Shirley Powell is one of a small circle of
poets who astonished New York and other poetry centers in the
1970s and 1980s with a new romanticism that shed modernism with
all its cynical baggage. Lyrical, supernatural, narrative, and
deft in portrayal of characters, Powell's poems startled many
with their freshness, and their sense of being narrated by a timeless
voice.
She is a prairie twister of a poet. Her people and animals
occupy a remembered world of small town and rural America, but
they are real--they breathe, dream, bleed and die. Her ghosts
and demons spring not from myth, but from your grandmother's rocking
chair. This book selects 80 poems from the very best of Powell's passionate,
spooky, romantic, and haunting poems. Other Rooms, first published as a hand-bound book in 1997, has been unavailable for some time, and we are deligjhted to bring it back into print. A Poet's Press Grim Reaper Book, $13.95. 6 x 9 paperback, 112 pp. ISBN 978-0-922558-36-0. Click HERE to order from AMAZON.
"She offers original visions of country living, strange
tales unadorned with sentimentality... she merges with nature
like a Native American, sensually and wholly, chewing bark of
sycamore, wearing necklaces of shark's eggs, drinking rain pools."
"A book to receive without prejudiced
expectations, letting in its wildness and innocence and rediscovering
your own images of trees, earth, water, 'the moon's clothed brightness'
and snow..."
"Who is this superb poet? ... she is capable
of an intense poignancy in reflection, and she is mightily concerned
with what it means to be a human among humans and with what it
means to be a creature among creatures. She hides herself behind
each page...because she is capable of hiding herself... such ability
is power manifest.
"This is the poetry of softly padded feet...of
coolly driven power, fried dough and shelter that is based in
the sun... their proletarian dignity had me spinning in my stool...They
cancel our obligation to 'night of the living victim' and weaving
a Wordsworthian quilt they open our souls to little and familiar
things. Shirley Powell deftly mists us in nature to break our
bondage to the laundry list of life."

Copyright 1975, 1984, 1986,
1997, 2009 by The Poet's Press
All Rights Reserved
Some of the poems in this book have
appeared in Rooms in 1984, reprinted in 1986, and in May
Eve: A Festival of
Supernatural Poems (1975), Parachutes (1975),
Alternate Lives (1990), and
Villages and Towns (1993)
Some poems in this volume first appeared
in Alphabeat Soup, Echoes, Home Planet News, Light, Stone Soup
Poetry (Boston), Oxalis, Concepts, Indigo, Mysterious Barricades,
Third Thing, Poets Fortnightly, The Woodstock Times and Ball
State University Forum.
This is the 146th and 178th publication of
THE POET'S PRESS
279-1/2 Thayer Street
PROVIDENCE, RI 02906
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Legions
of Bats
In the
Beginning
Steel
in the Fingers Writes This Line
The User
Just Before
the Migration
Seventy
Years Ago
Rat Hunt
Puma
Mad Woman
At the
Bar
Getting
Thicker
Gypsy
Earth
Song
When Will
It Happen
There
Is a Box
There Is
a Sphinx
Grammarian's
Poem
Clock Shock
Alley
Oop
Under
the Lighthouse
The Daughter
Speaks
Boy in a
Bubble
Woods,
Ruth Woods
First
Magic
The Quarrel
Margot
Country
Visit
About Barbara
Real Poet
Going
After Cows
The Fish
Continues
Owl's Hunt
The Worm's
Turn
For Snow
A Druid's
Tale
Speech by
an Old Deity
Freaks
The Chair
PLUS MANY MORE POEMS IN THE PRINTED VERSION
OF THE BOOK!
ABOUT
THE POET
LEGIONS
OF BATS
Legions of bats
stiff draperies of wings
hung on
the walls
their shadows
behind them
under them
stone corridors
in the grip
of the river
a fortress
of night,
around couches
of air
damp with
mammalian sleep
then the host
the fluttering
army
spreading
worn crusted wings
into sky
netting the moon
in webbed
fingers
their branches
crying their cryless cries
echoing
over the cliffs
and the
canyons
into pastures, and plummeting like
splashes
of night
falling
on drowsing cattle
cutting,
lapping
from
necks of the beasts
dumb under
moon
trickles
of blood
dark
on their wrink-
ling
hides
the winged ones rising
doing slow
dances in air
sending
their silent trills
over stone
still river
flying away from the moon
to their
stations
their shadows
keeping their hours, their days
blood bubbles
cleansing
their hard
little teeth.
