Rebecca Seiferle: Poems
THE
CUSTOM | HOW TO SPEAK IN BABYLON
| DOCUMENTARIES | THE
RIPPED-OUT SEAM
Rebecca
Seiferle has been a member of the New Mexico artists-in-the-schools
program
and is currently listed with Tumblewords. Her poetry has been
anthologized in
Saludos: Poemas de Nuevo Mexico, Pennywhistle Press, New
Mexico Poetry Renaissance, edited
by Miriam Sagan and Sharon Neiderman, Red Crane Press, and The
Sheep Meadow Anthology.
Her translation of Cesar Vallejo's TRILCE,the Sheep Meadow Press,
1992,was the finalist
for the Pen West Translation Award and a finalist for the Columbia
Translation
Award. She is the author of two poetry collections,The Music
We Dance To, from
which some of the following poems are derived, and The Ripped-Out
Seam, both from The
Sheep Meadow Press, New York. Her work has appeared in Calyx,
Global City Review, Harvard
Review, Partisan Review, Prairie Schooner, Blue Mesa Review, The
Sun: A
Magazine of Ideas, Indiana Review
and many other magazines.The Music We Dance To was
nominated
for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize.Poems in the collection won the Hemley
Award from the
Poetry Society of America and will appear in BEST AMERICAN POETRY
2000. Her first book,The
Ripped-Out Seam, won the Bogin Award and the Writers Exchange
Award. She
is editor-in-chief of an e-zine:The Drunken Boat <http://www.thedrunkenboat.com>
THE
CUSTOM
Gravied,
sliced
down
to the bone, every year
all
that's left of the Thanksgiving
feast
is the wishbone. Stained
the
color of tea or rain seeping
into
wood, it could
be
beautiful, a singular harp
from
which no one
has
learned to coax
a
tune, or ivory white,
a
bow of stars that never shot
a
wounding shaft,
but,
instead, impelled
a
feathered being into the air,
a
hinge for the drumming
of
earthly wings. But
the
custom of the breastbone
is
that only two of you can fight
over
this good fortune,
only
one of you can win,
so
some Esau plucks the wishbone
from
the carcass, some Jacob grabs
the
other end. Sometimes the bone
tears
and twists apart
as
slowly as the strings
of
DNA that bind you together,
unravelling
in your opposing grips;
other
times, already brittle
with
heat or hollowness,
it
snaps like the retort
of
a branch breaking
from
the cursed fig tree
or
the jawbone with which Samson
slew
so many Philistines.
Except
for that one year,
when
your mother hung
the
disarticulated blessing to dry
in
the kitchen window,
then,
painting it red, transformed
its
hollow shape into a small sleigh
for
a velvet-coated Santa Claus,
his
cheerful gaze steering blindly
through
a decade of Christmases,
it
has been the custom to fight
over
the bones. You've always tried
to
be the first to grasp
the
better half, you and your
Cain
or Abel torquing
across
the kitchen table,
using
the weight of your bodies
for
leverage, until one of you
is
left, triumphant, clutching
luck's
fat knuckle, the other,
its
bitterly splintered end.
HOW
TO SPEAK IN BABYLON
Breathe.
Bow once in the direction
of
death. Open your hand
like
the fist of the newly born.
Nod
toward the couple
married
for fifty years
who
are still dancing the two-step beneath
the
bright heaven they have made
of
temporarily buoyant balloons. Grip
your
fear as carefully
as
you would hold a bee
between
your fingers, wanting
neither
to crush it
or
to be stung. Speak
and
remember the cord
still
knotted invisibly
around
your throat.
In
the corner, a woman is
talking
to some strangers,
and
at your nod, her face
flushes
with something
like
love, her hand
rises,
her palm pressed
in
the space between her breasts,
as
if, the word, flew, there
into
her heart. But though
the
gesture moves you,
you
are not speaking for her,
but
for that heavenly emptiness
that
gathers beneath her wings
all
the sorrows of this
Jerusalem.
