Author: Kat Couch

Email: vyvyan@ultralightimages.co

Love Deserves the Infinitive

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

To love
she took your hand in the wood
and when you cried over the math
in third grade
and the class snickered awkwardly
it was she rose without thinking
and stood at your desk
in the ruled foolscap of the morning,
the milk in
and the nettles and oaks
speaking at the window.

She had not learned much:
to make the action past,
to conjugate conditional —
not even bare
love
without a particle.

There was no loved,
nor could love,
nor if the rain had come
we would have loved.
Nor once above the mibs and taws
her shadow may.
But in the sucking clover,
disguised in a neat dress,
she invited atoms,
breathed like billows,
made everything whole
because she knew it whole.

Courtship Dive

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

A broad-tailed hummingbird,
the one with the green back and the scarlet throat,
flies between two pines
at opposite sides of the lot,
pauses out of reach,
pivots in place,
first to the left: here’s my throat,
then to the right: here’s my tail,
pivoting left, and then to the right,
all the time whirring
around an invisible pin.

And then, of course, there is no pin.
That also was a mirage,
sound faking form:
a fiddle string vibrating so hard
it loses itself.

In the near dark
when the deer come out
he soars sixty feet into the air,
turns hard to ground
in a suicide dive
from which he must pull out,
but who could see it?

She can see it, a friend told me once,
down low in the lilacs —
sees him resurface
high in his inverted world,
where gemstones drop loose from the clouds
and lightning races into the sky
from the loving earth.

Os Pavões Brancos

~ Kat Couch

Porque os pavões brancos
na Avenida Pinheiros
sente-se em gaiolas de arame ao lado dos estábulos
eu comparo os seus corpos
a lótus que crescem na lama,
ou para uma cabeça de fósforo
iluminado na escuridão.

Nem sempre foi assim:
durante meses, mal conseguimos vê-los
entre as caudas de cor creme
dos cavalos em miniatura
e só sabíamos que eles estavam lá
porque um sinal em uma poste de cerca
disse “pavões adultos à venda”.

Mas agora,
mesmo aos domingos brilhantes,
eles estouram contra a lama
como faíscas de soldadores
e eu fico acordado, vendo-os
drapeados no nosso corrimão de cedro húmido,
o fardo de beleza deles
como um buraco
perfurado no céu.

White Peacocks

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

Because the white peacocks
on Lodgepole Drive
sit in wire cages next to the stables
I compare their bodies
to lotuses that grow in the mud,
or to a matchhead
lit in the darkness.

It wasn’t always that way:
for months we could barely pick them out
among the cream-colored tails
of the miniature horses
and only knew they were there
because a sign on a fencepost
said “adult peacocks for sale”.

But now,
even on bright Sundays,
they sputter against the mud
like welders’ sparks
and I lie awake, seeing them
draped on our damp cedar railing,
the burden of their beauty
like a hole
punched in the sky.

The Gulls on Alcatraz

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

They’ll eat anything,
the Western Gulls on Alcatraz,
so sometimes you can find
on the rocks at the base of the island,
or on the cracked and splintered yard
where the cons worked out,
tennis balls and bright yellow golf balls
the birds brought over and dropped,
thinking they were mussels or oysters,
some kind of unfamiliar shellfish
the fall would break,
and not the crap we lose or toss out,
all things finding their way
to the sea as they do.

And I understand their confusion
when the balls hit the ground and bounce
high in the air, intact and inedible:

I also have made it this far,
tired from looking,
the junk of another world in my jaws,

and I also recover,
beat away again across the flat bay,
sure that tomorrow,
on this same slipshod ground,
out of the deep cerulean blue,
a bird will land,
the moon in his mouth
and his whole head
shot through with light.

A Lot of Talk About Extinction

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

This is how it starts.
Out of the seeming
dead branch, the green hands
of the mountain mahogany
overnight, about to flex.