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
IN THE BEGINNING
First lullaby?
Hunter crying for meat?
Widow's lament?
What was the first poem, where?
Can't find it in
artifacts mastodon bones
spread out on a dry creek bed
But I know it
in throat and fingers
hear it when the leaves fall
down to sleep
I write that
first poem to you over and over
as it comes to me
Time doesn't vanish
Once and once more
we raise our animal heads
stand on two legs
rename the stars
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
STEEL
IN THE FINGERS WRITES THIS LINE
Steel in the fingers writes
this line.
What can be done, must be done
with steel.
Somewhere someone is pressing
a bell
but is it where another
waits for the sound?
The line is written,
flung across these spaces.
The buzzer urges,
sightless...
at a twisted gate
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE
USER
Fog arms reach
and fall away
while the steady car
tracks the road.
Farmhouses waver back long
lanes
country bridges
catch at me hurrying
animals dash at my wheels
Those others beyond the clouded
windows
rush by me unhappily;
I am too transitory
to be real.
I know there is no destination
I know I am the traveler
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
JUST
BEFORE THE MIGRATION
Something hard killed your
feet
Your thin unfeathered legs splayed
from the solid rest of you
propped on your fanned and banded tail.
Alert you watched us
twitching our nervous towels
You couldn't uncurl your
blade-tipped toes
couldn't stand
but
your beak was ready as your stern
questionless eyes
You fluttered still-strong wings
when we brought a box
that could hold you
No cats came.
Your thud at the window had
brought
us but no
other
predators
Then one foot straightened
as
if
you'd been dissembling
the other tingled alive
You shifted the sharp shins
of your name
golden and firm under you.
A finch at our feeder
didn't distract
Your mottled breast bunched you
lifted taking your weapons
intact
No mercy in your coming or
your going
Mercy belongs to the nest
and you know
the nest is far away
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
SEVENTY
YEARS AGO
Seventy years ago my grandmother
rode a spring
wind to church
and was
married
looking around the still room
to see if the
man she loved
was a witness.
ample black hair puffed on
her head
eyes lively
mouth just
missing a pout
gown to
the chin
to
the wrists
to
the floor
delicate
fingers on the young farmer's arm ...
Her lover stayed away,
was shot in a barroom brawl the next
year.
She went to Montana and lived
in a tarpaper shack
snakes crawled
under it
wolves visited
children
were born and no
doctor
women met in tunnels of snow
to
exchange remedies
and when spring came
she sometimes
took the horse
after
cattle
riding away
and away
while her
young ones watched
from
the door.
She has lived to be old
buried her
husband
two grandchildren,
seen her
children grow lean
and
grayheaded . . .
she sleeps in the long afternoons
dreaming of prairies
of wildcats that lived in the coulees,
of a lover
who
didn't come back-
she stands at a window
watching a country road.
He is walking toward her
tall and
bareheaded
whistling
and laughing
ready at
last
to turn
her life
another
way
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
RAT
HUNT
From the roof
where sky
hangs black
over gray
gold city
the man moves down
hearing
his heels hollow on stairs
as he passes
windows blank as walls.
The cat
crouches underneath
black
gray gold eyes in the dark
the cat
sees dawn on the roof
sleeps noon on the landing
hunts night below the
house
arched on splintered step
claws caught in the wood
waiting for rats
hard
squeals warm fur
red
blood in corners.
The cat
feeds in a pool of black
as the man's heels ring hollow
all the way
down
the stairs.
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
PUMA
(After Walter Van Tilberg Clark's
Track of the Cat)
Began uneasy night
the lips
of the dogs quivered in song under trees
where the
great cat had wandered.
Snow hung on the horses' hooves and their breathings
piled
in layers
on
air.
