Category: Maggie Anderson

by Maggie Anderson

Born, I was born.

In sweat and tears I lay on a flowered blanket

before a chrome bucket of ice and a bladed fan.

My mind is clear as polished glass,

my hair a tangle of black moss.I fall down

on the grass in my harness, laughing.

Father is doing his skits and antics,

running and sliding, dropping his trousers.

His starched shirts are strict and ghostly,

they hang on a line over the bathtub.

Dying, Mother is dying, pale in her housecoat.

I am learning to run faster and faster,

I can feel the blood in my ears.

Great Aunt Nell is large as a boat with her

slick jersey dresses and embroidered handkerchiefs.

Flying, dust motes are flying, in a caduceus of light

between the studio couch and the radiator.

Family arrives on the train in the rain

carrying leather grips and hatboxes.

The self blooms,

a chrysalis of sorrow.

Patricia, the soft reticule of her mouth

pulls me from my dry cave.

I drink Father’s gin with Robert,

suck sweet smoke from a plug of blond hash.

The police are shoving into the crowd with tear gas and rifles,

we do a day in a cell with no window.

I eat rice from a red lacquer bowl,

green tea singes my tongue.

The riderless horse leads the procession.

Fever carries me out of my body.

Father: “Listen at this;

I have written it down.”

Mother: “This is the table they have laid before me.

I am not afraid.”

from Dear AllFind more by Maggie Anderson at the library

Copyright © 2017 Maggie Anderson
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Maggie Anderson

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn’t have set out.

—C. P. Cavafy

Like one of Cavafy’s young boys lurking

in the dark cafes of Alexandria for love,

I was close to the grammarians and the aristocrats,

living in Pennsylvania among the exiled

Greeks, who fed me ripe pistachios

and bites of lamb.They sang me songs

about the blue fields of garlic,

stone streets and white houses,

dark curtains drawn against the noon.

We drank strong coffee and they read my future

in the muddy grounds: You will work

along the edges all your life, never at the center

and never rich, but a good friend to the rich

especially in your later years.

I felt myself beloved of all the poets I read:

one of Auden’s men, one of Sappho’s women,

one of the animals of Gerald Stern.

My Greeks taught me the sound of waves

over black beaches, showed me seashells smaller

than a fingernail, the yellow moon—

fengare—reflected in the sea.

I learned six words for love

and the word for daisy which is my name—

how to say the big sea, little orange tree,

and my child. Sometimes they called me that—

to pethi mou—and in those days we were as

little children, making our first visions

setting out on our marvelous journeys.

from Dear AllFind more by Maggie Anderson at the library

Copyright © 2017 Maggie Anderson
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Maggie Anderson

No more flags and banners!

No more of my endless good ideas!

In the hall of acquisitions the goods are readied.

In the walled rooms of learning the papers

are exchanged, the talk goes on

among drawn faces of young students.

In an ordinary February, what could happen?

I can imagine hunger, quavery

emptiness of nothing to eat and not knowing when.

Cut off, amputated in a cold basement with no news,

sharp static, a green transistor radio.

O mother and father I prematurely grieved,

where are you now that I need to lose you?

Ordinary mornings we rose and ate together,

dressed and went out into the world.

Phantom mother, your face a red and purple scrape,

your hat askew and your left ear bleeding,

in the back seat of a stranger’s car.This thing

had happened: they found you sitting

on a stone wall where you had rolled away

from the car’s tires, brought you

first to me and I did not know you.

In a glare of hospital lights, they took

my blood and gave it to you.What can happen

had happened, and our lives went limp and small.

How can I speak about this?

A flat sky, gray yet almost stunning

against heavy snow and a red sun rising.

