Category: Uncategorized

Telephone

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

The sun sets in a muddled bank of cloud,
the evening falling fast on Labor Day.
Five of us around the table:
a Brewer’s blackbird, a jack pine,
a stone, and Emily and me.

We served red berries and a trout,
and when the dishes were all put away
we played that old game of Telephone,
where you whisper a few words
in your neighbor’s ear
and they pass along to theirs
what they believed they heard.

Blackbird, I said,
All I have to lend is meager light.

He landed weightless on the stone,
repeating: Dark or day we rise in eager flight.

The stone, stone-deaf, in a low voice
to the tree: Snow numbs, but see,
on the hillside how it glistens!

And the pine, a metaphysical sort,
passed along: Wind hums, sit with me
and feel her kisses.

The message came to Emily
who turned and touched my face:
But when it comes, she said
the landscape listens.

Making Garden Gryphons (Ghazal)

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

They’re never as practical as you will have thought:
Sphinx moths with a real girl’s face? but at least you’ve thought.

The best invent themselves: perhaps a fox hair brush?
Too slow to beat the hawk, too bright — well, we might’ve thought.

Contrived creatures, and never as we’re taught, “nature”:
we will have felt “dragon” but never thought the thought.

A winged lizard — impossible! Do caves give birth?
Unless…combining fear and earth, evil, half-thought…

Beauty never makes a beast, though beauty kills it dead.
Just think with hormones, not with bioactive thought.

A perfect petri dish: some sleep, cold stew, some wine.
Remembering embarrassments she will have thought.

Ta-da! How’s this? A stag’s body, a cat head couched,
its one eye white as pearl, part blind — full blind to thought.

Sweet Monster

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

My husband gone
I raid the fridge, she says.
Not to eat but to pare.
He is happiest when it is full.
I toss out instead
past dated eggs, old olives,
a month-old splash of milk.

Cat food — tossed.
I keep dry vermouth,
muscular carrots,
whole grain bread.
When I am finished
the refrigerator breathes.

I miss him terribly,
but when I walk in
the kitchen is calm.

On the north seat,
the tabby, the young one,
watches me,
quiet without him.
She opens her belly to the sun.

She is my loneliness, too:
sweet monster,
sitting peaceful in my chest,
stretching in the big bed,
purring at the breaking light.

Pitcher

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Stained with grass and goose shit,
a baseball is a perfect thing.

If you ever felt the difference
between the ball in a bare grip
and the numb wing of the glove
you understand the game.

This pale pill,
stitched skin, Frankenstein monster
wrapping wool, a motley
redeemed by weight,
falls homing in the hand.
Even a statue wants
to make it move,
deliver from its scars
a quiet arc.

Young, I used to throw the ball,
a thing they hit.
Now I throw my love for it.

Boy with a Gun

~ Kat Couch ~ 2 Comments

We shared the sidewalk,
and he, too old for lemonade stands,
his head, so resolute it shook,
his fingers,
wrapped around the plastic gun,
his voice, too guttural
for ten years old,
shouted “Pow!”
and the arm recoiled
as I walked on past his house.

I wanted to say,
that isn’t the way it is at all.
You hear the footsteps first,
the voice is soft:
“Stop or you’re dead.”
The gun seems far too small,
winking in the streetlight.
The ring comes off too slowly,
and the boy is nervous
when he whispers
keep walking.

The Family Dog

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

In my father’s dream
Toto the family dog
bounds up the townhouse steps two at a time.
They’d given up the dog long before.
It was just dad sleeping,
when the drink would let him sleep.

He wrote bright, fierce dreams
that Saturday, his liver gone,
the mantel clock he loved ticking it out,
the handwriting in his journal
spidery and soft.

It’s easy to see that last good wish,
the dog back full of life,
a tonic for his own small stepping,
journal in hand,
each entry ending “cognac?”.

Document the Decline

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

If they bend your knees just right,
with one leg beneath the other,
you will fit,
although the plot is short and shallow.