We hunted the cat
with wind
on the lake, crying its name
to the dark
for the dark's reply
Dogs and horses and men
staggering
and slipping
into a cold
ravine saw
the silhouette
heard
the feline's
snarl felt
its muscles
gather smelled
the blood
flash
when the brood mare fell, rolling and wild
cat clamped
to her neck
claws clutching
her ribs
then leaping
away
dogs thick on the hill, men
cursing and turning
their
jumping mounts
shouts that the sky swallowed up
cat
was gone
air
was empty
then they shot the mare.
Drink from the cold flask,
men
into the
saddles and home
the cat walks its way in the forest
dogs rest for another day,
horses browse in the fields,
men fall into their beds
while
the
wild thing follows
wind
and snow
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
MAD WOMAN
I, Mabel, hear the years buzz
Someone
said what happened to Mabel
whose mother
burned houses
and someone
answered they took her away
one afternoon.
She said her room was fur
and would
kill her with its great wings
I hear the years buzz
In the hall
there were owls
and cranes
with necks like esses
webbed feet
of frogs that were men
that suddenly
were men
I locked
my door
there were
rabbits many weaving
long
circles
round
my room
I ran to
the window
nuns walked
near the convent
I called
and called
after awhile
men who were tall
broke open
the door
that the
dark green snails
had sealed
firm
I was carried
bandaged in blankets
unable to
do more than wink
down a long
stair
heads sat
on the banisters
watching
Now, I sit in a chair
painting
white pictures
nobody sees
them but me
safer so
I have gilded my arms with a pigeon's blood
and my captors are animal lovers
Sometimes I think of the nuns
they never
come here
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
AT THE BAR
It was one of those nights
when I was standing at the bar
I saw a man bring his hallucination
in
It sat beside him (next to
me)
He didn't buy it a drink
but patted it from time to time
when it seemed restless
Just one more drink and we'll go home
he
said
A shadow
seemed to grow there
I saw a tear fall on the bar
Wait here, he told it and went back
to
the men's room
I watched
it for him
After awhile I touched
its hand
And that was the beginning
the
edge
of all the
rooms
that I keep going through.
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
GETTING THICKER
I think the walls are getting
thicker
I don't hear people making love of mornings
any more
I thought if the telephone
rang more often
the electromagnet might revitalize the
air in here
Maybe I'll begin drinking and
then I won't remember
there were thinner walls once even
windows
I dream of doors but
have forgotten how they look
I almost (in my dream) remember
I wake up
almost remembering
Today I will walk through a
wall
breathing
may not be possible
I
practice
not
breathing
It seems to me the walls are
breathing now
I am lost in the walls like
a rat scratching
Maybe you
will hear me after midnight
maybe
you will make a window
or
a door
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
GYPSY
You know everything.
I turn and find the room
is full
of smoke
At night in a forest
owls
sit on your shoulders
You draw crimson wings
on windows
I am under your bed like a nail in a box.
You trace a spider's web against
the blaze
When the fire is over
you
will pass through like a finger
of smoke
I
will stay under your bed in a box.
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
EARTH SONG
Sun sings to earth in a silvering
the
turn of a wing
in
a sunpoint
brings wholeness brings music a
clearing
that moves as I move
that
grows in the rocks
the rocks never
die
in them are the bones
the
deep places
of
evening
I have gone by and gone by
on
this road
till
the going is in me
the
wander of water on rocks
the rocks never die
Sun sings to earth
the turn
of a wing
I have gone by
I
am the sinew of shadow
that
heralds deep places
in
evening
I have gone by.
the rocks
never die
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
WHEN WILL IT HAPPEN
Dog's
body at the side of the road
man with twisted legs lying in a ditch
truck carrying thunder down the hill
floating, faces cold in water, those two
girls
But those were dreams
Inside
my ribs or somewhere
locked in my blood grains
the killer feeds and grows
he'll
have me sometime, that vengeful one
it may be night I'll
be an animal
dazed by rushing lights
These are not the thoughts
I want to think
I didn't ask you to come here looking:
since you did I'll tell you this, that
we will all cry murder sometime.
