The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process

Unplanned Sequences

125 Martha Rhodes Unplanned Sequences The SMAll cANAl BeTWeeN TheM Into the small canal is Nothing ever tossed? This is a dare-notventure -into place and so persists, tannic and idle for the rest of their lives. IT fell oN Me It fell on me to write his stone, purchased before I was born, along with my mother’s. Easy to write hers. Loving Mother of Me. But for him—what? beyond his name and dates—four years since the marble company asked me for the words I wished inscribed. It was never my ambition to be the good daughter. Was, though, to be my husband’s good wife. And now, he’s silent too— 126 The RAg-PIckeR’S guIde To PoeTRy and the western reaches of the bed, his side, stay light, and a fault line divides our small plot. What to chisel into our marriage stone? That he just regarded me as that which he wished lived elsewhere? Erasure. Dunes rising, and even shorter days in the east. coMe To Me, hIS Blood Come to me, his blood, so I may cup you, be reservoir and ladle, both— clean, store, and stir. Then serve you back to him. Come to me, his blood, ill, so I may warm, sieve, and funnel you back to him; his cheeks ruddy again, his head in my lap. The wind is up! and sails our boat across Farm Pond, our friends on shore waving us to picnic time— a hammock-nap, a swim— all four of us, all well. Not dozens of summers ago, but now, this final Sunday in July, come to me, his blood. Don’t rush onto a lawn or street, don’t seep— but if you do leave him, if spilt, you who cannot slow or thicken redirect yourself—you must—come to me and I will bring you back to him. Unplanned Sequences 127 ThRoMBoSIS A rat carried this week to us between its teeth and dropped it at our feet and not even our youngest cat sniffed at it, though the rat surely left his scent on each day, morning through night. And the rat will find its way to us here, too, where at the hospital I hold onto your foot lest you be rolled away without me. We fear the rat will bring more Weeks of Inability, both of us unable—though today I am able to eat every doughnut New York City offers. My grandfather was a baker from Vienna. Perhaps he’d say to me today, Doughnuts are in your blood. And what should I say about your blood, dear, not knowing yet what’s in your blood that brings us here this week. The coNcuSSIoN Let me remind you that the bile his injury riled up arrived on your pillow as you slept. He would have forgotten the shower’s purpose were you not there, soaping him front and back, your hair not clean yet, braided and complicated to unbraid when wet and foul; the bed hastily stripped then re-made by you while he, propped in a chair and snug in your robe, stared at— what— For all of this, he still may not be kind to you again— concussions known to turn some rabid. 128 The RAg-PIckeR’S guIde To PoeTRy Your floppy retriever. Now he’s weaving toward coffee in the galley kitchen. Retract your hand. While I have never set out to write a poetic sequence, it has turned out, thus far, that I have ended up writing book-length sequences. I don’t necessarily announce my books as such, but I hope, of course, that readers will read them—as they should any collection, sequence or not—from first to last page so that the effort that I’ve put into organizing the work will pay off for the reader. In other words, the poem on page 10, say, is informed by pages 1–9, and these poems prepare readers for what is to come. I am very earnest when I say that I don’t set out to write linked poems. The poems come, one by one, over the course of several years, and as I write them, and as they accumulate, I begin to recognize that they are working with and off of each other. The individual poem usually arrives first through music, through one word attaching to another, then...