Where the Sky Opens. Laurie Klein

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      Laurie Klein

      June 1, 2015

      How to Live Like a Backyard Psalmist

      Wear shoes with soles like meringue

      and pale blue stitching so that

      every day you feel ten years old.

      Befriend what crawls.

      Drink rain, hatless, laughing.

      Sit on your heels before anything plush

      or vaguely kinetic:

      hazel-green kneelers of moss

      waving their little parcels

      of spores, on hair-trigger stems.

      Hushed as St. Kevin cradling the egg,

      new-laid, in an upturned palm,

      tiptoe past a red-winged blackbird’s nest.

      Ponder the strange,

      the charged, the dangerous:

      taffeta rustle of cottonwood skirts,

      Orion’s owl, cruising at dusk,

      thunderhead rumble. Bone-deep,

      scrimshaw each day’s secret.

      Now, lighting the sandalwood candle,

      gather each strand you recall

      and the blue pen, like a needle.

      Suture what you can.

      I. Portals

      . . . where the unthinkable happens

      A Lone Bird, Balanced

      Riff after riff cascades from a cottonwood—

      too bad nobody here speaks Bird anymore.

      Oh, for a madcap diva in peacock blue,

      her feathered train a ladder of eyes.

      Give her a voice that breathes out honey

      and arias warm as the primal yawn:

      praise unfurled, wingspan wide . . .

      Or summon an earnest, mustachioed tenor

      whose cedary timbre makes us believe

      taproots bebop under our feet,

      desert hyacinth bulbs groove, beneath dunes,

      while sea wind composes its chorus of stones.

      Where is that diva now?

      We want a translation for sky

      unscrolling this endless score.

      And we call for a thousand Bocelli birds

      singing acres of wind and cloud

      with the breadth of a robe, fallen open.

      Exposed

      So why do I always spot the homely birds?

      Mouse-brown, on those twig feet

      you look like a refugee. Are you hurt,

      little wife? Are you brooding, as I am,

      over the latest spill of blood and feathers,

      songless, over the next ravaged nest?

      Talk to me. Creak open a pocket-lined wing

      concealing a cottontail, a collapsible hat.

      Convince me the song of Zion lives, before

      the long blue eye of this wind impels us

      to shelter where doubt builds its house:

      a tatter of leaves,

      dust, and greenstick fractures.

      She Can Only Try to Compose Herself

      The wood thrush at dusk echoes

      every day’s hope,

      each note a psalm of a self,

      a white blossom

      where rests fall between sounds

      like petals. See the way air

      cups a face that it loves, and light

      strikes the hollow

      curve of the throat, leaving it

      speechless.

      She Calls Him Dreamer

      They both sign up for “Reading the Land.”

      He is the summit she fails to map,

      a soul built for switchbacks, a seeker

      of wind-shaved stone. He straddles

      the ridge, beckoning.

      She’s his Wild Beauty,

      but also answers to Bean, a Great Plains girl,

      calm as horizon, a hill unmade.

      Sometimes she thinks his veins churn

      with glacial silt, clouding his gaze.

      “Piece of cake,” he calls.

      Stalling

      over red laces, extra-long, she criss-crosses

      the loose ends on her shins like a dancer,

      hoists her frameless Day-Glo-orange pack,

      sagging beneath the old Dacron bag,

      strapped on,

      tight as a budget.

      Eerie sounds drown out Dreamer’s instructions.

      Bean slow-pivots the compass points. Upwelling

      water re-lacquers the lake’s СКАЧАТЬ