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
THERE IS A BOX
There is a box of salt
with
a girl on it
she has an umbrella
and
a box of salt
under
her arm
with
a girl on it
she has an umbrella
and
a box of salt
under
her arm
with
a girl on it
she
and poems are like that
they keep
being themselves
forever
they keep
wrapping
and
unwrapping
and there
are poems
inside
them
that
look like them
until the last shred of skin
is
peeled away
by that time the poet
should
be dead
but even then
she will give
one
more twitch
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
THERE
IS A SPHINX
There is a sphinx sitting on
my desk
paws folded lemon
eyes filtering light
the sphinx has not smiled or spoken
sometimes in the night it will
sing without moving its mouth
It is telling me something
inside the hard rind of my dreams
Its stone will grow fur here
When its sides begin wrinkling
in and then out
I will catch its breaths
in quartzite
build it a moon pool
under my bed where
it can study its face
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
GRAMMARIAN'S
POEM
Buckminster Fuller said,
" I seem to be a verb."
That made me think.
My granddad was a genuine article,
my cousin Jill an adjective
modifying every
person, place or thing.
Some men I've known are
mostly ejaculations.
The Jones we keep up with
must be prepositions:
They have so many objects.
And politicians?
They'd be pronouns,
saying they stand for
something of substance
till after the election.
As for me, I'd like to be
a conjunction,
joining all the lost parts
until my life's sentence
has more meaning.
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
CLOCK
SHOCK
and they said that on top of
this
building uptown
there was a clock
they
said
it never rang the hours
but
they kept it there
sometimes the hands would fly around
the face
sometimes the face would spin around
the hands
and
when the moon was in eclipse
something would happen
underneath
the clock
at least
some angel
hair would fall
or a poem would be born
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
ALLEY OOP
My pup and I were in the big
kitchen
with a wood stove
Grandma's kitchen
I climbed on her stool
to open a cabinet door
where she kept
banana
candy
marshmallows
spearmint
gum
Reaching I leaned too much
stool wavered underneath
fell
I slid off
onto a black and white floor
My knee was bleeding
Mama came running from the living room
Grandma followed
"Oh,
what's she done now?"
They lifted me
righted the stool
Alley Oop my little dog
black and white like the floor
lay where the stool had fallen
not moving
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
UNDER THE LIGHTHOUSE
(for my grandmother)
there were certain dreams you
told me
a
litany
I on my cot beneath the lighthouse picture
in
its oval frame
you massaging my thin leg
then bracing
it against a pillow
You told me of girls with handsome
legs
figure
skating
tales
of athletes
being
crowned
whipped
cream wishes
perfections
like a mountain
of
strawberries
or
an island
of
iced melons
You
fed me
favorite
dreams
your
fingers probing my dead
muscles
That's why the painting of
the lighthouse
shining
in the moon
still
makes me sleepy
makes
me smile
gives
me
vague and
lovely dreams
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE DAUGHTER SPEAKS
I begin to say
it is the noon sun that I have to
meet
questions you've never asked
are falling to the floor
evaporating
light in the room wavers
When you lay down that autumn
did you think of rivers shining?
Coupling on the new sheets
did you prophesy?
The mirrors glisten.
I begin to say I have to
go now
like a severed arm I
move off toward the East.
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
BOY
IN A BUBBLE
1
I know a boy who lives in a bubble.
It keeps him alive
he smiles at me
I wave to him every day
My parents say he can't come
out yet.
I wave to him through a window
I think his bubble grows smaller
at night stays
on the ceiling over my bed
in
the morning it's gone.
I wish I could visit him in there.
2
I am a woman whose son lives
in a bubble.
he plays bouncing and running
inside it
sleeps on
a plastic floor
I am a woman whose
touch will kill her son
3
I am a boy who lives in a bubble.
I have always been here.
Air outside is different
there are birds in it
I can get out if I want to
or
I can wait till the others let me.
Then no one will look at me
but it will not be safe
The others think if they ask
me to come out
I will come out.
They think if they tell me to stay in
I will stay in.
