BLESSING XVI.
There is something to be
said
for being a renter,
of watching over a place
without the obligation
to improve it.
The Native Americans
made it a practice
to leave little trace of
themselves
on the landscape.
Few of us can bear
to travel so lightly.
Yet this is our
condition:
to occupy this life,
knowing we will
be parted from it,
but not when.
At sunset my shadow
stretches
over the sea as I ease
myself in
for the last swim of
summer.
For thirty years I’ve
immersed
in the cold waters of
this cove
and felt cradled by sea
and sky.
In their ever-changing
immensities
I sense the unpossessable
sublime.
I sink my restless
thoughts to silence
so I may cleave to my
true purpose.
Tethered, words enter the
mind
through the eye or the
ear,
to make of themselves
the weightless structure
apprehended wholly or in
part,
like a shape shifting in
the mist,
reverberant as a song,
to be taken up or
forgotten,
like spent desire, or sunlight
shining on water, a
fading reflection.
CURSE IX.
He was not good or kind,
but he was memorable.
He was the Poet,
and we the disciples
each week seeking
the benefit of his
insight
as we sat around the
table
listening politely
while he free-associated,
his random thoughts
drifting into aperçus
delivered in a
high-pitched
nasal voice, the ash
hanging off his cigarette
until it dropped by
itself.
At the interview
for admission to the
class
I was in awe of him.
“These are yours?” he
asked,
indicating my Fogg Poems.
In suspense I assented.
“Not bad,” he continued,
and paused. “But there
are
so many of them.”
He sighed, leafing
through the seven pages
as if they constituted a
burden.
“You’re in the class,” he
said,
handing them back to me.
Believing he must be
right,
I let him influence me.
From that day on
I dared not add another
poem,
though possibilities
still
occurred to me,
I ignored my ideas
until they went away.
At the time I didn’t know
he was writing his own
series
of loosely-titled sonnets
hundreds of them
he would publish
in multiple versions
under two titles.
**
As winter melted into
spring,
his mind grew unhinged.
One afternoon in class,
hearing workmen
making a racket
in the room below us,
he flew into a rage
and shouted at them
through the ceiling,
banging his chair
on the floor in
retaliation.
Another time I saw him
shuffling across Mass.
Ave.
in bedroom slippers
looking lost and dazed.
At his poetry reading at The
Advocate,
he could barely speak.
The week before his
collapse
he put aside student work
and, ignoring us,
closed his eyes and
intoned,
“A bracelet of hair about
the bone.”
“A bracelet of hair about
the bone,”
he uttered the line again
and again, in a trance,
his voice growing fainter
until at last he grew
silent.
We fled, leaving him
clutching his dead
cigarette,
the ash scattered on the
table,
staring into nothing.
Anne Whitehouse was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. She graduated from Harvard College and Columbia University and lives in New York City. She is the author of THE SURVEYOR’S HAND (poems) and FALL LOVE (novel), which can be downloaded free from Feedbooks http://www.feedbooks.com/userbook/1900 Her second novel, ROSALIND’S RING, is a finalist is the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. These poems are from her collection BLESSINGS AND CURSES, which is forthcoming from Poetic Matrix Press. Other selections from BLESSINGS AND CURSES have appeared in Southern Hum, Earth’s Daughters, 2River, Gander Press Review, The Golden Lantern, Adagio Verse Quarterly, The Oklahoma Review, Saranac Review, Confrontation, Phantasmagoria, and Brave Little Poem of the Day. She has also widely published short stories, essays, and criticism. She is the recipient of the Mademoiselle poetry prize, the Joan Gray Untermeyer Poetry Award, the Black Warrior Review poetry award, the Hackney Literary Award in poetry and fiction, and the Academy of American Poets Prize at Columbia University. Whitehouse's chapbook Bear In Mind will be published this year by Finishing Line Press. For more on Anne Whitehouse visit: www.annewhitehouse.com.