Recall
that
moment when your life
knotted
in your throat
before
the empty church,
the
miles of vacant pews,
and
how you launched
your
voice out, for nothing,
for
no one, into that nothingness,
knowing
you would be able to do this,
open
your lips and speak . . .
DOCUMENTARIES
What's
the difference
between
human and animal grief?
Between
that gorilla who bears
her
dead infant, decomposing
against
her breast, like
some
unspeakable sorrow from nest to
abandoned
next, and these women,
each
frozen in the posture
her
body took the moment of hearing
her
child was dead?
When
the lions prowl the marshes
to
kill the cheetah young, we think
we
are like them, we think we are not
'animals'
like the soldiers who herded
the
children into a church that they then
torched.
The toddlers hanged from the tree
in
the plaza looked like
the
children in the soldiers' wallets,
except
that their smiles were not framed
in
cellophane or protected from the rain.
Naturally,
the soldiers pride
themselves
on being lions,
and
'lion-like' loll
like
Agamemnon in a cloud of flies,
complaining
in his tent, while,
finding
her dead litter, a cheetah
carries
off one cub, its foreleg extended,
stiff
in her mouth, and crouches
like
Clytemnestra mewing
over
the memory of the altar.
From
any distance, it looks like
human
grief, the way she tries
to
shield the tiny corpse, its matted fur already mixed
with
earth in the driving rain.
The
following poems are from Rebecca Seiferle's first
collection, THE RIPPED-OUT SEAM, from The Sheep Meadow Press,
New York, 1993. Poems in that
collection won the Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America,
the Writers'Exchange Award and The
National Writers' Union Prize. The collection was a finalist for
the Paterson Poetry Prize.
THE
RIPPED-OUT SEAM
I
will never stitch back together
the
horned toad that I halved with a shovel.
All
summer, in my mind, holding itself upright,
trying
to balance its torso
between
its front legs, the toad has tried
to
drag itself forward, to escape
the
agonized coils of its own
entrails
spilling out of the gaping absence
of
its lower body. No
meaning
I can think of, no matter how deft
of
hand, can knit the pale
distended
bowels, or reconnect
the
webbed feet's chaotic twitching
to
the brain that lunged, leapt,
propelled
them forward.
I
was excavating a pit for the children to play in
with
their fleets of miniature cars and must have
scooped
the legs from the body in one motion.
When
I lifted the shovel and saw the flayed skin
resting
in the blade, I thought
the
thighs' cavities, bloodless
and
filled with dirt, were the ancient remains
of
a cat's nightly predations, or the relic
of
a hiberation from which
the
horned toad never awoke, but then
I
saw the upper half, alive, sitting at the edge
of
the heaped earth were it, too,
had
been tossed.
What
shocked me was how perfect
the
unwounded half of the body was:
the
eyes' stunned gold,
the
jaw's tiny teeth, the spine's
prickled
barbs, the crimson gills'
breeding
color, the throat's throbbing rhythm,
the
head and forelimbs trying to go on, to continue,
while
the lower half had been interrupted
in
the emptying out
of
the blue and yellow guts,
the
soft pulp of the liver and lungs.
That
was June, now it's the end of August
and
in my mind, I am still carrying
the
still living torso behind a tree
where
I hit it with a shovel,
fracture
the skull,
so
it will no longer suffer
what
I have done to it. Again and again
the
creature drags itself forward,
tries
to reunite the two halves
of
what it is, to heal
the
wound it keeps dragging behind.
Only
in the ripped-out seams
of
body, of mind, do we resemble each other...
rendered
together,
the
horned lizard and the human figure
drawn
in black on the white surface
of
every vessel that the Acoma people paint
and
sell to tourists. They shrug
if
anyone asks what the meaning is
of
this design, of that one, at the idea
that
everything must mean something
other
than it is.
Copyright
© 2000 by Rebecca Seiferle. All rights reserved by the author.
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