This is what they think. They
have plans
They decide When
I laugh I laugh at them
I am getting stronger taller
preparing
for a certain day like the day
that came once
when I wasn't
ready
Black birds flew by the window crying for me
on
the right day
my
magic bubble knows
it
will have to break
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
WOODS, RUTH WOODS
Every day Rafe left Ruth
in the woods that was his name
Woods and he called her by it
Ruth Ruth Woods
In the wind they moaned those
frigging pine trees and
oaks scraped each other
A house down the lane had
children in it
little white girls came
to call Ruth made them cookies
taught them songs
brushed that long blonde hair
no wonder Indians lifted scalps
that hair was nice
Rafe wouldn't take her into
town he
left her there till
after dark and hoot owls
made her light up
all the rooms
He was making money hauling
trash
Get me a new truck he would say
Look how we live here
Ruth complained it ain't no life
What's wrong with it, Ruth,
Ruth Woods?
You lucky you got a man
She'd shut up
before Rafe got ugly
Kept her house pure clean
so they couldn't talk about
no shiftless darkies
and then the peddler came
sold her a knife she didn't want
then told her she could
keep it for nothing and
taught her some new tunes
a dance step too
bought her a gold ring
she had to hide
kept coming back and saying
she should
meet him in town
When Rafe found out
he took the knife to her
and she ran out into
the so black woods
Ruth! Ruth Woods! he
called to her but
she was gone
Come Saturday the neighbors
went a-hunting for her among
the pines and oaks
the sleepy owls
But she was gone
for good like
somebody scooped her up
and took her down to Tupelo
The white girls missed those
cookies
and those songs
At night they thought
they heard the pine trees singing
Ruth Ruth Woods
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
FIRST MAGIC
Long room full of six year
olds
I am teacher with a little edge of mercy left
You are student
blank and listening
leaning elbows on
an old desk
I
catch a corner of your nine o'clock dream
you
think of spaces around words on paper
You will remember dull walls
Catholic saints
homilies
your old desk
scarred and bearing your thumb prints
Leaning over the new words
you have written
you
stare at me In one fist you carry them
smudged running together to
me
"Teacher, what do they say?"
Do you know better than I
that we are all mysteries?
Out of us
come stars which line the cool East
with firefaced Messiahs
Out of us
comes abracadabra
Out of us and our old desks
comes the beginning of sorrows
the beginning
twists
in
our memories
plays back
the anthems of Mars
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE
QUARREL
When you rang the doorbell
none of the closets would open.
Did you notice the chair
folded into a corner
when you came in?
The wastebasket flattened
along the rug
the fireplace shrank
the window fan churned glass
wiping stripes of moonlight
on the walls
The room was stiff for storm
sliding in and out of our breaths
scratching when we spoke
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
MARGOT
Margot in
her last years wore
quiet makeup
black slippers
long skirts and
long sleeves over thin
arms.
She had two gods she named
Love and Art
Her aura was mystery edited
often,
quick-quilted
fictions to
decorate
all her hours.
One day a shadow fractured
her word dazzle
She leaves us in silence, her
eyes
finally hard and terrible.
She lies on a strange bed,
grown away from her body
that aged in spite of all her will.
Her new lover woos her now
from a
distant
place:
a god who will lie with her
always
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
COUNTRY VISIT
for Emilie Glen
You saw a snowy owl
that was really an arm
of a white birch tree.
You saw fire-eyed phantom deer
in smeared dark
beyond car windows;
you saw chimney smoke as a
woman
sifting your hair in
her aromatic fingers.
You ran from our thick spring
mud
that sucked at everything,
insatiable baby.
Fallen trees made a bruise
on some dream you were having-
you screamed your way from rock to rock
and nourished your feet at a waterfall.
You felt the close bald stars
making fear shadows
which our moon pulls by ...
You went home
and wrote a poem.
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT
BARBARA
No copy I,
as she once thought;
nor copy she, it's true.
She was like me,
and I, like her;
but we were different, too.
She stared the moon
full in its face
and never could withdraw,
while I,
more tender of my needs,
lived ravenous and raw.
We both saw monsters
clearly, fondling them
like snakes.
She, bitten first, subsided
while I invent
escapes
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
REAL POET
On the death of Barbara
Holland
My eyes hurt.
