Holy Night: A (Beth Kephart) Christmas Poem

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Holy Night

  

I thought that I was capable:

A girl with a song

On a night bright with the wide-open eyes of the stars.

My father at the piano,

My brother with the sweet reed of the oboe squeezed

Between his lips,

The crisped-skin fry of the Christmas Eve smelts

         Still in the air,

The stockings hung,

My mother and sister on the couch,

One beside the other.

And I was the one,

I was the one who would sing.

My father, as I have mentioned, was at the keys,

My brother was leaning toward his own notes,

In the house that isn’t ours anymore,

In the room where my mother used to be,

By the tree,

In the hours before what we’d thought we’d wanted

Would be received,

At a time when the eyes of the stars were on us,

And it was my turn to sing.

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Reunion: a Beth Kephart poem

Cleaning out file drawers, I find this poem, crushed between corporate projects. The story of my life, perhaps.

Reunion

Later, above the Thimble Islands,
lightning hooks the ghosts of buccaneers
and pirates.

You can see the ghosts hanging in the wind,
the shag hems of their trousers unraveling
in the channel,
treasure the color of kerosene
at their feet,
their women howling at the winter
seals caught in the cove.

Dry heaves of light,
and then the gloaming.
Leader and streamer,
and then the hooked sky,
and the ghosts in the hook of the sky.
No rain yet.
Rain coming.

Before this you had been standing
on the falling down
part of the hill.
You had been laughing.
Twenty years, someone said,
And no one's changed.

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I Wanted: An Old Poem Revised for the New Year

I Wanted

I wanted the whole moon

white where it is, blue how it falls.

I wanted the earth,

collapsing and folding.

I wanted the ocean to rise

and unberth us.

I wanted the loudest thing

in the morning light

to be my heart,

still beating. 

The short break

in a long poem.

The glass to stop

breaking.

Trespass.

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A New Poem, Flying Chickadee, and the Courageous Creativity Zine

A few months ago, Lorie Ann Grover, a dear friend, talented writer, and founding partner in Readergirlz, introduced me, via email, to Shirin Subhani, the co-creator of Flying Chickadee and the quite original and lovely zine, Courageous Creativity.  Shirin was wondering if I might write a poem on courage for her next issue, and I, thinking about my son's graduation and the uncertain nature of life ahead, said yes.

Within the last few days, this new issue of the magazine has launched, and it is, as I hope you'll see by going to this site, big in both heart and execution. Important stories are here, and so is hope.

Introducing, then, Courageous Creativity, and a poem about a certain boy, called "The Graduate." With thanks to Lorie Ann and Shirin. 

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The Solder of Limb Shade, remembering my mother, five years on

My mother is five years gone this day.  
Two years ago, I wrote this poem for her.  
It still belongs to her.

The Solder of Limb Shade

Where you are is not

where you are,

beneath the granite bench

and the heart-footed deer,

under cover, under the solder

of limb shade.

You are not sunk you are not skidded past

by wind.

You are not level, rise, diaspora, root,

nor the chime, pretty as it is,

above the stone field and its tulips.

But once, in a restaurant,

they played your song,

and the house that I have built from almost nothing

is hung about with birds.

You gave your final word

to me.

You said.

You are.

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Private as a Room: A Poem

In the midst of a swirl of karmic kindness, I have returned to a novel I left standing last April, this one for adults.  Once this novel told the story a poet, and poems advanced the plot. 

If a poet now no longer stands at the center of the book, her poems (which I suppose are my poems) remain.  Here is one.

Private as a Room

You dream a silver fish big as a truck

on a highway, any highway, this could be Mexico,

this could be Guatemala, nevertheless

and regardless, it’s a damned big fish.  You dream

the fish floating but upright, not exerting its gills,

not attempting to fly, eyes the color of pennies

and wide, and the highway you dream is

not a highway but a river in reversals,

running the wrong way toward the sky.

You tell me this in the morning, in winter, by the window

where the sun slides in between the branches of

the red bird’s tree, and you might as well

be speaking of the Apian Way, or the color white

in Mykonos, or that pool of light you photographed

in the cathedral instead of the instructions

of the priest.  For you had seen this fish, and it was

silver as a truck and big, coins for its eyes,

that cauterized quality of dignity, and you said

you thought you dreamed:  This is my gift to you —

this fish, that river, their sky,

in the same way you once said,

Marry me on Samson Street, in winter. 