I feel a cold that will

not stop, sound that has overrun

all meaning. Already the fires are close,

and the fields are burning.

from Dear AllFind more by Maggie Anderson at the library

Copyright © 2017 Maggie Anderson
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Maggie Anderson

After misreading the title of Muriel Rukeyser’s Third Elegy, “The Fear of Form”

What would that be? The row upon row upon row

then stupid turn of the tractor & back

grain elevator, combine, machine loose on

the hillside, turned over, the bloody arm

the stink of hogs, of pigs, of money

Hot humid afternoons with hay sticking to hands

& legs, hair matted to brow & neck

bees roused by the baler, swarming—

a gray cloud of hot sting on face & arms

white scar tissue where

the pot of boiling water for sterilizing Mason jars

tilts & scalds forearm & top of foot

in the shape of a sandal strap

Copperheads come quick from the cool foundation

of the root cellar first warm day

& nests of black snakes open out across the field

adrenaline rush of hop & jump over them

Rat poison rust & splinters, the catch of blades

bats swooping low the rabid, unpredictable

rumble of black bears over the picnic table

the girlish scream of the bobcat

Always something doesn’t work needs to be fixed

have to drive three places for parts

all day on edge lost time in repair

lost days of rain

Dark in the morning   already tired up   at first light

no mind for reading or thinking, low ceilings

picture a bumper crop good corn, early

more help with the haying

then supper & evening chores an hour on the front porch

check next day’s weather on TV

Even in sleep the fields are flooded

cattle   loud & thin at the barn door

the slightest lack of attention

can kill self or other   constant alertness

& no one to take my place

Who else would plough this land?

Who, if not I, will do all this?

from Dear AllFind more by Maggie Anderson at the library

Copyright © 2017 Maggie Anderson
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Maggie Anderson

If it’s a poem

You want,

Take a knife. . .

—Charles Simic

When my mind was sliced open

and I could not read or write,

I carried knives to the whetstone

and honed them: paring knife

removes the skin, bares raw fruit

to air and light. Bowie knife guts

a deer carcass, penknife sharpens pencil lead.

Switchblade snaps out from the boot toe

guides a high kick to the throat.

Butter knives smear soft fat.

For meat, the cleaver splits tendon

and shank, scrapes blood from the bone.

I tested the heft of each one in my palm,

tried their blades against the air.

Then I tore dark hunks of bread,

pulled them apart with my bare hands.

from Dear AllFind more by Maggie Anderson at the library

Copyright © 2017 Maggie Anderson
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Maggie Anderson

Early morning sun green fields

mint green Chevrolet I drove through the hills

down to the brown house beside the river

the little house of drink

where mice built colonies in the walls and scratched

in and out at will across the carpet and the bed

where we drank and slept and loved.

Bats clung to the curtains snakes rose from the well

a pox of small unpleasant

creatures a shed piled high with empty bottles

that caught the sun through the slats

green and brown, prismatic.

It was there the barn collapsed

(my friend heard it too).

Up late drinking, smoking, laughing

we ran outside and watched

the smoky dust rise up

from a pile of boards and nails and shingles.

The whole gray thing fell down, as if we had breathed on it.

If I breathe too hard I have to remember

the hairpin curve where, drunk

I swerved and speeded up, drove through a fence

into a pond where one of me died

while another of me hauled out the window

on strong arms, my lithe young body

flipped and slid down

the trunk into pond muck and weeds.

I freed myself and walked the three miles home

scratched up, sore and stoned,

fell face down at my lover’s feet

from another world

bleeding on the kitchen floor.

from Dear AllFind more by Maggie Anderson at the library

Copyright © 2017 Maggie Anderson
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Maggie Anderson

Just north of Hartville, Ohio, where I drove today,

thick woods opened out to fields and cattle pastured

down to the lake. My mind was full of lists

of meetings, picking up medication and dry cleaning,

when suddenly for no reason, I was remembering

the time Lynn bought my lunch when

I had money enough to pay for my own, but because

she didn’t know what to say to my grief,

she said I want to buy your lunch,

and it was expensive and good and I was grateful,

which made me think of Sandra whom I haven’t seen in years,

walking beside the Willamette in Portland

in the cold sleet of a November night.

