Clothespins
My mother is doing
laundry—snap of the bleached blue shirts
against her
breasts and thighs so when she is done she is
wet, evaporating, the legs pushed down so hard
on braided cotton
(her teeth-marks visible,
runic), my father’s shirts, despite the iron,
clouds of steam,
keep the shape of their pinning. The ones
I loved best squealed like jays or sparrows I had
harmed
so I could pinch the nubs of callus
coming out of my hands and form
a second monstrous
touching until she’d push the cage of laundry
another bed-length, and holler, “Quit!”
For her,
the pins were solo dancers, leggy Juliet
Prowses, mad Shirley MacLaines,
she’d marvel at on Sunday nights,
shushing us if we laughed too hard
against the gracefulness, or gnawed our pillows.
Snap
of the pedal pushers under
the wind-blown sun, the dangling stirrups. Snap
of the elegant
cotton blends.
Now they might as well
have held her with their torque,
the cut made and the spreader
widened, so her body was like the earth
coming apart
to expose its under-dermis,
all those colored wires packed tight,
strapped and coiled.
Except it was her heart.
A valve had failed. And so to keep her open,
the doctors used knives and clamps
(their bag of clothespins),
a replacement animal valve on a tray beside them.
Blood leaking
in spurts and jots, in increments of
medicine—the very spoonfuls my father aspirated
through a tiny
engine before he died to save his life.
The washer/dryer chugging the other side
of the wall, his
shirts clean, pajamas clean.
Wife’s hands smelling of Tide or Cheer.
So when I look
up (to where she is going, where
her husband has gone, scent
of apples and
lilac, if I believe such things), I don’t see
God but an unfinished basement
with the wires exposed so they
spark when she walks—
when I talk with her, listening for the shocks—
balancing the pumping out, her
arms purple, her
remaining breast purple,
where the clothespins bit her burning red in the night.
Choke-Hold, 1956
It must have been a
diamond in her
throat she kept
coughing—
as if her marriage
vows had trapped
some undigested
pocket of
air—some grit
a shoe had tracked
in, or sneaker,
ash from
a cigarette
carelessly flicked
(what she tells herself)—
so when the soup
is cold or
served too late, it is
this jewel that
catches, its strands
of carbon turning
to raw facet
in her breath. Not
him, not him.
Calla Lily
Only later did I realize the pressure thumb and
fingers could bring to bear upon the muscular stem of
breathing, so huge, like a column of steel in the
wrestlers I loved, so when my own throat caved in I
knew I was un-forged, green, like the stalk of a lily,
my breath spilling in moist folds, spittle like pollen
from a wind-shaken stamen, head in a vice. God’s voice howling in the honeyed light. |
My Knife
I keep a little Lear in my back
jeans pocket, a little sorrow
like a doll or jackknife
to slice away at storms
the tumbling skulls of hail
those bitter dice
or at those little winds that keep coming
out of the grass
with their seeds of silver
and nothingness
like faith being sucked out
of the earth, slipped back in
so I have to dig there to gnaw it out
I have to curse my left hand
the nub of thumb
I have to say my fingers
are the spirit scarves of grief
leashed to a hurt dog
its Cordelia heart softening
to whimper and yip
its Cordelia heart fountaining
in its chest like the moon
how cold the world is
on the blade of my knife
its tip snapped white
toothed, sharking the air
how cruel this little Lear
it wants the curved bite of blood
bubble and smear, the run
it wants the blood biting back
the knife taped to my last good hand
like a jailhouse shiv
which is not the world, but its skin
which is not the world, but its glove and dress
from Devotions: Heron
Twice this has happened: I’m driving west into the evening’s monochromes when out of the marshes a blue heron struggles across the highway’s five lanes, so low it nearly hits me, makes me swerve. The semi hauling ass behind me slamming its brakes, the cab dipping, all that forward-driven mass of the trailer buffaloing up and nearly smacking the bird from the sky. And then the daylight streaming. Emptiness streaming. The leveling out of speed. On my windshield: five or six blisters of marsh. How
velocity touched what remained of the droplets’ glycerin, made them bleed. Kinked strings picking up road grit. Husks of heron. Resurrection seeds.  |
Dennis Hinrichsen’s most recent book is Kurosawa's Dog, winner of the 2008 FIELD Poetry Prize. It will appear in early 2009. Recent work is forthcoming in Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Crab Orchard Review, Notre Dame Review and Sou'wester. He lives and teaches in Lansing, Michigan.
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