poetry by kelly heim
RETROSPECT
It never occurred to me that you were there,
all that time, the one leaning switch of grass
among heady roses, the man who wore grey
in a flickering crowd, who shook vine after loaded
vine for an impossible grape. In the sunken
valley where you hummed to a thready violin
(in a ballad called Love Finds You
Eventually), the sun cupped your blue
eyes in thimbles of champaign and vermilion
in a messy kitchen as you blew your coffee cool.
I could have touched you between flaking stars
and the swollen lip of night, on a puddled pier
in Venice, bobbing boats and tilted docks
hinged to a labored perpetuity, tired pomfrets
shimmering underneath, red-eyed and
patient, curious and fevered, the way we were sometimes,
just a wing’s length apart—our toes tapping the earth
for a similar salt. In all that time, I would sit
and think of you in the throat of a harbor, counting
light-fingers from mothy lanterns. Waiting for you
I stood like a fallen plume among masts,
propping the firmament, marrowed with time
and gray as we were both becoming.
My heart, wild with love, still whips with the loose sail, bucking
and bleeding from the weak stitch. I wonder when
a ribbon of sky will throw the silver hook
of rain that finds you. Perhaps it will sprawl
in a furrow on your cheek etched by the rain-dances,
the lush weddings, conversations over gnocci, the beaches,
the sweet tumble of your name, and how i know so well
all the laughter I have missed.
FROM BENEATH THE PINK
In my youth I ran through fields of grass
that stretched for miles, the hem
of my dress catching my toe as I stumbled,
laughing and crying as I saw the world,
hiding in tall weeds as the world saw me.
In my searching for the proverbial flower,
in my turning and throwing of every rock,
in madness I sought through the loneliest hour
only an ear to listen, an eye to behold,
a mind to grasp and a willing hand to bring
from beneath the pink, the imminent boy—
spitting, spraypainting and willfully smirking
in the perilous curve of my silhouette.
I never thought I would find you. Somewhere
between his notional flesh and my nervous words
one day you carefully stepped, listening hard,
mind stretched open, intellect receiving
my tired arms, slender and delicate from the apple
of nature’s misguiding. You met me halfway
in the seam of a belated dawn, a thousand miles
from where I started, my knees covered in dirt,
soul thrashing, sun-drenched hair knotty
from the years. In the rattle of an unwanted drum,
you heard a perfect song. After hundreds of others
had missed, your hand reached and found mine.
In a world that had spoken to me in cryptic tounges
of lavender and lace, of drama and disregard,
you looked into my eyes, smiled and said hello.
THE GIFT
Fears and fantasies
of spiders, snakes,
of money and lovers,
the big fish that got away,
the perilous undoing
of defenses, the projection
and the pride, all that I
have sought and all that I
have lost, these things
you know so well of me.
A thin string of time
extends between us,
a laundry line
of spotted linens
dark underwear and
mottled socks
quivering in our
reciprocal breaths,
the paisley swim trunks
i didn’t know i had (i still
do not believe they are mine)
bloated in the crossbreeze,
first grow bigger, uglier
then smaller and paler
than ever before.
You touch my words
gently, slow to let go
as if they were made
from a silver leaf,
as if they came from
some beautiful place
you’ve always wanted to be.
Yet we are sitting
in two chairs in a room
where I have committed
the carpet and the walls
to my long-term memory,
where your chair rocks
back and forth,
where even in silence
I can hear the ping
of my thoughts
colliding with yours
like fuses in mid-air.
You look after me
with senses uncolored,
heart detached, soul aloof
in the volitional parting
of insight and sentiment.
I cannot believe
how your mind can reach
as passionately as a hand
while your arms remain as still
as fences in a blowing field.
Who are you
without your chair,
without the clock
and without
my one hundred twenty-five dollars?
I wonder if you sleep
on the right side or the left,
if you wear old t-shirts
and holey jeans and sit
in front of the TV with a beer.
What moves you,
what makes you weak,
and what was the last song
that made you sing?