Nothing happened. We walked two city blocks

talking pleasantly about nothing in particular,

then she asked me if I wanted to borrow her gloves.

One afternoon, thirty years ago or more,

in my makeshift office in the Cathedral of Learning

with no furniture but a view of the Heinz Chapel spire

dark with rain and city grime, Ed stuck his head in the door

and said It’s a little alienating, isn’t it?

I wasn’t sure if he meant Pittsburgh, or teaching,

the view, or life in general, but they all were,

and who would have thought I would remember

this so clearly for all these years?

In December 1971 I was visiting Jane Bennett in

California, Pennsylvania, where I called my father

from a wooden phone booth in a drugstore.

He was three days away from his death,

alone in his apartment, aphasic from the strokes.

I told him I love you, and he said

You’re right. Those were his last words to me.

Sometimes when the years come close like this

everything that happened once seems to have been

happening forever: someone is putting cold cloths on my head

because it hurts, someone is sitting on the edge

of my bed where I am a fevered child in another world

far beyond hearing. Today I was only busy,

but when Anna touched my shoulder and told me

Take a little nap, you’re exhausted, I could see I was,

so I lay down heavily, like the bales of hay

the good farmer of Hartville pitched out for his stock,

because the ground is frozen solid,

because the weeds are iced with hoarfrost.

And like the cattle,I ambled over the cold field

to take whatever might be offered now

from the flat bed of the mostly reliable wagon.

from Dear AllFind more by Maggie Anderson at the library

Copyright © 2017 Maggie Anderson
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Maggie Anderson

From deep inside your black overcoat

words, like a lost bird,

are trying to find a way out—

now that you have begun

you won’t stop and I am waiting.

What is it? What happened?

A long time ago people were hurt and you caused it.

I think you said you were Sorry

or Stupid or Worried.

You were not looking at me—

but staring straight ahead

through the windshield of the car

at the night and the snow.

Trapped in a house, a bird will dive and circle back

from room to room from window to chair

any steady edge

between lifting up and landing—

flight is what comes before telling

or just after.

from Dear AllFind more by Maggie Anderson at the library

Copyright © 2017 Maggie Anderson
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Maggie Anderson

My mother died at fifty of

a beautiful word, leukemia.

Nine years earlier

in autumn, she gave birth to me

when the maples in the park

began to turn as they do now.

I don’t know how to walk here,

in the shifting space no meanings fill.

I have now outlived her.

I enter this foreshortened field,

wildly unmothered still.

from Dear AllFind more by Maggie Anderson at the library

Copyright © 2017 Maggie Anderson
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

by Maggie Anderson

You whose memory comes to me winter afternoons as the soon gone sun

falls low and thin

You whom I knew long and well

You I knew but slightly, knew not well but cared to,

had there been place enough and time

You who have come to hate me now

You who are the trees out the window to me, the shallow-rooted I have

always loved

I greet you in my unsent letters, in both my random and my steady thoughts

You whom I failed to thank and you I failed to turn to

You I have tried and tried to speak with and have not been able to cross

those seas

You I fought with in the snow in unsatisfactory shoes, marching up and down,

shouting at each other, so hot we were, so cold, the drifts deepening

You I let down and you I picked up by the highway

You who have made a name for yourself

You who were called away and never came back,

you who would not leave

You I worked with as we had never worked before, side by side

in the studio with five windows glazed by yellow light

You I no longer know but fear dead—

drugs, car wrecks, the several wars,

the usual deaths of my generation—

And you who have gone the distance, beyond your disappointments,

your cancers and their dire cures, my friends

I send you this letter, from the landscape of our years together

You must not wonder if I think of you still—

I have remained steadfast here

I have remembered you wholly into this day

from Dear AllFind more by Maggie Anderson at the library

Copyright © 2017 Maggie Anderson
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.