Author: Kat Couch

Email: vyvyan@ultralightimages.co

Breaking Camp

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I am deliberate, breaking camp.
I draw tent pegs out
like a vet pulling quills from a dog.
I don’t tug at the earth
and she settles shaking on my palm.
I fold the tent with Japanese hands,
making envelopes for her;
I fold long-necked birds that fly up
in the warming updraft of the dew.

I am a clock hand in the desert,
slow and circumspect in the rain,
commanding our tent submarine,
a black watch-cap lookout
soaked through again.

I press air from the sleeping bag,
lying full length, fucking the ground.
We make small fires,
extinguish them with small floods.
We will eat everything eventually,
the rock and the elk —
our edges honed smooth,
we fit like all married pieces,
like all married things:
part given, part owned.

Cleaning Birdhouse

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We are always children, really.
Every animal death is the death of love —
not dependent love,
not mom or dad, however deep,
but the first one we knew ourselves
separate and complete,
that made us separate and complete,
and so in an awful unexpected way
the death of us.

The schoolyard girl, the girl with the bangs,
the unborn twin, the boy down the block,
the collie at Christmas.
No one loved for us, none loved as we did.

The day after I put it up
house wrens built their nest
in the new birdbox,
ferrying sweetgrass and sprigs of sumac
through a hole in the neat shiplap.

It was a fine bright thing:
white pine and brass catches,
one wall and the roof hinged at the top
for cleaning out.

But at the end of summer,
cleaning it out, I stopped,
grabbed the shovel from the shed,
dug a foot-deep pit on the ridge,
above the cottonwood and the creek,
and buried the old nest there.

I drove to town in my middle age
with a well, a wound in my throat,
an organ of need, twig, and skin
wanting all of it again,
the gaping breath and the whole bone,
sure that I could not be,
after all, just a part of this.

That by now I must be hardened off,
complete as flight,
not running edgeless
into the rest of the world,

and not undone by the fledgling
left dead in the nest
his perfect unwrapped
new-brown feathers
a miniature of grief.

Purr

~ Kat Couch ~ 2 Comments

i.
Voyager 1,
when it was launched in 1977,
carried on board a golden record
with the music of Mozart and Chuck Berry
and greetings to alien life
in fifty-five languages:

“Hello from the children of planet Earth,”
it said in English.
“May the honors of the morning
be upon your heads,”
it said in Turkish.

It’s difficult to beat,
“How are you all? Have you eaten yet?”
but my favorite is in Swedish:
“Greetings from a computer programmer
in the little university town of Ithaca,”
it says.

ii.
No one knows exactly why cats purr.
We assume they are happy,
comfortable, comforted, safe,
but vets report they also purr
at the moment of death,
after the needle is slipped under the skin
into the vein of the leg.

And studies show they purr
at a frequency that heals bone,
that a healthy cat will lie down
next to a sick one
and begin purring for it.

But they don’t purr when they are born,
and they’re born blind and deaf,
ears down, like lumps of damp dough,
spinning through space
in their own quiet world,
huddled up against that soft universe
of fur and flesh,
huddled against the mother
they can only feel
in their blindness,
in the deep mute well of the night,
eyes lidded,
eyes wrapped in skin and loss,
until three weeks or so along:

purr.

The root and meaning of all speech,
their own golden record:
It’s me.
I’m here.

What I Remember About Winning the Race

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Although I said to myself I wanted nothing more
than to break the tape,
to be the first one over the line
in the ninety-degree heat of Castroville,
Artichoke Capital of the World,
in fact, a runner doesn’t break the tape at all.
It wasn’t even a tape.
It may have been a length of string
the two who were given the job
at the last minute saying,
“I thought you had it!”
“You said you did.”
“The gun’s gone off…we better think of something.”

And so it was a chalk line someone had in a bag
hurriedly stretched,
not broken but pushed through,
pulled away from their hands, one end dropped,
the string gathered, balled up,
stuffed into a knapsack at the end of the day.

Although I said I wanted nothing more
than to come in first,
the light popping in John’s eyes,
my winner’s knock-kneed unmuscled stagger,
I did nothing more than hurt and retch,
stretched on the cold tile of the men’s room floor,
breathing unusual breaths,
my breath coming in short gasps
and no teammate
no concerned official knocking at the door
(there was another race I’m sure) —
alone in the men’s room
my hands gripping the sink,
puking over my knuckles:
the touch and temperature of victory.

The Penitent Brothers

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The soap plant flowers in summer
but the leaves come early,
sinuous as Javanese daggers.

In the Old West men lathered their hair
with the juice from the bulb,
healed poison oak,
killed fish in the streams.

At the foot of the Turquoise Mountain
they are more devout:
by March the leaves of the plant
finger out in cat-o’-nine-tail clumps
and they clean away sin
on the backs of the Penitent Brothers.