For years you discover me,
ingnite, repair and unravel me
until one day at ten
before the hour
I walk out forever,
the careful touching of our lives
burning out like a spark, your voice
receding in the ember
of our rich world, as yours
turns onward and in its path
a draft tears through mine.
In its chill my soul cries
as I see only what is real, the very gift
you strived to give, in the knowing
that you never once loved me.
WAITING
As snow falls, I blink among junebugs
flickering in an impending meadow.
Somewhere there is a word
unsaid, a grape uneaten,
a drum waiting to be struck.
I am blinded by tomorrows.
The crocus rebounds weakly
in the places I have stepped.
TO A CELL
In the morning I awaken, thinking today
somehow you might answer me. With or without
good faith, ceaselessly I interrogate,
ardent and aching, encumbered and enchanted
by all of the unknown, the nameless
and the strange. It is as empty as it is
rich, perpetuating my labors ever nearer
the terminal chord of the interminable song.
I look at you. You lie sprawled and still;
the delicate reaching of filaments,
the obligate drama of water and salt,
the machinery within you ever turning,
ever reaching, yielding and destroying,
a vesicle imparting, a telomere waiting,
a membrane besieging, all a pageant wrought
by the abiding vigil of my mind’s knowing eye.
Until your channels blink vacantly with indecision,
until the ephemeral spindles tie an intractable knot,
until the second messengers cease their transmitting,
by you I am haunted, bewildered and ignited.
In a mute exchange I implore, in our common chemical tongue,
with method and material so perfect as to speak between us,
back and forth, over and over.
In the bend of a solitary wavelength,
in a soft blotch on film,
in a maddening litany of numbers,
you might whisper back, sometimes
faithfully, seldom promising, always
with your funny misgivings, never quite bestowing
all that I have sought. It is the wanting
and the wondering, the habit and the heartbreak
of a question and its answer that beckon me
to the fringe of another,
beginning again and again.
CHANGES
I am the sea.
My foaming hands reach over sand and
when no one is looking, they unfold
a dying oyster, a tenuous clam, an expired crab.
Outstretched like lace I overcome a woman,
embezzling her necklace, twirling
ad infinitum in the coveting of my undertow.
To a hook in the Bering a swordfish submits
and to a Java reef a sea star spawns anew.
Prevailing winds over Fiji catch maddening drops
Rolling them into the capsule of a nascent storm
perhaps to flood the vineyards of Bordeaux
or a dusty market in west Porto,
hoarding metal cords of rain to unwind
an atom of copper from a Zambian mine,
a molecule of oxygen from a California poppy,
a speck of carbon from a moth in Borneo.
A man walks with me on a Jersey beach.
He picks up the spiral crown of a whelk.
It is broken. I have scattered
the rest in a terrible secret.
I encircle his ankles like a soft cat,
my salts palliating, waves breaking
in a rhythm he has always known.
In my new breath he reaches for the old,
turning a shell as if to find a face underneath.
I reach to him and recede in a yearning, perpetual tongue,
speaking to him in lies, to the static blue
rumble of a permanent drum.
CLOSING IN
From the catcher’s box I’d give a sign
ready to receive your throw—
far to the left or straight down the line,
a fastball too high or a sinker too low—
a breaker to burn the seat of my mitt,
or a curveball answered by the uncommon hit.
Whatever has befallen you, haunted
and confounded you, I know
like the twist of your hand and the point of your toe,
the searching of your ninth-inning stare,
the weight of your glance on the final release,
stirring with hope but too cool to care.
I was there, like a beach taking in tide,
in our silent accord, my glove wide
open to meet you in the heat of the zone
and in all the bothered spaces outside.
Now you are aching from the years,
your breaking ball a memory and life tiresome,
the midwestern rain beating the pasture
where we once stood on sand-filled sacs,
imagining the men we’d one day become.
Now I think we are finally closing in
on the sixty-two feet between us.
NOSTALGIA
The sugar maple touches the shudder
coyly, its shadows hiding the spaces
where blushing bricks have gone missing.
The hoary sycamore, now fifty feet tall,
has thrown a ball,
a fling for someone else's lawnmower
ending in a bomb of seed,
of tiny beginnings that never succeed.
