Sheila Black

FOR AVALON

We know better than
present-tense

the velvet of recede--

hands wave useless
dictions

the mouth as you find it:
a blood-rag

the body ever the scar
of itself, and if

I had just once, I had--

what rift? The body which
always separates each

from each, self from self
so I write you still:

I could not have breathed then.
I could not have kept breathing.

* * *

THE ASHES

John Keats: [about writing poetry] It ought to come like leaves to a tree, or it better not come at all.

It's bad to write one a day when they
should come like leaves. Bad but cheaper
than therapy.To be alone.To be
alone and alive.The child with marbles.
In the corner.In the dust. Two crossed sticks,
A ghost of a leaf. Once the bright water
filling my room at night. As if the sky was
a sea I could sail across. I watched the moon
and I wore a brace, pins that screwed
tight and the pain was an orange flower with
a red inside. In every garden a dream.In
every garden a face. I used to think God
was just this--the need to feel a watcher. But
in that room, that sea of night, I watched
only myself. Sometimes with no reason
I turned giant, but the world expanded
too, my back yard a field so vast I could
never cross it were I my ordinary size.

They should come like leaves, because we
still make art in imitation of nature. The frozen
face of the dancer on the TV testifies how
difficult the imitation. "She does not look
real, we say," but of course, she is. The boat
leaks, the boat sinks. Silence and stars
and large water. I once loved a sycamore
as painfully as if it were a person.
As if it could hear me and feel my thoughts
when I touched its rough bark. I was young
and mad, and at night I wore a brace that
laced me in leather, that held me in steel

No one escapes 'a knowledge of
pain.' In the oldest garden, the red flower--
It is beautiful; it is dangerous. Once the girl
sees it she knows the story of fruit, the
saga of seed, which is simply to grow and
decline. The dust in the mouth, etcetera.
That dream going on and on like a bobbing boat.
The simplest story. Child and forest,
child and path like a bone in the moonlight.
They have scattered the crumbs. They mean
well. They are waiting to see where she
will go.

Sheila Black was the 2000 US co-winner of the Frost-Pellicer Frontera Prize, given annually to one US and one Mexican poet living along the US Mexico border. Her collections include Love/Iraq (CW Press 2009), House of Bone (CW Press 2007), and a chapbook, How to be a Maquiladora (Main Street Rag 2007). She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos, 2011).