Second Childhood: Poems Read online

  The Coldest Mother

  I can only follow one stone through

  to its interior: and I do.

  An amethyst from Achill.

  The stone is transparent violet.

  Firelight plays with its color the way eyes play with tears.

  It’s cold where east is north and the earth is flat

  and a person grows old.

  Equivalence—no matter at what distance.

  The fluttering snow is at the mercy of

  ever-increasing crescents crossing circles

  measured by squares, dashes,

  fish bladder, almond patterns, placenta.

  The folks up higher know everything of illness.

  I saw a child rolled in a cloak of snow

  to kill his fever.

  Irregular heart, aortic stenosis,

  rheumatism, atrial fibrillation, vertigo, blood clots,

  deafness, colitis and poor eyesight.

  Scars on a wrist and internal stitches,

  headaches, PTSD from winter accidents,

  childbirth. Sorry, this is ordinary

  stuff for a cold mother. At the end

  she wants to live in comfort like a pearl in an oyster.

  She can chill here in peace and suck on ice.

  The sun is warm, the northern lights are curtains

  blowing across the heavens to which I float.

  Every faraway ice floe leads to fairies.

  And every boat leads to material sciences.

  I know about both of them

  and I still believe they’re too much alike.

  White icebergs float or sink

  under the wings of Aer Lingus.

  Bling wobbles on a window:

  it’s the sun our beloved.

  See the monk on the Skellig squeeze and rub

  his frosty eyes

  when he spots twelve swans

  and a little girl

  on a purple amethyst in the ocean foam.

  An early scene

  innerly seen:

  random sprays

  of snow across Fresh Pond

  (far below freezing

  in Fahrenheit)

  could be a white man’s torso

  who escaped a hospital

  and shed his sheet and slid

  happily face down on a mud-streaked mass

  of ice. Could be cyclamen

  with its leaves like violets

  or refugee camps in Syria.

  I must not lose heart.

  It takes sixteen years for

  a soul to cross the silvery ice

  to the forbidden fields of grace

  never knowing if it’s fair

  to choose self-starvation over health care.

  I was such a cold mother a mineral was a flower.

  Dear Hölderlin

  (for Maureen Owen)

  Years ago in a migration

  we each carried our own

  rug and pillow,

  telescope and strings.

  Our tent was portable and able

  to be dismantled.

  It could be rolled

  and stuffed very fast.

  Flowers and grass

  still grew freely and sea-lilac

  had already cracked

  the tarmac. So there was sustenance.

  At the estuary nearby

  two continents had split apart

  and a curlew

  flew alone and crying.

  Carefully a book

  would be buried

  with iodine and wine

  and food that doesn’t rot.

  The cross is a good marker

  for an avenue and white clover,

  trampled where little

  sweet pea is growing higher.

  Down the hill comes a poet

  with ginger hair, he puts

  violets inside his hat,

  herbs and water and says:

  There was once music here,

  a round table

  and gang prayer,

  and an exploding glacier.

  Women kept each tent clean

  until one cried,

  I’m going to take care

  of myself.

  We heard her packing

  the woods into her tote

  like a nymph

  managing a shipwreck.

  After that, for us all

  empathy was our only hope.

  A Vision

  Some old people want to leave this earth and

  experience another.

  They don’t want to commit suicide. They want to

  wander out of sight

  without comrades or luggage.

  Once I was given such an opportunity, and what did

  I find?

  Mist between mountains, the monotonous buzz of

  farm machinery,

  cornstalks brown and flowers then furrows

  preparing to receive seeds for next year’s harvest.

  A castle, half-ruined by a recent earthquake still

  highly functional.

  Computers, copying machines and cars.

  It was once a monastery and home for a family

  continually at war.

  Cypress trees and chestnut and walnut trees. A swing

  hanging long from a high bough,

  where paths circle down, impeding quick escapes by

  armies or thieves.

  I was assigned the monastic wing that later became

  a granary.

  Brick-red flagstones, small windows with hinged

  casements

  and twelve squares of glass inside worn frames.

  From the moment I entered the long strange space,

  I foresaw an otherworldly light taking shape.

  Scorpions lived in the cracks.

  I came without a plan, empty-handed except for my

  notebooks from preceding days.

  This lack was a deliberate choice: to see what would

  be revealed to me by circumstances.

  I took long walks that multiplied my body into

  companionable parts.

  Down dusty roads and alongside meadows,

  and pausing to look at the mountains and clouds,

  I talked to myself.

  Mysticism “provides a path for those who ask the way

  to get lost.

  It teaches how not to return,” wrote Michel de Certeau.

  One day I had the sense that there were two boys

  accompanying me everywhere I went.

  I could not identify the boy on the left,

  but the one on the right was overwhelmingly himself.

  Someone I knew and loved.

  The other one was very powerful in his personality,

  an enigma and a delight.

  His spirit seemed to spread into the roads and

  weather.

  Silver olive trees and prim vineyards.

  Now a rain has whitened the morning sky but every

  single leaf holds a little water and glitter.