The porch is painted a brighter white
and the door a sweeter red,
the windows unchanged but their panes,
vulgarly exposing heavy newness,
gape as if to mutter something trite
about how time dulls the rose’s thorn,
and how years bleach the browning blossom
and the dirty cares of yesterday.
The hemlocks tremble in the wind,
the aching, snide and insincere wind
that once stole a balloon from my grip,
and crushed my paper planes,
and scattered our laughter and our love
and things we thought would stay the same.
The wind of change is a lion
that only memory can tame.
In yellow light she pirouettes
as darkness ebbs from whence it came.
Out of the safe and knowing past,
the blind sparrow has flown.
The sleeping jackal of my youth
has since awakened in search of me,
to show me to myself.
In summer wind I find you shivering
between the stacatto of daffodils that herald you,
their throats outstretched as if to sing
the soprano curl of the half-shell hum
to the throb of the swank evening drum.
From side to side the dinghies drift,
their slanted spinnakers a collective breath—
coxswains bark to their rowers and swift
are their sculls like flickering combs.
Runners and rottweilers huff among trees
and the vapor of traffic rises and roams.
Amidst the din of conversation,
the weight of a thousand fleeting thoughts,
the sounds of sentiment and calculation
of scholars and lovers and sinners
and the inward searching of the lost,
you do not stop for anyone.
Onward you proceed, slowly, irrevocably,
from the gaping gullets of 58 towns
unto the next yielding something new—
a floating sole from a terminal shoe,
a spinning leaf from a Dedham cherry,
a paper cup from the morning ferry,
an errant couple in a rented canoe.
The place you are going is not far
from the place where you began.
In the evening, I walk beside you,
just slowly enough to understand.
AT THE END OF OUR SEASON
Daring is a young heel to follow
An arrow that I have drawn;
To struggle and sweat with the engines of my mind
That turn madly and warily on
a modest thread between betterment and harm.
For a piece of themselves,
For a rivet of an impressionable spirit,
For a habit and a hunger,
and for a chapter of their lives,
I ask them, I demand of them.
I show them the way of a stick like Demeter to her seed,
and to my tirades, to repetition
and to my shouting voice they heed.
With a madness I lend by design,
They chase a common dream the way
lions stalk the path of prey.
At the end of our season,
laurels and medals may not await in a net
quivering from the might of their limbs
and my selfish pride.
Someday I will meet them at the line
where the game has ended
and life has begun.
If they have given the fabric of themselves,
unto them I keep my word
to reveal a strength born not of me, but of them--
a light to shine on their bleakest hour,
a spark to fly where the dark horse waits,
an oar to bear where winds lie still,
a spirit to prevail when all hope has left,
and a heart to reach those around them
and to love the one within.
SONG OF A VALEDICTORIAN AT SEA
Against turning skies and fluid landscapes I stand
still and tall, with conviction and pride
of the self-charted course I bravely pursue
over watery knocks and thickening swells
without season or guides or instruments of new--
only intellect, calculus and theoretical skill.
With progress measured in the strength of my will,
the latitudes pass as I progress without fail
as I'm dreaming the dream of not finding out why
a heart beats faster with an intractable sky--
Would curling clouds drive wind and hail
to my perfect knot and invincible sail?
Like Bacchus to the vine I am to the sea--
they say to great places I'll go in my life
and my way is certain, I complacently sigh.
Amidst this agreeable eve aspires
a gust over shelves of sea that send
torrents and billows to the decks I defend.
With all my intellect, calculus and theoretical skill
this new tack I counter as my forehead perspires
and wayward my bow still intends.
Storm! How you seize my intellect, calculus
and theoretical skill that I
brought from the years to this unruly end!
For a weathered hand and my soul for the selling
for a ragged ear to collect my cry,
for a mate at my side more seasoned than I,
missing a tooth and a lesson in spelling,
Oh what I would trade to return alive!
On land I held high opinion and promise and pride,
any weakness that papers and pencils belied;
Despite elegant merit in numerical rankings,
the sea I shall say has a different way
of showing my place in the order of things.