It was cold then, too, I remember, and the road

was a thick slick of ice and the street

was as private as a room, and there was

nothing in your hands but my hand,

nothing in our pockets but time.

And yes, I’ll marry you.

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Figures of Speech, a poem revisited

In the early years of this blog, when I was writing and posting poems, I posted this one.  It has become, over the years, one of the most visited posts on my blog; the vast majority of those who seek the page hail from the Philippines.  Because "Figures of Speech," about the young man now headed off for his senior year of college, is still essentially true, I revisit it this afternoon. 

Sometimes just a few white saucers will float down from the sky
and I want to wake you. Snow, I might say. Open your eyes.
Or somebody funny standing on a corner will, apropos of nothing,
throw a jigsaw dance, and I want to instruct, Now there’s a scene
for your next story, as if you were not already
looking through windows.

That’s the hardest part, for me, of getting old — remembering
your independence, asking your opinion before lamenting mine,
understanding that the way I happen to chase hawks at dawn
is something you’ve already made excuses for.

There were years of being your mother when your childhood
was the first childhood, when time was you trailing balloons,
the hat you wore, the afternoon we climbed the rocks in Maine
and squinted at the sun, and that was how I learned love and why
I could not foresee not waking you to snow,
to the first factor in a suburban metaphor.

Time isn’t then anymore. You leave when you want to,
you sing behind your door, you paper the table
with the morning’s news, and in the spaces in between
the instances you spend with me, I am assaulted by the memories
of my own first childhood. I calculate figures of speech at dawn.
I write until I bless us both with losses.

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Berlin: A Prose Poem

We came to Berlin to discover the places in between.  The fresh scrawl of sprayed paint.  The sudden lark of a solemn boy.  The brume that settles just ahead of storm. 

Between buildings resurrected, among sculptures re-adhered, beneath the dome that bowls up and through an effervescent sky, Berlin is defiantly alive.  It is point and color counterpoint, love in the park, a neon thatch of hair, a colossal strike against despair.

Where am I?  The question.

The answer:  We were there.

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Standing with the Narcissi/Beth Kephart Poem

I have denied the dahlias their second season,

leaving their fretwork earthed in for the winter,

their prospects overcome by white ice.

Beneath the lilacs, in the tulip bed,

the gnawing hunger of the mole,

and in the crush of azalea nearest the house,

proof of the deer that came in the season

of my insomnia and flared the window

With its stoked breath.  This leaves

the burden of forgiveness on the red ranunculus

and also the heather, dug in yesterday,

as also the yellow broom that sweeps the teeth

of the iris you sent to me in a box from California,

marked Yours. The burden of living forward

stands with the narcissi.  The burden of truth

with the bleeding heart beside

the shaft of wintered grasses.

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I Wanted (a poem)

I Wanted

I wanted the whole moon

white where it is, blue how it falls.

I wanted the earth,

collapsing and folding.

I wanted the ocean to rise

and unberth us.

I wanted the loudest thing

in the morning light

to be my heart,

still beating. 

The short break

in a long poem.

The glass to stop

breaking.

 

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Budejovicka/Beth Kephart Poem

Budejovicka

It was the way the dust hung, globed and white,

and how every room was square and thumbtacked green

with ivy.  She’d left three slips

drying on the line outside, and a peach on the table,

and the old bear of her winter coat in the closet because it was still,

in some ways, an animal, and, besides, you were only

passing through and it was summer.

You bought a heel of bread at the Metro stop and hung

a paper goose from a hook in the ceiling and when you tell

the story (you tell the story)

the puppets are alive because of you.

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Red. Green./A Poem

She was wrong to think

that his reading one poem

once, decades ago, on the borrowed

third floor of a dreamer’s house,

was an indication.

Wrong to think that he would
read again, or want to,

or ask her to dance,

and mean it, or care

when she said, This book

is for you.  It wasn’t,

he didn’t, he wouldn’t, though

twenty-seven years later

he sliced the red meat

from a tomato and lay it into the sweet

anchovy salt and eighthed

an avocado.  The red

and the green, he said.

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Wanting/Beth Kephart Poem

Wanting only the short break

in the long pause
of a poem,
the scattering of senses.

