Norman Dubie

The little Blaisdale girl was knock-kneed

and cranky with freckles. She was

quiet and often immersed

in the King’s versions of holy writ.

They called her Sparrow,

so the Lord would be watchful of her …

When her father’s boat failed

to come back from the North Atlantic

there was finally a memorial

followed by a feast –

she and I were charged

to take blue enamel kettles

full of garbage

out to the pit beyond the henhouses.

She was a year older than me and could

walk faster. I stumbled

twice in the pigs’ run. It was

a cold peninsula in Maine.

It was snowing heavily …

In her old communion dress she was

now invisible in a white wind – the gulls

arriving were quickly lost

also in the storm:

there was a disembodied sobbing, only the red

carapace of lobsters, the screams of gulls

and then again,

only the armor of those big sea spiders

climbing high to a vanishing point

beyond even Butler’s Cove

and the great granite face

of Morse Mountain which like a freighter

from Asia moved impossibly into the nor’easter …

Asia was where her mother said the father

had died first,

eating even the bones of snakes, the sound

of gnashing teeth

there beside the compost heap, again and again,

with full ardor

and in the full circle of cold and nitrogen.

In the cold heavy rain, through

its poor lens,

a woman

who might be a man

writes with a can of blue paint

large numbers

on the sides of beached whales –

even on the small one who is still

living, heaving

there next to its darkening mother

where the very air is a turnstile …

I’m certain this woman is moved

as anyone would be –

her disciplines,

a warranted gift to us,

to business, to government,

and our military,

and still she exhibits care and patience

this further

talent for counting,

counting …

An ars poetica

I remember the death, in Russia,

of postage stamps

like immense museum masterpieces

patchwork

wrapped in linen, tea stained,

with hemp for strapping…

these colored stamps designed for foreign places

were even printed during famine—

so when they vanished, so did the whole

Soviet system:

the Berlin Wall, tanks from Afghanistan,

and Ceausescu’s bride before a firing squad.

It had begun with the character of Yuri Zhivago

in a frozen wilderness, the summer house

of his dead in-laws, his

pregnant mistress asleep

before the fireplace

with flames dancing around a broken chair, piano keys,

and the gardener’s long black underwear.

Lara lying there. A vulgar fat businessman

coming by sleigh to collect her for the dangers

of a near arctic escape…

But for Yuri, not that long ago, he was

with celebrity,

a young doctor publishing a thin volume

of poems in France, he was writing

now at a cold desk

poems against all experience

and for love of a woman buried

in moth-eaten furs on the floor—

while he wrote

wolves out along the green tree line

howled at him. The author of this novel,

Boris Pasternak, arranged it all. Stalin would

have liked to have killed him. But superstition kept him from it.

So, the daughter of Pasternak’s mistress eventually

is walking with a candle

through a prison basement—

she is stepping over acres of twisted corpses

hoping to locate her vanished mother …

she thinks this reminds her of edging slowly

over the crust on a very deep snow, just a child who believes

she is about to be swallowed by the purity of it all,

like this write your new poems.