Two Poems
Elaine Terranova
Heat and Light
"I'd rather be a raindrop returned to the sea than a soul in hell."
- Faustus
Struck
From the start, you find no rest. Traffic
from a nearby turnpike. Birds rising
to sing before dawn. Whereas the body
takes so much concentration.
To be human is to be imperfect,
so the soul is always
trying to escape. It creates diversions
such as illness. It leaves in increments.
The body continues, adhering to
its 248 commandments
attached to every function. [End Page 93]
Think: you're a child
with a splinter, a sliver of the world
enters the small precinct of the self
and mother with a needle
probes with fire your mistake.
Then fifty, sixty. Estrogen
gives the illusion you still have a life.
The hormones, little runners
getting ready. Rabbit with a twitching
hind leg. Moist sex, young skin.
Each year, the mammogram:
silhouette of night. Something, mountain,
something, sky.
Stars break through the dark transparency.
Calcifications, a trail
to cells the hormone feeds, not the usual, weak,
with their life sentence. Others,
fire-blackened trees death grows.
I was not a martyr, I was not a saint,
but they pierced my breast
with a needle and cut the rot away.
Visualize, someone says,
the color of earth or sky.
Green as water. Blue, like air.
Let it enter you, fill the shape
first of a foot, then leg, the torso. [End Page 94]
The Treatment
The elevator sinks to that half-life
beneath cement, beneath lead.
The treatment unit.
"You can go back now and change."
Oh, if you could.
In the waiting room, light and dark
clasp fingers like a Valesquez. You wait,
you contemplate your sins. On the table,
magazines thumbed back to pulp. Even the chair
beneath you, an evasion.
Why I slumped where I sat: I was
bowing to the world. Why I read:
I would have been in anyone else's story.
An odd bird, Valesquez. Solitary.
Some said, a hawk. The way
he swooped down
on the contents of a room.
Sunlit or torchlit. Warren
or dwelling place. Empty or filled
with bright bodies. Human finery,
burnished vessels.
The TV chef whips and whips
the whites, leaning into them
his high, pleated hat.
Now he lights the brandy.
Here in your chest,
heat so intense if you could touch inside
you would pull back your hand. [End Page 95]
Light
"Don't move.
We'll move you." A bounce. A child
on a horse.
You can't predict
how long it will take. Fifteen seconds.
Twenty-five.
The body gathers mass,
outside of time, outside of
Karmic advancement.
Salvage, they call it, saving you,
shining light through.
You are porcelain, you are
uncomplicated as a teacup.
Think: Addition Modulo Twelve,
you subtract to know the time.
The thirteenth hour, one.
If you forget,
it comes around again.
I'd make a clock exactly backward, counter-
clockwise: the way if it were up to me,
it would go.
Heat
The sun at the edge. It falls.
Everyone advances, backlit red cutouts.
People walking dogs, a blood-red shadow
that runs along with them, upside down,
trying to get away. [End Page 96]
I am driving two cars, in two lanes
separated by boxwood. Each in turn
spontaneously combusts.
The demon of light, the demon of thunder,
instruments of education,
like the fiery cart you ride on.
I lowered and lowered myself
until I was flat,
until I had no past, cast no shadow.
Small Hours
In the park there's always a crow, startled,
reaching a tree where a little girl
counts to 100 as everyone finds cover.
Time going, the small voice keeping track.
It could be me thinking of something, thinking
and thinking. Her arms around a tree,
the syllables arrived at so haltingly, cadence
of a drunken adult. A park that sunset
enriches like thick, golden cream.
At home with her brothers and sisters,
strangers, all, as they move through the house,
the bathroom, the only room the father
is sure to recognize. Once a squirrel
dropped through the chimney into the whole
ruined civilization of the basement - Here
I'm taking the squirrel's viewpoint. [End Page 97]
It's better to live by a park than, say, in Bhutan
where there are no chimneys, and the smoke
escapes through every open window.
There too, though, the body that has been opened
is sealed again with a language of scars.
At night I have the sense of being
swept up and contained in my bed
until the first of the world shows up, half
the silver bike handle, ivy flapping in the yard.
Elaine Terranova is author of Damages (Copper Canyon P, 1996) and most recently The Dog's Heart (Orchises P, 2002), and has new poems in Pleiades, Poet Lore, and Crab Orchard Review. She is associate editor for poetry at frigatezine.com.
