Without Words

I’m having a really hard time writing in the last few weeks. But I’ve been reading out of my anthology a lot so I thought I’d just post a poem I’ve been enjoying.

A Postcard from the Volcano

–Wallace Stevens

Children picking up our bones

Will never know that these were once

As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes

Made sharp air sharper by their smell

These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones

We left much more, left what still is

The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow

Above the shuttered mansion-house,

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate dispair.

We knew for long the mansion’s look

And what we said of it became

A part of what is . . . Children,

Still weaving budded aureoles,

Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems

As if he lived there left behind

A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,

A tatter of shadows peaked to white,

Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

E.S.H.

She was born from a chicken’s bone,

splayed from the crease of the why and

made from a wish for a friend.

She waited, cradled in a chrysalis

until broken legs revealed twin bones

of deceptively different sizes;

they sealed themselves,

entwined with like-minded muscles

sometimes pulling in opposite directions

but with blood that always ran

toward the same place.

Like irises that grew from one knotted root,

they were green and let themselves spill out;

the scars upon their crooked spines telling secrets

that can only be known to those

who are grown from the same hip bones.