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Martha Kapos poems
after Frank O’Hara
‘You told me trees pick up again
where they’ve left off –
but now, without their leaves
they have such a look of naked
emaciation that their hard
curves and hollows stand out like ribs
on the bare chest of Buddha.
And that Japanese Maple now bent and stiff
under a slick of white-out ice
left off last fall with an exceptional red
they’d said on Gardeners’ Question Time
was a distinct sign of stress.’
‘Be patient’
said the Sun, loud and clear
as it stepped in through the window.
‘You know what an act of faith it takes
to believe I’ll put in a reliable
appearance in the morning?
Well –
I’ll not measure out any more distress
than you’ll need to write your poems.’
‘Can I be certain of that?’ I asked.
‘Not always’, said the Sun.
With so much going on outside
you forget how the world
feeds itself into a tiny hole
in the eye, tunnels its way
to a back room and stands on its head.
You forget how the brain
admitting its mistake, tips it back
onto its feet, connects
the very small to the very large
and tidy housekeeper that it is
stacks it all in strict
time sequence in the linen cupboard
where now, after so many blunders
the shelves have collapsed and the sleek
sheets scattered by the wind
have changed their names and become so small
lightly floating flying across the front lawn –
a dandelion stands on its head
and its hair has become very white.
The unfastened minutes trickle out
until the past is a wisp
lodged in some ditched bicycle
face down on the pavement, or the wrecked
spectacles you’ve left on the table.
When her face lies open, fast asleep
sometimes at night I’m the unrequited lover
peering down and taking in the view.
Her profile meandering sideways
on the pillow draws a craggy sunlit line
of curves and inlets such that could divide
the eastern seaboard of the United States
from the Atlantic: providing proof,
I’d like to think, against the slightest risk
of continental drift except that floating
within the radius of her cheek
(as if an intruder, having tiptoed in at night
had tampered with the established order on my desk)
a small brown mole is slowly changing its position.
As it settles now in one uncertain place
and then another, shifting its location
depending on mine, it’s as if the distant
spot is a remote but sizeable town
perched on a chalky slope above the harbour
or from another angle, closing in, it’s a single
farmhouse by an adjoining pond where, settling softly
a little to the left, a tiny concentration of gnats
dips down to practise landings on the water.
Freckled shadows fall from the surrounding trees.
In the general darkness I can just make out a man
and, unless I’m very much mistaken, he’s bending down
to toss a small round stone into the water.
Rings fan out and leave me circling
in the baffling echoes of her whereabouts
where for all I know the story peters out
until at last I spot it sinking down
through clouds of watery bottle-green so dark
my anxiously attentive eye flicks on
a torch as if her face was full of rooms
each one a prior world she’d passed through
and I track it down the unlit flights of stairs
back to the ultrasound department in the basement
where I’m an unexpected witness to the scan.
It’s a transparent fish in the inky dark
a primordial shrimp whose neck is slit
with fishy gills, a lugworm curling
sideways in the mud, and deeper still
a small round beating shadow
the radiographer assures me is her heart.
Taking it down from the hook
with panoramic holes for his head and arms
she dressed him entirely
in the present moment, the confirming
yes to everything he said
tucking him up in bed, smoothing
the sheets, laying out the views
from the window: all the shapes
she made of the blue-green
grapevine hung over the garage
the sumac with its many-budded spikes
placed on the curving lawn
so that he proceeded among them
into the deep garden where trees
displayed their new collections of leaves
each waving a long stem towards him
holding a lozenge of green light
as if they were extensions of his own eye
and the sky stood open in motionless
pieces of shining the size of a diamond.
Her face in its largeness swam
on a repeating wave of arrival
coming as it did from a place
where the sun sat on his bed as if
it would never move, never go into eclipse
behind the sliding shadow of a door
or ever give up its shape and grow thin.