There has been a lot of talk
lately about extinction,
and there will be some:
there always was, I guess, before anything
much cared about comings and goings.
It is only this that makes it hurt:
the deep quiet of a Colorado morning,
the sky cerulean, cupped blue
as though we were seeing it
from inside the egg of that migratory thrush,
our new feathers — you could hardly call them that —
new skin, bones, beak, near formless

and the scrim of the earth,
all it means, outside the glowing shell.

But instead, we must somehow be
in the other hemisphere:
not this northern Easter but in mid fall,
the stars all different,
the dry seed, like the corkscrew style
of the mahogany — a few stragglers stuck
among the small green hands — the rest
long since picked up, blown off and out
to other work.

Skunk, Twilight

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

I remember,
when I see the animal wobbling, distracted,
across the road
that the famous blacks of Velázquez
— the rich black even Picasso envied —
were burnt wood or bone,
plant or animal color,
and not an absence at all,
nothing to do with dusk
or the fading light /

likewise in his dithering,
following a scent trail
to the edge of the cornfield,
he is disconnected
from what is left of the day:
splendid, bold, apart.

And then the hay on each side
freshly mown, the draft horses
in the far stables
apparently alone;
the stag, in its own hour,
a little farther on.

I remember how much beauty
is in these margins,
in back lane illuminations,
our drifting bodies
without the purpose
and accomplishment of daylight,

how I would rather be the first painter
of common things, as Velázquez said,
than the second painter of something much grander,
rather spend the evening
with these rich relations
than back among the waking poor.

Copyright © 2018 Lilibug Publishing.

Cave Painting

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

Putting aside the fact that they are old,
which is, admittedly,
like putting aside the divinity of a god
or the black of a crow,
we understand the paintings in the Chauvet Cave
because we have been children,
because we lay awake in summer,
possessed by what we wanted and what we owned.

‘We’ll go horse riding on the beach,’
my father promised,
and I never slept, hearing the relentless
gravel pulsing of the sea,
seeing my pinto, as though he were there
— and me, straight-backed,
moving the spirited thing
with the pressure of my heel.

If I could, I also would have
ground stones to powder,
mixed fat and spit,
sketched the thin-legged horses,
their necks impossibly arched,
posed static, because they were mine.

And then, in bed,
under whatever rushes hid and warmed us,
watched the obsessive fire
trace their red and ochre lines.

But the Ensenada pony,
when I tried to ride him,
mostly stood
— tired, malnourished —
until I pulled him reluctant
to the edge of the water
uncontent and untransformed /
the dark shapes of trawlers inching
like beetles on the horizon:

paintable ships, but knowing now
how only shipwrecked sailors paint,
how only starving hunters paint.

Copyright © 2018 Lilibug Publishing.

 

Walk-Through

~ Kat Couch

The house painter was leading a walk-through,
three days of spraying and staining done,
a couple of his friends tailing us
with open cans of color,
their own faces leathered,
tejano pop songs playing still
in the April sun.

‘Did you build these trails?’ he asked.
We skirted blue spruce, slid on the shingled slope
down to the woodshop.
‘No, the deer built them.’
I motioned to a pair of does
in the shadow of the olive tree.
‘Do you hunt them?’ he brightened.
‘Is it legal? Probably not legal…’

We slowed above the arroyo.
‘Hunt them? They’re family,’ I answered.
‘We watch their kids grow up —
two of them last year,
under the walkway you painted.’
But how to tell him?
About the fawn in the ditch,
the legs of stags cut apart on fences,
the lazy circles of turkey vultures
over the prairie grass.
Loss is older than hunters, I want to say.
In this fat country even their natural deaths
are in our flesh,
and not vacant, vestigial
like a tailbone,
the impotent muscles of our ears,
or what is left of a third eyelid,
couched, reptilian
against our tears.

Copyright © 2018 Lilibug Publishing.

Linked Tanka #2

~ Kat Couch

I don’t remember
Februarys so empty:
the house wrens are gone
the elk are in the white hills,
the earth so old it forgets

it misplaces things:
deer file past without stopping
the grass never wakes
there’s a hole in the pine tree
where scrub-jays used to chatter

but it is nothing.
it is nothing April can’t.
April can’t erase.
nothing April can’t erase.
nothing it can’t remember.