The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Rachel Galvin TRAVELING PEDDLER'S DECLARATION Virgil Out of absence she configured desire, conjuring the divided world in negative. She knew the stillness of sycamore was more divine when flustered by wind, the smooth mountain when creased by raptor’s careen. She sought a stereoscopy of ardor overlaid on piety—led the other girls at night to the tomb at Saint Médard. In filmic delirium they consumed dirt from the grave of François de Pâris, to choke full, stem and root, supine, vulpine. Convulsionists, sécouistes flocked to the miracle: girls trampled, pierced, their scavenger exclamations. Were they the arrows of the Lord? The tableau writhing. The script read bring yourself closer to his aphrodisiac silence. Her eyes grew accustomed, concocted a ricochet from phantom to man: in her, a delectation of lack, a displacement of self. Pleasure’s subterfuge. No living man compared to the deacon dead at thirty-six, buried with the poor. Into her devotion François reached his deft tactic—she was certain the bittersweet image would emerge— as when the eyes fix on the space a star is not. IN THE LOIRE VALLEY A release of rain filled the cafe with people: bouquets of brass sunflowers above the booths, trios of light-bulb Cyclopses. I discovered my heart had a seam like a walnut, you could press to lever it open and expose its dark, wet dividers —inside a locked mailbox, a letter. The wind bared its hem as I passed a butcher shop, pheasants and rabbits hung upside-down, inside-out. Tibetan Buddhists dismember their dead so that birds of prey may easily ingest the corpse, to speed the reincarnation of flesh and breath in flesh: an arrow drawn, an agitated electron that arcs from shell to shell toward the nucleus, leafing through sheaves of light. AFTER THE ECLIPSE When we awoke all flesh was blue: the bell in the square, once rescued from a Vilozhin fire, now Prussian blue, Chaya’s oxen a bright French blue, linens drying on the line and the morning minyan’s prayers tinted from hyacinth to wisteria. Overnight clocks regained authority, took metronomes for brides. Young Rivka stashed the last unofficial green in a basket of apples and ran to her Moishe, who in three minutes recounted the original malady of every stone in the village. Where to find a remedy? We fluttered our hands in supplication, the merchants went on conversing in the marketplace, adding consonants on one hand, launching their sums on paper wings— how the houses rose to resemble people! There, like a handkerchief emerging from the pocket of each villager, was the name of the Lord. VILLAGE OF TWICE-SALTED SEAS If the wings should brush too close— we hide under the skirt of a table. We invite the disguised messenger to the repast: in his pocket, a vision. The goblet drinks its own wine. Long skeins of melody to wind before we eat, vowels I’m learning, egg glow, scent of yeast. Here, candles burn longer because of prayer. * Men sway in the aisles, praying, Hatikvah on the intercom as the plane touches land. My friend says I cannot touch the Torah, a woman’s touch defiles. You won’t if you’re a Jew. But it is too late. Aliyah, the going up. Standing before unscrolled pages, I chant, opening and closing blessings, sewing goatskin with my silver finger, while sun blisters my shoulders, collarbones. * My life, a ship setting sail— now I spend my days writing a scripture by hand: stories made of stone, salted with telling. I look up at my mother over the stew pot she is stirring—in a dream of hornets, I kneel on one unknowingly. It enters my left knee. * I am catching a train, I am looking for myself in a shop window, between the o and m of home. Standing on one leg, I recite. Land whose holiest wall is cemented with handwritten prayer, where I am a Jew two steps removed. Despite all revolutions, feet continue forward, blood matches blood. A ruined bathhouse, dark angels with siege machines. But I, could I take my nipple from my child’s mouth and draw a line across her throat? My hands are unsteady. The woman hidden in a storage room, the only adult to tell the tale: * She preferred salt on all her meals, she believed the soul was finite, she loved noisily. She whom the grocer hid in a barrel to escape the Cossacks. She who used a broom to beat my father, left her children in London, Ballyminton, Rochester. She who raised her children Jews, she who raised her children Catholics. Who spoke Russian before English, Yiddish before Russian before Hebrew, who used different gestures in each language. She who kept her letters in a soup tureen. Who told my father to fuck off one Christmas day. Who ran anarchist meetings, who had a harelip, who was left without a cow to live by. Mysterious kitchen, duty and dominion, boiling carrots and prunes together, phrases of steam over the pot we stir. She gathers consonants, seed-shaped prayers, a cloth over her head, hands over her eyes, she sways. © Copyright 2006-7 by Cook Communication |