I think of hers,
so blurred she learned
to speak the lines
without seeing them
She burned all messages,
leaving only the poems
alive.
Even she, the marvel-maker,
drifts now
and her words go out,
sparkles beyond my fingers
to touch, my mouth
to try.
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
GOING AFTER COWS
Granddad led the way
to gray boulder
(duck landing) to cross the branch
and then uphill
The bellwether
came even before
he slipped the halter
on her neck
She followed
down through daisies
and wild carrot
to pig sties and
to barns
Animals always did
what Granddad wanted.
Even the sick hen lay still
while he reached inside her
with a spoon to take her egg
"I thought it mighta
broke in there," he told me.
He cut off the heads of cockerels
every week at an old tree stump
He'd turn them free to flop
The other chickens watched but
didn't run away
When he went after cows
the cows came as if
he had holy wafers
in his dusty pockets
as if he knew the real
names of those cows
their long-ago desires
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE FISH CONTINUES
The
fish has died before this
if
it is a fish
it moves though water
as
a thought
given flesh
might
swim
Each panel it makes
and pushes
aside
to get to the place
it is going again
The fish has lived before this
if it is a fish it is not
puzzled
at the sameness
of
its dream
it hunts out the identical water
the exact
molecules
that caressed its length
before
this
after
this
The fish continues
if
it is a fish
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
OWL'S
HUNT
Owl in halflight
trailing cobwebs of old stars
over meadows
blood of small things
whirs
in your long feathered ears
In the first stops of light
sounds sink to earth
and are frozen
as
your wings seem in mid-flight
White roads wrench underneath
you
lean trees rise
and the mercy of daylight
draws back
as you fly
as you call
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE WORM'S TURN
All around us is a sound continuous
like rain
but not rain.
Bits of leaves lace the ground
thick caterpillars fall and crawl and eat
We have killed them all day.
Juices of green growing things spurt
from them their black coverings erupt
they
die
on our fingers
under foot
Their twins remount the buildings
climb trees
drop from roofs
munch every leaf.
They
come we kill they come
There is a sound everywhere
around us
a sound of soft devouring
steady
uncontrollable
like
rain
GO BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOR
SNOW
I lived in snow, a snow house
while the white sky peeled
and slipped down
gathered by trees and the glad ground.
and I lived in snow
wore it for hats heaped it over the hours
ate it as it turned to nothing
under my tongue
It was no misfortune living
in snow
sodden and chill
watching it fall and grow
fall and grow
I chewed bark of an old sycamore
tough leftover fern
dried blueberries
hard on their canes
from the summer
the few hickory nuts squirrels missed
Living in snow sledding
the hills building ethereal castles
I animated snowwoman
carrying my dead white burden
everywhere
Of course I was frozen alive
to be found in somebody's April
lying in a flooded field crying
for snow.
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A DRUID'S TALE
I will tell you
your next dream
There is a hemlock with a gaping
thick lipped
mouth
in its side
You walk down a long hill
in
the country
fallen leaves hide spiders
doodle
bugs
snakes
spring peepers
bounce their voices
through
the wet woods
You watch this tree
trading
places among
other
trees
sometimes it dozes on the hillside
mouth
agape for breathing
other times you've found it
by
a stream
screaming a frozen
warning
you
think you can almost hear
The other day you sit home
at your dining room table
pausing between spoonfuls
of yogurt
The tree with its staring wound
rattled your window
you jump and fling down
the blind.
It's this tree or you
odds
favor the tree
which refuses
to honor
the ancient customs of trees
while you are a traditional person who
thinks that when in the country
you
must walk in the woods.
Now there are many trees, mostly
the beeches
that tremble as you pass
under
their burgeoning leaves
spirit
holes widen
their voices come to you as you move
down the hill
you
had thought
the
spring peepers
were making this clatter
but it is really the forest itself
Someday soon you'll decipher
the language
they quaver, the hickories, the maples
for
it is easy
the
maimed sentinel tree
tries to show you
"You are one of us,"
is the message.
"Come join
us."
Sap congeals on
your skin,
bark grows
a
dainty oak leaf
lifts
itself out of your finger
What if you don't wake up?
