Personal Bird
I have a personal bird.
It sings its four-note
melodic song day and night
without relenting.
I can hear it now through the
sliding glass door.
It doesn’t care whether I’ve
planted the marigolds
and nasturtiums, string
beans or zinnias
(though if I did, it would be
chiming in right overhead), or
rinsed the sour milk
from the plastic bottle
I found in my front yard
(students!). And I can
look at my email all I want
every time I hear one of
those irksome “notifications”:
it doesn’t care
whether I publish
my book or not, or whether
I published my other books
or whether I publish this or
that poem or whether
Tom, Dick, or Harry carries
the torch for me or hates
me in their sleep or thinks I need
filler—Juvederm—in my
chin—
it cares not
about writer’s block, or energy block,
or even libido block or
distinct lack of interest
in food, horrible night
sweats and compulsive consumption
via iPhone of repeating news
cycles about our asshole
president and his
asshole entourage. And that
campaigning congressman in
Montana who decked a reporter—
and then was elected.
Personal bird can be
heard when I’m out
of ear shot upstairs on the
other side of the house
meditating. Supposedly listening
to “Andy,” the Headspace
guy, then sallying forth
into silence for
twenty minutes.
But thinking things
like All people are vampires.
Or showoffs. Or Steffi
is being judgmental. Or H. has
dropped me again. Or…how
much do I actually need to
exercise to get a “handle”
on these “handles”? High-minded
stuff like that. After that, prayers
and readings from Pema Chodron,
Melody Beattie, Emmett
Fox, and The Courage
to Change.
Poor bird is
indefatigable. Poor bird repeats
the same two rising
notes, so close in pitch, pause
and the two repeated
lower ones. Sometimes, it’s
five and the middle
one is the high piercing one.
Cheer-up, cheerily,
cheer-up, cheerily, Peterson’s
says. Where do they
get these “transcriptions”?
Personal bird is high in
the elm I think. I haven’t been able
to spot it. If it goes
quiet I can call it—then it
comes right back.
Soon, my mother will be dead
fifteen years. Not my
hasty glance at her post-mortem
bedside (obeying
her even then—she had said she didn’t
want to be seen dead) or staying
down the hall in the meeting
room when the freckle-
faced guy from the funeral
parlor came to get
“her” with his gurney and
his green zippered bag. Not the
night before when
the night nurses came in
to sponge-bathe her feverish
body. She wore an
oxygen mask the size of
a salad bowl. The machine
that fed it was like a refrigerator.
Her blood oxygen
dropped and dropped. I discussed
with my father his
future plans. With her not two
feet away, panting. I had
her clothes dispatched within a day.
Two sets to the similarly
tiny women my brothers
had chosen, a few sweaters to my
cousin Jane, and the rest to
Flotsam and Jetsam, the
in-house thrift shop at the nursing
home. The tiny-diamond
guard ring from the hand she’d
slapped me with,
I quickly bestowed
on my sister-in-law—though,
come to think of it,
I’m not sure she ever
slapped me wearing that
ring—she got it,
I think, when I was a six-foot-tall
adult. The six
watches I kept, figuring punctuality
could be a worthy
inheritance, and promptly
lost them, one by one.
Personal bird, so sweet and pure,
says it’s like a huge
grappling hook, a bloody hook
at a slaughter house, that
I will dangle on for the
rest of my life. I will
continually find people with
her “psychology” and
assign them to dominate
me. That I will feel
humiliated and victimized
for the duration….That it’s
too late to fix it, that it could not
ever have been
fixed. Sweet bird, so lovely;
I have just learned
you are a robin. The friendly species
who truly answers when
I whistle. She was brilliant
and funny, generous
and charismatic,
to anyone who didn’t
brave the house. Woe be unto
the person born her
child. The bird seems to be promising
something. It repeats itself
over and over. Then goes across
the street for awhile
until I call it back.
Deep Vein Thrombosis
The grizzled white whisker
near the corner
of J.’s mouth—
where he has
trimmed—
you’ve been whispering,
talking with him,
sotto voce,
in a twelve-step
meeting—it’s like a wave, you’re
too close
can’t
decide if you’re
attracted or revolted. His
black mustache
goatee shaved head. Turn off or turn
on? He’s creepy, Mia
says in a text about
the guy who followed
her to the bathroom;
he calls her every
night and tells
her in his sonorous voice
about his Army years
in Germany, how
his wife doesn’t
like him being in
the program. I heard him
say once he’d been
a Special Op. I heard
him once
say he used
to drink every night
till dawn
in a closet with
the light out
in a plaid telaweave
folding chair. A woman is
jumping my husband—
I told him
this morning every time
I see her I want to pour
a bottle
of moisturizer over
her head.
