Figured Dark: Poems

Letter to M., from Swannanoa

Letter to M., from Swannanoa —Swannanoa, North Carolina Twilight in the garden, looking across to where Black Mountain rises. I’m working through the collection, the middle poems written, still unsure how it will end. The days stay noisy. The drone of mowers, the college kids baling the first cut of hay, now and then bucking the fallen back onto a trailer. What I first took to be a scarlet tanager’s call was their truck––backing, warning. In the gathering dark, the lilies and azaleas reach west. These, the meadow beauties and asters, were all worked today by hummingbirds, an almost invisible blur of wings, and I began out of that energy–– cutting an ending that did not end–– though when I passed the garden at full noon, the dragonflies were making love, dazzled, head-to-tail. Tonight, I’m thinking about language and the silence after. Not the beauty, but the heft of words, weighing them in my hands. At dinner, Gretchen spoke of a reading given entirely in sign language. How the poet began, 54 her hands held above her right shoulder, the fingered words traveling through the stanzas, crossing to the lower left. At the very crux of each poem, she worked directly over her heart. I think of us apart, how you ended last night’s phone call––angry, exhausted. Knowing you are asleep will keep me awake tonight, considering order in the final section, wanting to call, wake you at dawn and say, “It’s finished,” the way a stonemason, high on a scaffold, taps and turns the stones, fitting them, one by one, into the chimney’s rise. At some point, he climbs down, packs his tools and goes home. It must be a simple calculation: how much weight can the footings hold? 55 ...