Author: Kat Couch

Email: vyvyan@ultralightimages.co

Summer Wedding

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New married, they lived one summer
by an apple tree,
and watched the fruit
turn green, then oxblood red.
And watched the sun
and watched the shingled sea.

August came
untended in the long grass.
At picking time
he found a bright pot
and shook the apples down,
his hands around the branches.

He was awkward in his wedding ring:
the smallest finger rubbed it,
like a tongue with a new tooth,
where it blazed against
the thick gray boughs.

Where apples fell,
they stewed in pockets
of unclipped grass,
in earthen cider smells,
in a garden quick
with snakes and sowbugs.

He stood among them
in a fine independence,
satisfied to not be
mad with growing,
while Sara watched him
from the kitchen.

She must have seen him as he was:
not simple and apart,
but a kind of metamorphosis,
some mythic thing —
legs, wrapped and rooted
to the earth by snakes,
his arms in apples,
and all his skyward fingers, leaves.

Open Push Air Out

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I keep meaning to put my pants on
but I don’t.
I keep meaning to put my pants on
but I forget.
I’m trying to drink more milk like you said.
I’m trying to drink more milk
but it soured.
You say I’m still stinky and I get it.
You say I’m still stinky
but at least I showered.
Walk me to the end of the block.
That was how our vow went, was it not?
You walk me to the end of the block
but I stop.

I keep meaning to put on makeup
but it’s gone.
I keep meaning to put on makeup
but it gets in my beard.
I’m trying to catch the bus to work but —
no, I’m trying to catch the bus to work
but it leaves across the street,
to the little butter building
by the legion hall.
You say to ask for help if I need it.
You say to ask for help, but there’s just
the scratch of spiders when I call.
There’s just the sound of water in the pot.
That is how the mouth works, is it not?
Open, push air out.

Acheron

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Of the five rivers
most know two of the others,
my sisters.

You’ve never met them?
Sure, we run into each other.
Lethe and Styx

get the spotlight,
but I want to talk about
tonight.

You have five shots
on the bar.
I’m the last one, right?

Firestarter

~ Kat Couch ~ 2 Comments

Mr. Springer, who resides
at the dingy bungalow
on Constance Court
that we can see from the wooden deck
of our wooden house,
and who last Saturday started the fire
that burned a thousand acres of grass
due south along the lake —

that Mr. Springer,
who the neighbors,
shortly after, bilious,
suggested should go to prison
for the rest of his too-long life,
was just connecting
an electric fence.

Sparks flew.
They do
at high school dances and in fields
and sometimes catch fire
and run for all our panic water.

But now, across the road,
through the window of his living room,
I watch him watching television,
his generator in the driveway,
and around the place, the black grass
spread the way it did / not away
the way it did,
but sharp-tongued prairie now
licking up,
darkly, acidly
against the flickering wall
of his flickering house.

Galatea

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At first, she sat in the corner sulking.
There was still a powder of stone on her skin.
Her shoulder, soft as a cat’s,
turned hard rounded in the palm,
but I was used to that.

After all, wasn’t that the idea?
To find a melting point for marble,
to have the crest of her hip push back,
flutter of breath
from the small cave of her mouth.

I just wasn’t ready for the opposite:
my want making her soft,
her hate reversing the charm:
petrifaction of love.

After four days I prayed
some god would take her back.
She wasn’t eating.
She drew caricatures of me
on the studio floor with a stick, saying,

Can’t I go outside? What are you looking at?
Don’t you have any friends?
Then nasty, knowing my weakness:
Can’t you make me a mate —
someone good-looking, younger, sexier?

When she stopped moving
I would pause
in the doorway from the garden,
crunching an apple, a sculptor again,
remaking her with my eyes,
smaller like a child.

They said we had a son,
but what do those liars know.
I took out my chisel.
The boy rose smiling
in the gravel of his mother’s arms.

Sewing a Kayak

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The best kayaks
in the world
were sewn by the wives
of Inuit hunters,
because a single bad stitch
meant the loss
of husband and hunter and food
and warmth and simple honor.

