Dorothy Waking

I dreamt that we were back in Ohio.
Proving how little dreams know,
I asked about your brother,

picturing him as a boy, forgetting
he'd been found a few summers back
hanging from a tree at Alum Creek.

When I asked, a thunderhead
of black birds dropped like a tarp
on the long pines, plucked us up,

and carried us to that lonely country
where there are no fields of flowers,
no one dusting them with snow

as fine as confectioner's sugar.
Where there are no balloons
to carry us back to the lives we left,

and no white handkerchiefs to swish
bon voyage at the headstones, rows
of baby teeth growing smaller

below us, then vanishing.
In that country, the forest is all
shadow-trees, but the one where

your brother swings, where he swings
even now because time stopped,
is white and gnarled, a deer antler,

its bark like bone. His eyes are
missing, sockets dark as plum pits.
His brown hair scuffs in the wind.

Who can wake from that?
There is no telling what that wind
might blow home with us: crow

feathers, scraps of blue gingham,
black walnuts in green casings.
Their dark ink stains our hands;

even burning lye can't wash it off.
Who can wake from that?
But we do.  We wake and point

to others in the room.  And you
were there, and you were there.  And you.

Job

Darkness ploughs its furrow here.
I am nothing now but a purse of bones.

Skin for skin, Satan said. All that a man has
he will give for his life. What was given me

has been taken away, my cup drained
to the dregs. Gone, seven sons

and three daughters, the sky spiraling
with their black hair. And for what?

To prove the worst can happen
at any moment, and always does.

Darkness digs a rut miles deep
somewhere in my field. It's as if

I wander blind, hardly trusting
my own steps not to lead me

down into it. Who here deserves
forgiveness? Who could possibly

bestow it? I asked for an apology,
but one was not owed me. Forgive me:

I have uttered what I did not understand.
Worse happens to better than I.

Maggie Smith's first book of poems, Lamp of the Body, won the Benjamin Saltman Award for best poetry collection, and is forthcoming later in 2004 from Red Hen Press.  Poems from this collection have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, PrairieSchooner, Gulf  Coast, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Swink, and other journals.  She holds an MFA from the Ohio State University, and has taught creative writing at Gettysburg College as the Emerging Writer Lecturer.

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