  Mirror neurons experience the suffering that they see.

  A forest thick with rust and gold that doesn’t rust.

  I saw a painting where the infant Jesus was lying on

  his back

  on the floor at the feet of Mary

  and his halo was still attached to his head.

  And another painting where there were about forty

  baby cherubs

  all wearing golden halos. Gold represents the sun as

  the sun represents God.

  Outside wild boars were still roaming the hills.

  Maize, sunflowers, honey, thyme, beans, stones,

  olives and tomatoes.

  Rush hour in the two-lane highway.

  Oak tree leaves curled into caramel balls.

  A Franciscan monk sat on a floor reciting the rosary, a concept borrowed from Islamic prayer beads centuries before.

  Figs, bread, p
asta, wine and cheese.

  These are not the subconscious, but necessities.

  People want to be poets for reasons that have little to

  do with language.

  It is the life of the poet that they want, I think.

  Even the glow of loneliness and humiliation.

  To walk in the gutter with a bottle of wine.

  Some people’s lives are more poetic than a poem

  and Francis is certainly one of these.

  I know, because he walked beside me for that

  short time

  whether you believe it or not. He was thirteen.

  That night I drank walnut liqueur, just a sip, it tasted

  like Kahlua.

  The inner wing of a bird is the color of a doe.

  And the turned-over earth is the color of a nut, and a bird,

  but soon it will be watered for the green wheat of spring.

  Flying up the hill on the back of the motorbike in the warm Roman air was like drinking from the fountain of youth.

  Umbrella trees along the Tiber.

  I walked on the rooftops across Rome, including a grassy one, and one where a palm grew out of a crack in the rocks.

  I was carrying an assortment of envelopes containing paintings and notes for my Mass but they could not be managed easily because their shapes were irregular.

  Some had juttings, some were swollen, the color red was prominent. They depicted divided cities, divided into layers, not all in a line. A layer cake sagging under the weight of accumulated dust, dirt and now grass.

  Each layer had been purchased at the cost of decades, even centuries of hand-hurting, back-breaking slave labor. Caveat emptor!

  Broken columns, mashed marble friezes and faces. The triumph of greed

  was written across my storyboard. The city was a

  mighty and devouring creation,

  a creature with a crusted skin.

  Even in the city you look for a place that welcomes you. You actually want to be found!

  Being found is the polar opposite of making a vow.

  You are a pot of gold and not the arc of the rainbow.

  When you sit down on a stone, face up to the sun, you can’t help but think, Mine, mine.

  And you don’t have to promise anything to anyone in time.

  You may be called to a place of banality or genius,

  but as long as it is your own happiness that responds to it,

  you are available to something inhuman.

  Mozart sat at the piano for the better part of every day.

  All over the world monks have lived in desert hovels as scribes, prophets, mendicants.

  They are the extreme realization of one aspect of human personality

  that tends towards lack of possession and solitude.

  There was a hole in the roof of the Pantheon where

  we were told

  that the snow fell through onto the relics of Catherine of Siena

  the mystic and onto the porphyry.

  A man in Rome told me that a monkey climbed down a wall

  holding an infant in his arms and in remembrance

  there is a statue of the Madonna

  on the very rooftop where he began his descent.

  Alas

  For you, what is happiness?

  Black tiles and slant

  of ribbed clouds.

  A child’s rainbow

  with a house under it.

  Clothes in the washer

  clapping all night.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks as ever to the editors of Graywolf Press and to the staff and atmosphere of the Vermont Studio Center and to the kind people of Civitella Ranieri. For help along the way, my thanks to Rae Armantrout, Christian Wiman, William Corbett, Carolyn Forché, Isaac Slater, Richard Kearney, Elizabeth Robinson, Linda Norton, Carmine Cerone, Xandra Bingley, Lynn Christoffers, and to the exemplary life of Joeritta de Almeida.

  I would like to thank the editors of the following publications that published my poems and the poems of so many others:

  American Poet, The Baffler, Consequence, The Economy, Epiphany, Fact-Simile, Fire (UK), Golden Handcuffs, The Harvard Review, The Lamb (Song Cave chapbook), New Orleans Review, Pataphysics, Paul Revere, Plume, Poetry, The Straddler, Talisman, The Volta, and Water~Stone Review.

  Fanny Howe is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including most recently Come and See, The Lyrics, and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation. She received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement, and she has won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. She lives in New England.

  The text of Second Childhood is set in Minion Pro, an original typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in 1990. Book design by Ann Sudmeier. Composition by BookMobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.

  Table of Contents

  Half Title Page

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Contents

  Dedication

  For the Book

  The Garden

  Parkside

  My Stones

  Evening

  Xing

  Between Delays

  For Miles

  Loneliness

  The Monk and Her Seaside Dreams

  Second Childhood

  Progress

  Why Did I Dream

  Flame-Light

  The Cloisters

  Angelopoulos

  Sometimes

  A Child in Old Age

  Born Below

  The Coldest Mother

  Dear Hölderlin

  A Vision

  Alas

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author