Wanting the moon to rise upside
right in the sky,
and the dawn to ink pink,
and the earth to stop breaking
into its pieces.

Wanting the loudest thing
in the morning light
to be the heart,
still beating.

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Dance Lesson: A Poem

And I felt then the easing away of the dance,
the not knowing a lien against,
you giving in to my giving up,
and the battle for the samba lost.

We will dance the fox trot like old people, then,
you said,
your feet suddenly sunk into a clobber pose
and your lips pulled in over your teeth.
Remorse was the mood:
yours, mine,
the victims we make of ourselves.

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Baptism/Beth Kephart Poem

The distance between now and then is the ants,
spilled as if from a candy dish
across the wood horizontals of the deck,
and so swiftly organized into cross currents
that I am sent back in time
to the cracked pavement of Ashbourne Hills,
where I sit naked kneed to the sun.

I wear the short pixie hair of a girl
who has not yet come into all her moods.

I have braided the streamers of my brother's new bike.
I have watched him swirl the cul-de-sac
on the balance of two wheels.
I have heard my mother call,
and I am tired out by pride, eyes closed
and socks turned down at the ankle bone,
almost asleep to the dream of a cat nuzzling by.

I am honeysuckle sugar, I am pale, a hollow stem.
The ants are silent, and they come.

I am saved by my own screams,
and by mother's friend. I am lifted up
into Aunt Loretta's arms, carried from the pave,
over the yard, and plunged
into the running-with-water tub of the house
I only just remember the music of.

My dress, my socks, like the black ants drowned.
Something like innocence lost,
something like pride,
except for how, even now,
it is the dream that nuzzles by,

the bend of streaming time,
the distance from then.

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Quaver/Beth Kephart Poem

Now you understand
everything. How it was never
what he said or how he listened,
never the violent grind
of his coffee at dawn,
or the caution: Leave me
to what I am, to my idea
of the intransitive.

It wasn’t the way he kept
the birds in seed
or how time idled
in the architecture
of his afternoons,
or how, at night,
he resolved,
or I should say countered,
distance.

It was color.
It was the way
intimation came to him,
and shade,
the way the paint
roamed a glissade
but would not settle.
His assertion of quaver.

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Jean and Iryna are Dancing: Beth Kephart Poem

And the music is.
And the music is
how Iryna hears it,
how she won’t let it down to the floor
on the power
of its own acquiesce.
How she says
the battering beat is my bones,
it is the affectation of want
over repose,
and by the way,
I will be late, and that will be song.
Take it apart.
Say it again.
The music is
how the one snow thread
of Iryna’s snow dress
snaps,
how it melts,
how it is always Jean’s,
alone.

(I did not take this photograph of this gorgeous and talented couple; it was taken of them at a recent competition in Boston, where they captured the attention of the judges and the fans in major fashion, as they always do. They are on their way. You can see why.)

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Happiness Business: Beth Kephart Poem

This happiness business of yours being
nearly complete, being
I’m not saying
swagger or stomp,
not claiming
the rogue refutation of what
(may we speak honestly?)
is still life as we know it—
which is to say steady on no feet,
and too lovely and perceptible
to save itself.

That is not what I said
or not what I would have said
had you not, again,
been heading out the door—
your cap gyroscoped back
on your head,
your assurances
nineteen years old
and clever,
your words tossed
over the sudden brawn
of your shoulder:
Don't worry it will be late so I won’t wake you.

Absolutely not:
Wake me.

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Ledge: Beth Kephart Poem

The strange knowing between us.
The thin line of nothing
that is the listen,
thigh to thigh.
The untelling of song and the sun
that falls shy.
I am not my age.
I am not who I have been,
or I should say:
Dance is hardly archeological.
It is now, then gone.
It is the hard, soft heart of remembering
when: I moved, I was moved
by the untelling of song.

Sun on the ledge.

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The Dance Lesson: Beth Kephart Poem

You will never be;

you won’t.

Your spine, your face, your hips
are implicated, wrong.
Your balance, meanwhile, is an obstruction to mine
and cricked to a shim.
You have snaggled you have shammed you have embargoed beauty.
You have yelped the discontinuous, and why
would you ever
(answer this)
heel the music
into breaking its own heart?

It was your suspicion of tension
that failed you.
It was your wanting
too much
that forced
the first elision.
The second
erupted from despair.

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