FIRST BOOKS ISSUE
Donna Lewis Cowan
TRANSPLANT
It is what you wanted: to be emptied
and filled. Still it surprised you how
easily you came undone, how simply light
laid down where your mind so long
forwarded its furies, the stilled heart
that planned ahead, rationed, failed.
Now it is ahead of you, the trigger
of a need you didn’t plan for, titanium-lit
in the dark skeleton, crystallized by voltage.
You imagine it keeping you within bounds
like cruise control, binding the inevitable
heart-race in its endless loop -
or is its job to keep up, not decide? -
making your life linear, as if your desires
were riding the scales programmed
in code, to be bucked off at any time.
You think you were saved for a reason,
even found Ararat on a map
so the degrees of latitude and longitude
could help you believe. That is not our world,
we would be the ones left behind.
With its fish-bone creases your scar
resembles a fossil: the evidence that closes
the case, but which further evidence can erase.
VIRGO
She bundles in speechless layers of white,
each curve an afterthought. Her hem
bobbing at her ankles, she holds a shaft of wheat,
an ear of corn, between thin-boned fingers.
She will not raise eyelids, skirts, issues.
Her last cry may be from the belly of a volcano.
She pleases gods.
Her mind wears a scarlet alphabet,
spells out all the names, the midnight harvests,
her body closes with a ring.
She may marry late.
She may never marry.
The lion always comes before her.
Night upon night,
that stiff position
is pinned in the stars.
THE PAINTER
He divided her into eight equal parts
as any artist would, into architecture
and scale. Everything grew from the face,
descended into a pattern of pores.
He spent an hour in yellow, stirring
her eyelids into fire-consciousness.
He wanted to make her see something
outside the picture or beyond
his grey cracked window, hazardously
painted shut. He studied her, surfaced
the drowned anxieties of her skin,
the infant wrinkles. When she spoke
he could feel the image slip
from its solid monument
into division and when her voice
stopped he could assemble the pieces
again, the way a man would see her
without ever knowing her, as if beauty
was a need he could make.
In my basket they lay sober,
CHILDREN
unlit: the unwinding scrolls
of newly-wired fuses.
I plant them in rows, grooming
the soil about the wooden embryos.
Surveyors of a broken sun,
they hum like untuned metal strings.
*
Spring, and their bodies snap
like sprung traps.
They hail revolution in the grass,
leaves lapping into dizzy,
strumming arms. Wide-eyed,
they swell hearts like wings.
*
It was a proud, metal winter,
stinging early March with stiff winds
and drunken rips of rain.
The farmers set out torches
to keep the groves from freezing.
We grazed our fingers
over your burrowing hoods,
pressing petals into their crowns,
warming you until the sun could.
*
Spring, and I watch you from my chair,
streaming electric, gathering gravity
around you like permanent planets.
I imagine the thread of your roots
wrapping this garden up tight -
each segment in the darkness
a maze
of one world finding another.
CLEANING LINCOLN LOGS
The impossible task:
making our leftovers
clean enough for a daughter.
In my hands the dust
patterns like animal tracks,
crosses the abbreviated grooves
worn away by over-love,
the stress of building
and knocking down the structure
too easily, too often.
You empty the scratches
where you etched
letters, initials –
before you knew
how the world
could whittle away
each masterpiece.
Drying in the sun,
they are still alive –
the rings of a hundred years
are captured, translated
into new time. Later
in the red imaginations
of our bodies we build
and burn the cabins;
we burn them
from the inside out.
Donna Lewis Cowan is the author of Between Gods (Cherry Grove Collections, 2012). She attended the MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at George Mason University, and is an experienced technical writer and programmer, as well as a mother and poet. She blogs at http://www.BetweenGods.com.
Cherry Grove Collections is an imprint of WordTech Communications dedicated to the art of lyric poetry. WordTech, one of the the largest poetry publishers in the United States, brings out approximately 50 titles per year under seven different imprints. Reprinted by permission.
Published in Volume 14:1, Winter 2013.