(When they lashed Rafael to the cross
on Good Friday in a canyon out of town
he cried like a child for the nails:
Ay! Como estoy deshonrado!
his arms swelled purple and he groaned
in spite of the shame.)

While the village sleeps
the soap plant blooms in the hot afternoon,
its thin white petals curled back
like an ecstasy of saints,
its stalks so delicate
the flower seems to float in the air,
feeling for the sun.

Father’s Day

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

My parents used to sit on the balcony
on Menorca in the mid-day heat
eating Spanish olives
and tossing the pits over.
We called it suntan lotion
and not sun block in those days,
and when we ran out, we used olive oil,
coating our English arms with it
until they glistened
like plucked chicken wings.

Each afternoon my father made the same joke:
how years later a whole grove
of olive trees would spring up
below our rented rooms,
against the stucco and the wrought iron,
in the red dirt.

He was wrong, of course.
No trees grew,
nothing stayed:
not the smell of my mother’s oil paints
when she painted in the cove,
not the depressions we left on the sand.

What grew was this olive,
the one I draw from my mouth
long after my parents are gone.
This one, gray-green,
cured, no longer bitter.
This one, purple-black,
pitched, its small flesh wrapping
an undegradable stone,
launched over the railing
among the goldfinches
in the Scots Pine.

Julia at the Vanderbilt Estate

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The earth folds in on itself
and even in its dying
there is still a mist
rising from the river
among the red oaks,
the magnolia, and the poplar trees.

Enough to erase the horizon,
enough to say, with a loose stroke
or the smudge of a finger
we can make the scene less firm,
cloud the coming end,
still fill it with possibility:
exotic fruits, a new June,
newlyweds rafting the patient water,
their laughter hung on the leaves
like wind chimes.

Who doesn’t love a landscape?
We are all immortal in it,
despite the stone step where
we gathered for breakfast
near the balustrade.

I said, ‘Julia, the colors!’
She said, ‘I see, I see,’
though of course she couldn’t.

‘I met one of them once,’ she said.
‘Met who?’ we asked.
‘The tall one…I forget his name
— but he’s gone now.’

‘Yes,’ we said,
and the red oaks said yes,
yes we know,
the mist still
rising from the river.

Deer Aspect

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

We slept in the thicket as we do,
half sleeping,
our thoughts walking on spring ice
branch to branch, as they do,
hearing up from the damp night of the earth
the etching into leaf of the smallest spider:
the orb weaver
the grass spider spinning, spinning
in the filtered light.

And feeling under the coarse hair of our bodies,
under the needles of our skin,
the seismic shifting of the rock,
the dry rock, the rock on fire,
far, far down —
our kin.

We wake fat some mornings, butter fat,
with our lips in leaf,
but some days inexplicably
I wake with muscled skin and hollow hair,
leaving the depression in the sumac
where our bodies have carved
hollows in the thicket, remembering
(the way we remember all fading dreams)
that I dreamed I was pale and almost hairless
with two straight and awkward legs,
coming and going through the copse
without asking and without permission,
closing the door of the great unnecessary house
in the morning, leaving,
and pocketing the keys.

Cow and Calf

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

For the third time in three years,
walking in the wilderness,
I surprise two moose,
a cow and a calf.

The cow complains, moves on
with a bovine grunt
calling the little one.

Her hair is edged with black,
the brown on her flanks so deep
you could drown in it.
She’s as tall as a draft horse and fast:
if she wanted to,
she could cover the ground between us
before I could stand up.

So I sit,
feeling a pinprick of guilt
for having intruded /

and yet,
how can I take my place in the wild,
how can I be — what’s the phrase? —
a good animal,
without lightly disturbing it?
Nothing here wants me passive:
the forgotten relation come home
to mope and grieve,
the one who sits at the edge of the fire,
the one no one speaks to,
not the sky
not the rock
not the water and the water hemlock,
and not the bat-faced calf
his eyes fixed on mine
reluctant to leave.

Once Occupied

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The old man who used to own the house
is driven up by his niece
in a car with Wyoming plates.
It stops at the end of the drive.

They had probably come up just to see,
and then, me out on the deck
getting water to the spruce and daylilies
along the lines he had laid
even then, in his nineties.

We heard his wife had died,
but he didn’t mention her:
it was for the niece, to show her the view
and the tile and the wisteria,
to talk about the wild plum, the tame plum,
the peaches big as his fist,
the wrinkles in the road as deep as his.

He said when the house was new
the driveway was a solid piece of rock.

I pointed out how the lilacs
hadn’t bloomed this year and he nodded,
how the cicadas were bad,
how the wasps had left their paper nest.
I had taken it down,
afraid they would reclaim it,
though they hadn’t bothered us —
just flew back and forth along the deck
(he said I put those railings in).

We sat on the porch swing smiling,
time gone and the satisfaction of it,
the rings of the wasp nest
still white as death on the wall.