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Incantation

Step onto the deck.  Push off.
This vessel is made of intelligence—
yours and mine—the stuff we have
whittled back to a poor imitation,
to fragments measured on tests.
Put back what the body knows,
return soul to bone, wrap mind
in its scarlet-cloaked case, feel
ideas form.  You have only
to step aboard to shed your old life.

Calf Born in Snow

I can still hear the loud moan
in my grandfather's kitchen,
where the woodstove was open
for the failing fire's warmth, and
on the oven door, wrapped
in an old quilt, lay the new Charolais calf—
a twin that survived its snowy birth
that morning, though its brother died—
both of them the color of muddy snow,
this one too weak to stand.

We tried to feed him his mother's milk,
but he seemed to forget he was eating
and slept, so that by ten that night, when
he raised his head suddenly, making
a loud maa-a-a-a sound, I could scarcely
believe it.  "He's getting better!"
Dad put his hand on my shoulder.
"Quiet.  He's dying," was all he said—
old knowledge, deep as the Blue Mountains.
Still, I'd witnessed that final, wonderful
rallying, as if every ounce of life pulled
together to raise the calf's head,
to leave is sound so indelibly there.

Agricola

The good earth can easily enough turn into the bad earth.

                        —From the introduction to Virgil’s Georgics, tr. Smith Palmer Bovie

The heart of our country’s body has gone to sleep, and though

it beats in a solitary way, it refuses to manage. The arms and legs

of this body no longer completely move. They twitch like

limbs of a dog asleep by the fire, only dreaming pursuit.

With freedoms cut back, we prowl and laze

under new restrictions, like animals detained in a zoo—

as if bars could protect us, and unfortunately,

sometimes they do.

The heart of the country’s body still pours out

red joy like a summer punch, while we doze

in warm afternoons dreaming of Science, the dark god

with no human heart, averaging our mistakes.

But, in the brain’s blue north, peace lurks. Fields,

plentiful with obituaries, wait for renewal. Virgil’s fields,

tilled and growing, shaped a vision of peace. Every implement

he described became a tool for harrowing the future.

Plow and prune then. Place your hand in the soft earth,

your homeland. How good it could be without war: blistering,

dying—bodies shipped home. As early as now, it is possible

for the full life to flower. Peace, planted/tended, grows.

Birth

Tulips blaze yellow in the vase
as my son bursts in from school—
his fifth-grade science lesson
glistening in his eyes. "We saw
a foetus in a jar," he says.

"His birthday was the same
as mine. I could have been
in that jar.  He could have
been standing there, looking at me."

On the table behind him, a petal
is missing from one of the tulips, leaving
a thin glimpse of stamen—such as
the openings we get sometimes: the one
my son slipped through today, blooming.



Flu, Spring Rain, and You

Lying in bed, flu bogged,
I wonder what mean quirk of fate
makes my body cry out
for the muscle and contour of yours
two years after our divorce
and one year into my new love.

I'm too weak for anything but need,
and need you I do.  Though you’re
in California and I’m with someone
new, the vines of our marriage
are bound up in my veins
like a virus green and climbing,

making my body crave comforts
from a marriage that continues
like a stump in the forest—
dead—except for a few green
sprigs, persistent at weakest
moments in spring rain.

 

After the Argument

I.
If I could capture the moon, I would
bring it to your cottage whole, wrapped
in lace underclothes—its pure light pooling
on the sheets where we used to lie.  In your sleep,
dreaming of mandarins and ginger, you would
turn in the light and smile, your cinnamon
hair tangled in a silver-smudged glow.

And, if I could hold all our days, pull back
the curtains that slouch and slump on the floor
to see ahead, I'd tell you honestly, I do not
understand the love you give me. 
Is there nothing you would keep back?

II.
I did not guess you’d come to me, red hair
turning white, curly locks and beard, tall,
big of belly, dripping from the sea. Nor did I
know you pulled its lower depths with you—
that all your life, you’d crashed within its storms.

