The flight of Jeffrey Midtown to the Bronx & Arguments of the unborn
by Carrie Haber
[ poetry - march 06 ]
The flight of Jeffrey Midtown to the Bronx
I am a refugee to that field of butterflies.
To that valley for cover
From a red social temperature
I wash my hands in the clover
Deep in the purse of the pasture
Whose coins are alive and suck sugar from flowers
I am a butterfly to that field of refugees.
To that stumped-up republic,
I flicker down the hillside grazing powder spots
Across grasses of folks
That mill in the sun and take notes
About futures in water and hedges in boats
And there I am cooled by all the ablutions
And raisins and vinegar
And arranged wedding showers
Where I come from we're no good at futures
Or conversations or even note-taking
Just work and bygones and our swell Hallmark natures
For our paddock of daughters and their ever-afters
For our promising sons and their pigeonshot laughter
For the cans on the fence
For the doorbells of happenstance
For the Starbucks when we get to Providence.
Arguments of the unborn
Night's a steel bucket, with the house on cold stone
And I am awake forming a bone in it
Baby's expanding its knees into my well-being
Its restless hard knobs, its hair and its feet
Arriving by gravity and sugar
And the air doesn't move.
The stars on their crook-necked axis hold still
The autumn sky twists on an angle like a badly-screwed jar top
Where a satellite slips through celestial fêtes
Pretending it's been invited,
As though no one will notice at this hour
The book I've unearthed here, in the woods, on my ancestors -
A Punic War covered, with mold from all the childhood homes
Mating on its pages, its binding, its periods many -
Has me convinced Hannibal's as good a name as any
An hysterical wind rises off the lake:
The laughter of loons, behaving like blood-beasts,
And their thundering wings as they strengthen and wreak
Their flight from this winter, which is coming next week.
And the baby and I writhe around in our growing
Like ridiculous flops
In the company of loons and their hollow-throated arguments
At why the night should not stop
At why the lake should not freeze
And why the fish underneath it should not go to sleep.
