What Will Crush You With Its Giant Marble Feet
What will grind you into a dust sweet as
lead, a powdered
sugar to dull your wits & sharpen
your rage? What will
scrape you hollow, an empty
gourd with a grotesque smile?
If you love, grief will. We are what we
eat and so we are sorrow.
Children who lose parents form around
grief at a pliable age
and take its shape. A twisted deity runs
its long fingers through
a series of minor scales, sending
us drifting through the open
window of the rest of our lives. Parents who
lose parents lose
sleep, help, footing. Weigh many
more tons than can get up
and play, cook, break up the
fights. Honey-sticky little hands
for whom I would die but not make
toast, dinner time as it may be,
can you lift the cairn from my
chest, stone by stone by increasingly
heavy & hard to palm stone? No? Then you
can watch another show.
Interment
For my father
Nothing
would ever be good enough for you.
Not
for you—but for us, for you.
And it
wasn’t going to be the green
crushed velvet
that covered everything
and
felt so meager in our hands.
Nor
your formal portrait
carving
tracks in the mud as it slid
down
the coffin-stuffed hill.
Neither
would it be the cousin
of a
hotel ice bucket full of dirt
we
ladled over you like gravy.
The
rain had the right idea
and so
did my toddler
when
she tackled the easels
full
of smiles, so they
would just
stop.
A Marian Carol
For my firstborn
Baby,
I’m
the
solar
calculator
you
found
in a
drawer.
If,
however
blinklessly,
I even
existed
before
you
picked
me up,
I had
no idea.
Mama
I can
see it now—
you
were looking at eternity
and
thinking about laundry.
My Pack
The month my moon came and my mother went,
they
gallivanted in on their hems, camped
under
the Christmas tree, and jumped right in
my
lap—my pack. Sloshing grails and stealing
swords,
hoisting canopies and hammering
cathedrals.
Wheel-wound and foot-strung, in horned
diadem,
robed or perfectly naked,
they
came with lilies, sloughing stars and skulls,
pouring
pitchers of water into ponds
and
other bodies. Black hounds warred against
their
chains. Wolves brayed wild and lunar when
the
cards would waterfall through my hands and
never
once fall in the wrong place, not once.
Constance Hansen is Managing Editor of Poetry Northwest.
Her poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in: RHINO, Harvard
Review Online, Southern Humanities Review, Cimarron Review, Four
Way Review, Northwest Review, Vallum, Superstition Review,
and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she lives in Paris. You may learn more
at www.constancehansen.com.