over the watered tea roses to watch the doves pecking at the sprinkled seed you had tossed last evening; oh then he draws closer to you on the pillow as he whispers, how he paused and paused, not believing the sight of one small dove gingerly feeding the other; he shows you this with his mouth pursing pursing like kissing, as if he had a tiny kernel between his lips, so when he does leave, you fold the summer comforter down and rest there, rest in the sweetness of the hour until his footsteps softly come back—shuffling, waddling as if cautious of the cat, and the door almost magically opens as he hands you a blue plate of egg whites on rye and ribbons of heavenly bacon, so that you think of the doves again about who will exactly feed whom later, when it comes to that, who in the dawn, before one takes flight.

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The Coyotes In the twilight fields where yesterday you picked the wild poppies, come their cries, sharper and better than your own, so that you push your knuckles against your teeth and then slowly remove your pale blue dress with the torn lace hem and smooth your hair down with your one free hand, while the other reaches languorously for the water glass, the clear water from town, not the well water, not the creek water— that dry summer waste.

You open the closed shutters, and lean your forehead against the window, and face that big diamond of a moon, and tell god this once you’d like to be wrenched away from the buttes and hills of your porched-in home, you want to never leave a trace of your perfumed oils in the summer garden or the halls where you pace daily straightening pictures, picking up plates and putting them back; you want to go out where the heat still shimmers in the air and drive in your husband’s truck splotched with his dust and sweat, and maybe yes with your face flushed and your eyes bright, pass every torn fence, every cottonwood and oak you ever knew, and never once think of things like duty, reasonableness, or marriage.

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The Dried Pools There used to be a sign of promise in the season of no promise, when you would listen to the creek’s current in the dead of a blazing summer, dutifully memorizing its dark awake, where during the day you picked up white pebbles to skim across the surface of the water, angling downstream to catch the drift, where you sat from morning to almost evening, wondering if your girl body would turn into a woman’s, though every day that very thought became more and more unthinkable, because then you’d have to bind your breasts and cover your sex which to you (listening to your small transistor) seemed an irreparable rent in the quiet farm comfort you called home; no, though you pulled the cool sheets over you as automatic as breathing, you never dreamed that which you ascribed to like constant prayer would be torn up as if it were your mother’s grave, those vernal pools would evaporate, turn to hard tablets of sulfur and salt where once you sat on the edge with your head down, your arms crossed, your marvelous bones reflecting indelibly like a god's.

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The Orchards

I learned the body first scrambling under wire kneading the black earth with my fists, as if to get it right, as if I were hoofing the furrows, spreading the scoured seed.

Under the saplings, under the parental trees, near the one-room schoolhouse, the heavy pears of summer were plump as textbooks, the traffic savage and in waves; convertibles and boats with their tops down, teenagers shouting like mischievous geese everywhere.

I resolved to die to you there under the clear sky of my motherland.

Love was unglamorous and quick as you unburied me like gold under trunks, rolled me from shade to sun, the dried out ears of wheat bruised under my belly, the stubborn foxtails, oats, little fangs of thistles.

And afterwards we’d eat the fruit that had fallen as though it were left for us; the milk-white 20

meat like wine.

In the orchards, I learned god wanted us nurtured, forgiven; he showed us there we could have it again that world unbroken, all plaint and rich with desire.

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About the Author

Leonore Wison has taught at various universities and colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She continues to live on her family cattle ranch in Napa, California. She has won fellowships to the University of Utah and Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts. Her work has been in such magazines as Quarterly West, Madison Review, Third Coast, Poets Against the War, Nimble Spirit, and Trivia: Voices of Feminism. She is the mother of three sons.

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