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SPEECH
BY AN OLD DEITY
I am the trees,
and
the trees are breaking.
Cold fog presses my eyes
with
its negligent thumbs ...
I am your enemy
weakening
walls which
the
currents
caress.
Why do you call to me over and over,
standing
a long time in the road,
creek water tasting your lavender
feet?
The maelstrom is silent.
Every cloud falls without sound--
All around you branches are broken
and
floating-
I am the trees: the hickories,
oaks, the pines,
and
the water-soaked birches.
I have always been
only
the trees
and
the trees are
breaking.
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FREAKS
Freaks with their crazyquilt
faces
lumped backs mismatched
arms and legs
freaks have their eyes on you
Freaks remember.
They follow you through doorways
sidling under your arms
they are thinking an old conversation
that doesn't begin or end
they show their stumps roll their tongues
but do not
speak
You will have to guess their
screams
pick the
pits of their thoughts
out
of your breakfast
On a fast elevator they
are leaning
toward
you
trying as always to capture
your stare
they smile;
perhaps they will
entertain
they preen and fawn at your knees
into the wells of their eyes your face
disappears
They are strengthened You jerk to an exit
drag
a club foot
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THE
CHAIR
It was a rocker
old
and armless
sitting by an
upstairs window
where the seven
sisters slept ...
It belonged to the grandmother
it
came with her from Ireland
when
she was sixteen
It rocked with its own squeak
a sort of cracking sigh
and no one used it but the grandmother
who
sometimes sat there
piecing
quilts ...
The girls who slept in that
room
often
woke at night
to the familiar squeaking
sound
and watched the rocker
rocking slowly
and
then faster
and
then faster
no one sitting
in it
They'd cover up their heads and try to sleep
The smallest girl occasionally would sleepwalk
she rode the rocker on those nights
faster faster fast asleep
Her sisters woke her gently as they could
and she
would scream with fright
at waking in the rocker
that
could rock
alone
One night when there was moonlight
all around
the sisters heard
a rattling at
the
window
they shivered though the air was warm
the
rocker
began
rocking
wider
and wider
fasterfaster
turning
and turning
It fell on one side and almost
like a live thing
came
to rest. One of the
rungs
had broken
The grandmother died that
night
full
of years
and
almost blind
The sisters were so frightened of the chair
their father tore the
rocker
into parts and burned
it all for firewood
in
the wintertime
And as the last of it was burning black
the
door to the upstairs began
to open and to
close
there
was a coldness
on the stairs
that seldom went away
They lay at night and dreamed the rocker had
returned
they thought they heard
it rocking
the youngest girl would sleepwalk nights
and ride the invisible
rocker
until
she fell exhausted
to
the floor
Her sisters were too terrified to wake her
One morning when they lifted
her
they found her dead
and after that the rocking stopped
except for
stormy nights
when there were tiny screams
within the walls and the squeak
of a rocking chair
The house is gone now
three
old women still live on
the others dead are
sleeping in the woods
around the house or where the house had been
Their faces all are blurred
their voices are forgotten ...
The living and the dead
slip in and out
of dreams
and there are times when worlds
so intertwined
bleed into
one
another
a chill lies on
the spine
the eyes jerk upward
like
foxes gone to earth
the things that were
have
disappeared
into the things
that are.
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ABOUT THE POET
Shirley Powell began her lifelong
poet's journey in third grade in an Ohio hamlet called Reilly,
and her first poems appeared in newspapers and in a collection
of school children's poems published by the state's department
of education. As an undergraduate at Miami University in Oxford,
Ohio, she won two prizes for poems written in college. From then
on, she was hooked on poetry. A major part of her writing life
emerged when she moved to New York City in 1971. She became an
active Greenwich Village poet as the surrealistic and subterranean
found their way alongside her lyrics. Narrative poems flowed from
these as well, and around age 40, she began to publish poems in
magazines. Since then, she has been involved with poetry workshops,
public readings, a literary quarterly (Oxalis), and with
managing various poetry reading series, festivals and contests
in her Upstate New York years. Four books of poetry preceded this
volume.