A Crescendo of Rain
Tonight, I don't resent the party sounds at the end of the street
but I am wrong about the iris—
it has no stamen, which you prove
by splaying me apart
as if I'm made of legs,
made of petals—
I am made of leggy petals
and you grasp them.
~
The flannel-clouded sky a white quilt
gathered and twisted, the whole sky
a bed. An apricot
so ripe it falls apart
in my hand, its splitting
not so much a splitting
as a falling open.
Even blue, the sky is full of rain.
The pavement sweats.
I learn to suck nourishment
from your flat, ocean breast.
~
Deep spring. Piano. Glass.
Lightning, a rumor of thunder
as though the curtains had moved in the wind.
(A rumor of thunder.) The sage,
the feather, the guava, the rain
and the period blood release
all at once. A mourning
dove is moaning something
I no longer know.
~
Wind is blowing a flag begonias.
Wind is blowing the white gladiolas.
Ocean of salt, ocean of roses.
Formerly Washington Boulevard
I'm waiting for the light to change. It changes. I drive west,
toward the liquor store where the mural of two women
stares across the street.
The one on the right is always happy,
languid, a little dumb.
I've always thought the one on the left
was sad, maybe even crying
as she raises an arm to cover her face,
but the one remaining eye
is simply looking at me,
simply open.
This is the way it looks to see the thing in front of you.
This is the way it looks to see what's coming.
Street Without Street Lamps
Now the moon is back, announcing itself,
a little unwelcome.
Several days without reflection
end—even the moth's wings shine.
The windows develop streaks.
Not that the moon is a bad thing, but
I'll say it: I reject this moment.
Give me, instead, the long twilit sky
that makes the tree line ripple,
branches blackening into a kind of night,
hallucinating a boundary, a name.
Give me back our nakedness and light
and like the scent of knapweed—
wet, faintly sweet, like an afterthought—
give me the white sky, blushing.
Lazarus, Himself
The boxing ring of his heart is vacant,
visible through his now invisible skin.
There is more than one kind of death
and this is the headless kind,
the kind that disintegrates balls,
chips away at pieces of leg.
This is the kind that leaves a torso
perched near a lake, suspended
slightly and cocked aslant
to indicate torque. It's not
that the bones are shards,
but little cyclones,
and it's as though
the man was about to get out of the bath
if only he had arms
below the elbow; if
below the knees, he were not in need
of prosthetic devices. His clavicle
presses into the soot of a cloud
that all but lids the sky, pressing
toward the base of the tub
like a coffin—though, to the left,
there's still that view of the cliff:
rock as rocky as his body.
And now the trick is that this—
imagine, even this—
is about to be resurrected.
Fields of Salt
They ask a falling into them, their cold
weight of stars, white sifting
through the stray trees
jutting up like crippled rakes. Otherwise,
this is a figureless landscape
as it must be
and the skin, scraped clean
by scabrous, grating jewels—
each dripping across the body
in its tiny river.
And the bramble and the stooped and
segregated weeds poking into the night
can join the night.
Everything you needed: no longer there,
or necessary.
And, for once, the moon is buried
under the hill.
Driving Home Alone After the Strand Reading
The boulevard is a blank field
and there is a fence post—old,
stuck there, holding up the fence:
that is its job. The fence
lets things through—air through,
flies, snowflakes, men climb through,
but the fence doesn't move.
Facts, facts. This is the city I live in,
this is the country, this is the boulevard's
weather. What I report to myself
is a kind of rain, a kind of ruin.
No one enters the picture; then
a black sedan, decked with ribbons,
turns down the road to the veterans' cemetery;
Black metal, black glass, white ribbons, black air,
the markers stand like rows of teeth.
Boulevard, wind, fencepost,
blaring streetlight, black flattened grass.
Plane Poem
The strobe (night day night)
snow wing barn.
The barn that's always with you.
Its two dark eyes.
The yellow lantern
doubled in the window glass.
The plane plays a long, sustained chord
like a stuck harmonica.
Organ pipes. A pack of cigarettes. A minor fourth.
Canned wind funnels down.
And there's that other sound—
of a tunnel, through a hollow bone.
Daphne at the Moment of Transformation
But now, my toenails grow into shale,
Veins root. A bleeding rock.
The gutted, pocked bark
of my shin. And birds,
sparrows, land along my
shoulders, trailing
their little worms. Leaves
spurt out of my
rugged, bone twig-knuckles.
He is running.
And the wind blows through my mouth
like hair.
Sarah Maclay's poems have been published in Ploughshares,
Field, Hotel Amerika, Solo, Pool, ZZYZYVA, Lyric, Cider Press Review, ForPoetry.com,
and many other magazines, including Poetry International; where she is currently
the book review editor. Her critical work will soon appear in The Writers Chronicle.
She was a 2004 finalist for the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, the 2003 winner of the dA
Gallery Award for Poetry; and a semi-finalist for both the 2003 Kenyon Review Poetry Prize
(Zoo Press) and the 2002 Tupelo Press First Book Prize. The author of three chapbooks. Ice
from the Betty (Farstarfire Press), Shadow of Light (Inevitable Press) and Weeding
the Duchess (Black Stone Press). She also co-edited the anthology Echo 6 8 1 for
Beyond Baroque, a literary center and performance space in Venice, California. where she
has been a poet-in-residence. She is a fourth-generation Montana native who grew up on a
ranch in the Bitterroot Valley, later earning degrees from Oberlin College and Vermont
College. She currently teaches writing in Los Angeles.
Praise for Sarah Maclay's Whore:
Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry
"These elegant, evocative poems, delivered in the lower register, rich and dense
with drunken language, present us with a tropical metropolis lit by a torch—lush, fertile, shadowy—while gifting us with a fragile, solitary, naked
sense at the center."—Mary
Ruefle
"How to extract poetry out of a smooth California quotidian where there are almost
no seasons? Through attentiveness to the minute detail, through small lyrical gestures,
Sarah Maclay creates seasons in her poetry, seasons of sadness, joy, intelligence and
love."
—Adam Zagajewski
You can also order Sarah Maclay's book, Whore, via Spring Church Book
Company:
Call Britt at 1-800-496-1262
ForPoetry |