They work
together they’re
thrown together
constantly.
Her husband
has had a stroke, is
paralyzed.
What does
she think I’m dead?
* * *
Deep Vein Thrombosis. They
talk about it like
it’s an underground river,
that may or may
not bubble
to the surface, and if so,
where in this
vast wooded
and meadowed terrain? It
just explodes
my brother said,
his “young” friend—
his age—whose
clot traveled to his
brain,
another guy who
had a silent one
that traveled
from leg to spine
something didn’t
feel right
he went to a doctor
before getting on yet
another flight
got put on
Heparin.
My daughter’s boyfriend
told me his family property
“Le Gasteaud” in Auriol wasn't
worth much
without water. Water springing
up all over the
the adjacent
farmland underground springs
irrigation pools for fields,
but Frederic for some reason
had only
bought the half acre the house
stood on.
They were having
to haul buckets
from the Roman
Fountain until
he thought to hire
un sourcier, a source-
finder, sorcerer, Djibril
said,
gesturing a wishbone,
the diviner
waving the
antennae of his tuning fork—
and voilà. They dug, water
bubbled up.
The over-the-top Palais
Longchamp, on
a huge rise, on
a city street
at the corner of Boulevard
Phililippon
and Montricher, right
near the tram line,
was built in honor of
the construction of Canal
de Marseille
that would
bring water
from the Durance
River to the city. Started in 1839,
it took thirty years
to build.
Ornate statuary, four bathing bulls,
three women above them
(the one on the left
holding clusters of grapes and
a wine goblet, the one on the
right, sheaves of wheat. And in the
center “the river,”
taller, with
her arm wrapped around
a scepter, and her foot resting
on a water jug), stalactites
and nymphs in
a stone grotto,
pools pouring into pools, pouring
into pools, into the elaborate
“chateau d’eau,” the fountain, the water
castle. A bottle
of moisturizer
poured over a woman’s head.
* * *
I finally read the
warning label
for one of my
meds. It says,
For God’s sake,
don’t bleed. Doesn’t that
mean I won’t
be getting
a clot? Heparin has the highest
negative charge density
of any known biological molecule. Just
FYI.
Deep veins of ore,
underground rivers,
the worms, mud burrowers, like
the parchment worm,
that live down
there and never come up
some without
even an air hole.
Beneath the ocean,
the Mariana Trench.
My friend Barbara said
she snorkeled into
a cave. She said
she’s claustrophobic—
occasions for
letting go,
occasions for
leaning upon
a power
greater than
oneself.
Higher power gushing,
or is it that
other thing
that’s gushing,
lust/disgust,
and h.p.
that’s raining down
on the cool
marble of
Palais Longchamp,
the beautiful immutable
mythological
figures. Remember
Cynthia. How
she finally took
me aside
at the writer’s
conference. Like
the fact that she
was from West
Virginia and drove
a BMW needed
explaining? She said
she’d struck
oil totally out of the blue
in her back yard;
it just kind of
bubbled up
sounds like
in the bramble
and the thicket.
And became rich
overnight.
Awkward
somewhat. Bought
a chain of
supermarkets.
That it had been
a hard
adjustment. All that
ease and
privilege. In front
of friends, of
family.
Gushing. That
woman with
her hands on my
husband. Me, up
until I found out what
a rabid right-wing freak
he was (thank God), touching
the hell out
of the revolting, gorgeous
bald guy—
or wanting
to—
the man
with the whisker.
The speaker in the
meeting said when he relapsed
the beer
rushed through him
like a shock
wave. He was
an electrician. He said
he knew what
a charge was.
Dana Roeser is the author of three books of poetry. The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed was published in 2014 by the University of Massachusetts Press as winner of the Juniper Prize. It was named by Library Journal as one of “Thirty Amazing Poetry Titles for Spring 2014,” by Baltimore City Paper in the “Top Ten Poetry of 2014,” and as a 2014 IndieFab Book of the Year Award Finalist. In the Truth Room (2008, University Press of New England/Northeastern Univ. Press) and Beautiful Motion (2004, UPNE/Northeastern University Press) both won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize. For Beautiful Motion, Roeser was awarded The Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington Fellowship; In the Truth Room was nominated for the 2010 Poets’ Prize. Roeser received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Seneca Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, Green Mountains Review, The Florida Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Sou'wester, Laurel Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Mississippi Review, Verdad, Pleiades, Shenandoah, Notre Dame Review, Indiana Review, Sou’wester, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (as well as several other anthologies), and other venues. Roeser has taught in the graduate MFA in Poetry programs at Purdue, Butler, and Wichita State Universities. For more information, please see www.danaroeser.com.