Lisa Bickmore

Concord 

 

at leaf lift, fat fruit falling
                to hand, bubble-headed bird
                                secrets glass-blown
                hard seed heart, tongue-crushed

sweet bloom-end narcissi, sugar holding
                scent-heavy fence brambler,
                                branch brawny shoulders,
                twiggy hands, mouth of its violet

kiss-or even darker, a velvet sheen
                pearl or nacre first snow-
                                gleam glove-cleared, rubbed,
                thumb-polished, this

untended flower mouth bee-stung
                berry, this love honey tumble
                                sweet thicket, autumnal
                tendril, unmeditated

yield; this nonetheless late gleaning,
                a transcendental century
                                and a half hence its cold Massachusetts
                roots, declension of vitis Labrusca,

black fox grape the native wilding,
                frontier now of my tillage, my
                                viticulture, my clean Ball jars,
                my Northern thrift, my lyric

husbandry—plump bushels all this unbroken
                afternoon sheared from vine and cane:
                                swoon plummy and beguiled
                into my marveling palms—

 

Published in flicker, Elixir Press, 2016.

Eidolon 

 

The pop of the disconnect I feel as a point in space:
what were the words he said, my son,
in the language he’s learning? The ghost of his silence,

even that will not be there when the dial tone finishes,
after he’s asked the question I could not bring myself

to answer: are you willing? words that echo here
in the American dark: I take my stick,
write in the dirt in a language only I speak,

which I refuse to explain. If he were here, I would show him:
I collect photographs of altars though I kneel at none.

The church on the corner hides an empty nave where
the icon should go. If I could unpaint it,
scrape the plaster down to the bare frame, just the idea

of an altar, I would worship there. But I cannot say no,
either, willing and unwilling, neither here nor there,

this nor that. At a mass for a friend’s son, the priest said,
a bereavement like this, we never get over. I wonder,
how will she ever again hold a book, thread a needle?

Walk, or even sleep. Unlearn her need for his presence,
his voice occasionally on the phone, his seat at the table.

But he is not there. To put off grief, I leave, a weightlessness
in the empty house fails to stay me:
to the crook of the finger on the Cape, where under

a brilliant sky the sea and wind spelled uproar into my ear.
To Dublin, where we stopped at every painted door –

a church’s, red, its iron hinges with curled flourishes
like an ancient script, binding of a holy book.
We could have entered but didn’t, though later,

at the Henry’s Fork, we walked on a new old road, narrow,
through a gate, nothing more than two posts. The hills

held in their laps a shadow cast by cloud.
We found a bridge where swallows kept their nests,
though they were in constant flight: they traced

glyphs over the glyphs of midge-flight-we watched,
rapt, still, a vigil on which nothing depended.

Is this the hajj I’m on, underwritten by nothing
but what I rebuff? How strenuous my effort not
to follow the letter, how powerfully yet the form persists.

I wake early or fail to sleep at all, watching for a return,
but of the ordinary son, somewhere riding his bicycle

on roads that skirt a jungle, memorizing new words
from cards he’s made. He eats chicken and rice.
It is ordinary, his absence, to the life I take up each day –

I arise at seven in an atmosphere composed
by the small fact of him gone, the uncrippling real

to which I accommodate. How years of presence
collapse into one shining then darkening star, failing
as they all inevitably do. Willing for what?

I should have asked him. The faculty of the will is that
principle of mind by which it is capable of choosing

is what Jonathan Edwards said, and in the dailiness,
I prove it again and again, rise to mourn in the day
with no shortage of occasion: just before he left,

the vet let us sit with the dog who was about to die.
A few weeks after that, my grandmother was gone.

Then the cat disappeared for a week. I stood at the back door,
calling her name into the field where mice play.
I think of each loss in the same breath, I take it in,

and in the instant it is taken from me: this is my calling,
my pilgrimage, and after my vow of withholding

I can say: a bird loose has power and liberty
to fly, but the bird’s power of flying does not
itself have the power and liberty to fly: to stand

at that door is the faith I have in my volition,
it is my will to wait, awake and dreaming, arise each day

as he does, going-forward wheeled creature speaking
another language at the edge of the South China Sea.
I plight myself to the green life beyond:

the sparrow seeking what seed has fallen in the grass,
a homely scent of turnsole, all day following the sun,

at night turning to be ready for light.

 

Published in Ephemerist, Red Mountain Press, 2017.

Mother of Swords  

 

The big riffle signals stones, and where
to step with care, my father tells me:
he remembers fishing with his father
in the mouth of the canyon, their feet
knowing a sure road beneath the water,

its plait and loosening: still, they kept
their waders well, mended them when a stone
tore the rubber, the caddis and nymph flies
sorted in the tackle box, the creels cleaned
after each catch, so the canvas smelled

only of river and not of fish rot.
Still, the world waits for the stagger, as when
he, a man in full, cycled through a cloud
of bees. He says, Of course I got stung.
Of course—the bees were the surprise, not

the sting: and now it is not the body,
always fallible, but the insult
to the brain’s vessels, the mean twist and pop,
the muscles on the left side having
forgotten their former habits. He sits

on a bench, lifts weights, his therapist
his mirror: each lifts, level on both sides,
though for my father, the one arm lags.
I listen as the therapist remembers:
I left an open can of soda.

I must have been ten. And when I took
a sip, I felt something wrong: and when I
opened my mouth to spit, it stung my tongue
and flew away. If bees could spite themselves,
that’s what it did, I thought, as I drove home.

Clouds wreathed the crest of the range to my east.
These stories witch water and admonish:
in tonight’s cards I turn up a queen
who sits in profile, her crown a circlet
of butterflies, but she holds a long sword

erect in her right hand. So stern I think
she’ll turn, look straight at me, say, a cloud
that swarms might be your proper atmosphere.
Say, watch your step: the river keeps blades.
Say, let your tongue hive a comb for bees.

 

Published in SLUG Mag, Issue 372, Vol. 30, December 2019.

Complete Response 

 

The news is never good, except today
when the surgeon tells us he sees
a complete response to treatment—
the tumor gone,no further evidence.
We repeat it to ourselves—complete

response—it makes us giddy.
My husband puts Big Jay McNeeley
on the turntable—I leave him
sorting the mail, watering the bamboo.
I’m on the treadmill at the gym

when the big screens at the front,
tuned to CNN, tell it in pictures:
a man wrestled to the ground, shot
an infinity of times in the chest,
the one cop so close the gun is like

a finger pointing at the end of his
accusatory arm: the forty-eight seconds
of that video the only news, played over
and over, the titles redundant except
the man’s name. I’m climbing a hill steadily

as this story loops: it’s not the only time
this week a black man has died by the hand
of police, and this is not a metaphor, the fact
that the wounds in one man’s body heal
at home, and another is pinned to asphalt,

as I climb my fake mountain, his family
is at a press conference, the son sobbing
into his shirt, the beautiful machine
of his father’s body stopped while
my own heart keeps going and going.

 

Published in Timberline Review, March 2018.