On land, your caring broke surface in finest seams,
cool mists against the sunburnt heat.
You came into my landlocked life
like a Norwegian ship captain ridden by a fly—
your changing face: clouds across the Sea Force.

In loving you, my shell broke loose. I was vulnerable
as a sea creature at low tide—and flourished there. 
So many times you swept us past my limits.  I took
your daughters to my heart; your son's arrogance, 
I forgave; I had such hunger for your taste.

III.
Now, at day’s end, driving down K Street toward a moon
that squats hugely on the horizon-sweet moon
of warm butter, watching me approach as if inviting my car
to arc from street to sky to cross over the distance
and wreckage between us—I can almost hear the song
you sang to me: “All I need is the air that I breathe
and to love you....” and hearing, hope there is a way.



Secrets at My Uncle’s House

I learned from you the elegance of proof,
complex math, and my own inadequacies,
that imagination steals energy from the real world—
and even memory, so tidy and selective,
can be brutal in its sameness from which
the density of touch is vanished,
from which completion is barred,
as it is for the buck leaping at the fence
or the puzzle always being worked on your table.

I have come here, Uncle, for my sanity
that it might stabilize like an object in your room—
like the fox skull you found in a field and baked
till the spiders ran out. If there is any wisdom,
it is in collections such as these,
in the clutter of your nests and shells,
in the gargoyle or geode that waits
to be taken up and turned in the hand
as if some lesson were in it—a clue
to the unfocused excitement it provokes.

Or wisdom might grow from movement,
from the circular sweep of your arm
as you lean over the conch shell puzzle
searching for the shape you must have,
while I rest my cheek on the smooth
leather chair (that sits on the worn rug
slightly off-square) and gaze at the objects
everywhere on ledges: mock-ups, old prints,
open books.  It is evening and the curtains
are open.  At the window your telescope slants
toward the North Star, as if this house were
a navigable craft and you were to take her home.


2

For breakfast, Mrs. Bailey prepares
your barley—without exception—
the thin milk, a kind of liquid peace
to be spooned into one's mouth.
She does not know that your father
made this table of dark cherry, tooled
its legs, or that when the leaf
is extended, the leg pulled forward,
it opens into other rooms, those
of your childhood and mine—
and further back to grandfathers before
us, to the one who came in 1780 to survey
west of the Blue Ridge, but stayed that first
winter on the mountain with a Senedo woman
and staked his claim.  Our dark grandmother
was not mentioned until you told the story: 
She lay her body against his in the bitter wind
and rain.  When spring came, she taught him
what Europe forgot.  Guiding his fingers
with hers, she helped him fashion a bow.


3
To make a bow, choose a small tree,
three handspans in girth.  Ask permission. 
If not given, move on.  When you sense
acceptance, begin with a flint knife. 
Make a groove in the trunk
the width of your two fingers,
and another groove six handspans above it. 
Cut out a long strip between them,
and season the strip a full year; 
carve into a graceful bow.
Wipe gently with bear grease,
and string with sinews of deer.
Before the bow bends to your hand
or learns the strength of your pull,
honor its beauty, the speed of the bear
and deer, the skyward lift of the tree. 
No one will take it from you.

Patricia Gray was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in the Shenandoah Valley, not far from Charlottesville, Virginia.  In 1983 she received the M.F.A. degree in poetry from the University of Virginia and was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize.  Since 1994, she has coordinated the Poetry at Noon program at the Library of Congress.  She has also taught poetry writing in the Washington area.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, such as Poetry International, Poetry East, The MacGuffin, Shenandoah, and online journals, ForPoetry.com and PoetryMagazine.com.   In 2000 and 2002, she received artist fellowships in poetry from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.  She lives and works on Capitol Hill.  patriciagray@mail.com  

"Calf Born in Snow" was read on NPR's The Writer's Almanac, January 30, 2005.

ForPoetry