But what does it mean for a poet
to write a bad poem?

Do we sit with our children
at the dinner table,
wife sullen, the kids,
their eyes burning shame,
because they know
there was a poor word.
Everyone was talking about it.
A dull metaphor sank the boat.
The house melted.
For want of a syllable
we lay on the ice.

And in the drawer,
as though we could hide it,
a stinking
sunk poem.

Soufflé

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

When I was a kid
in love with a girl
I took a bus to New York City
and there remember
only two things
she didn’t thrill by stepping
in the room.

It dumped eight inches of rain
into the Holland Tunnel.
And then safe in her
New Jersey home,
in an empty kitchen,
I made a soufflé
with whatever was about —
whatever.

There was some cheese.
People came and went.
Some flour.
Her parents were divorcing.
Some butter, all abandoned:
the refrigerator
was a time capsule,
a locker of remembered love.

Everyone ignored me,
and that was just.
It was she, only she, anyway.
The soufflé had a crust,
sweet-strange as a metaphor.

I sat at the kitchen table,
the rain dry,
the roads winding unimportantly,
and ate the whole perfect
thing.

Words Used by Kat Couch

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Memories, a river of bad soup,
a cat-trap by the water.
I dream the moon soft,
your hand on the screen door.

We loved that creek,
dipped for stone apples,
tossed them on the trail,
lay in the milk ribbons of our bones.

Old love, long time gone:
your eyes, blue berries,
your sweet head,
that monster of your beauty.

The kids gone, too,
you to your doctor husband.
I sleep twitching, walk
the whitewater of night.

Remember our kitchen gods?
They smell like onions now,
the stinking rose,
mute carnival pictures.

Lately I am a bear.
Can’t shoulder shit.
Too light for hibernation,
I stare down a bush, blind.

Dad Dying

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He used to tell stories:
how my mother would visit him at Oxford
and cook three-course meals on a single burner
while they sported the oak,
which, he explained, meant they kept
the heavy wood door chained.

In the end, he drank so much
telephone calls didn’t reach him.
They fell through the wire,
and you shied from his thick, warm voice.
His great chest shrank at seventy:
the captain of the first XV,
the rugger boy who scored three tries
the day I was born.

In the hospital
nurses fluttered like sheets
along the hallways;
through the window, a garden party sky.
I thought of that wartime summer,
the one all Englishmen seem to remember
whether they were alive, or not yet born,
or dying in the air in Spitfires.

He was a kid then,
lugging books and his gas mask.
A part of that world was his —
the tea on the grass,
and the big beneficent clouds, promising
they would also be there
that day in Kelowna.

But he didn’t speak.
I made an awkward joke to his jaundiced head
about how I hadn’t expected to see him so soon,
and took my place.
His breathing filled the room.

When it stopped, his wife cried
and shouldered out,
ignoring my mothering arms.
I crept back in before they took his eyes,
kissed his yellow brow,
our skin briefly the same.

Among My Superpowers

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

One. Finding lost things
my wife could never find,
but I failed with virginity
and no longer count it on my résumé.

Two. Casting protection spells for deer.

Three. Sketching.
Well — until recently.
I can’t draw anymore:
all art discriminates;
it is all about difference,
and I have lost the sense
of one thing in relation to another.

I take off my shoes and place my feet,
heel to sod, in the prairie coneflower,
take a pencil,
but my talent is gone.
The upright toe of the flower,
in the blue grama
like a nub of cherubim,
and the tall rye grass
seem attached to me;
my legs now, articulated like juniper.
The berries on the sand cherry are out,
bulging, livid as the eyes
of damselflies,
and the powder-green sagewort,
that wild shortgrass, fringes my scalp
down to the flint and shale
of this ancient skin.

The pencil disappears.
I find it with the mountain mahogany,
where it has grown feathers.
It is still too weak to fly.
By the weekend it will be
south with Scorpio.