Pothunters will wonder why
you are buried under the Russian olive
and not on the hill, in the old mausoleum,
and why the sudden stopping,
the decline, the fall,
the years of neglect —
the center of commerce shifted perhaps:
a terrible epidemic,
a brutal war.

They have sunk all the ships already
and the oil has slipped away.
The bread and the books are spoiled,
the enormous library burned in the night —
not by armies — by the old postman.

You watched it light
that cheerless June, when the evenings
smelled like sage and sherry.
But there are no more good men to poison,
no more pamphlets,
just circus posters on shop shutters.
Even the topsoil doesn’t hold.

Some helpful soul
will have broken your arm to save space,
placed your viscera in a jar
painted with bluebells,
lovingly wrapped.
They will wonder why the stalks of lavender
and the hawthorn berries spilling from your right hand,
a pen with a metal nib,
and who lent the fateful blow,
the one that counted.

They will wonder why you didn’t fight.

A grad student, a coed,
will love your expressionless bones,
fill them with meaning,
construct a digital face and make its lips move.

She will imagine you
like a paper wasp
who came back to the nest
to find it gone — just a ring
like plaster on the wood,
the queen gone too, a few bodies,
and you later on the sill,
slowly, slowly,
slow with cold, in circles.

Primavera

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

It happens I’m a little loopy about Portuguese, in song and poetry, and when it comes to song, about fado and Mariza. (For background, here)

A song of hers has been going through my head, on repeat. At least, it’s on Spotify on repeat, and so it’s been going through my head: Primavera. Spring. Archetypal fado. Listened to it a basketful of times (uma cesta cheia de vezes?) before chasing up the lyrics, then found a translation, and tweaked the translation a little. Like most love songs, the lyrics themselves don’t blow you away, but Mariza herself will, and the vocal gets in the gut like a Lisbon fish hook.

The video comes complete with a guy playing the guitarra portuguesa who looks like the Anonymous mask experiencing carnal bliss. I say that with respect.

Spring

All the love that had bound us,
as if it were wax,
was crumbling and breaking apart.
Ah, tragic spring
how I wish, how I wish
we had died that day.

And I was condemned to so much:
to live with my weeping
to live, to live, and without you.
Living, though, without forgetting
the enchantment that I lost that day.
Hard bread of loneliness —
that’s all we get,
that’s all we are given to eat.

If you keep on living,
what does it matter,
if the heart says yes or no?

All the love that had bound us,
was breaking down, crumbling,
overshadowed by dread.
No one should talk about spring.
How I wish, how I wish
we had died that day.

Lyrics based on lissber translation

Herbarium

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

The Yellowstone Supervolcano,
a giant magma chamber
below a caldera more or less
in the middle of the national park,
if it erupts,
would cover about a third of the U.S.
in a layer of ash, thick enough in parts
that plants would die,
fields become sterile,
the waterways of the Midwest poisoned.

The cold ash and not the hot lava
does the damage.
The Earth would cool,
skies get dark in day,
mass evacuation,
millions starving.

In a worst case it would be
what scientists call
an extinction level event.
But that’s the worst case:
it may never happen in our lifetimes
nor in the lives of our grandchildren.

Still, I crack open
the canvas spine of my herbarium,
position a piece of honeysuckle,
pressed for a month,
and with a thin knife
lift a leaf, run the ball of a finger
across the wires of veins,
across each pistil thread,
infinitely patient, infinitely fragile.

Mother Ann Lee herself survived
New England’s Dark Day.
I suspect the flower has heard
that old saw of hers:
to do all your work
as though you had a thousand years to live
and as you would if you knew
you would die tomorrow.

Returning After Evacuating From a Wildfire, June 2012

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

The clothes go back in the closet
and the cats come home
and they speak to each other,
each to the other.

The plume still rises
on the western edge
in the one hundred and four degree heat,
and the firefighters on the line,
they speak to each other
in their shorthand speech.

The thank-you signs are out
and the kids approach
with their piggy banks.
On the news at nine we take the toll
and speak to each other, each to each.

But there’s one thing
that doesn’t go away, one thing
that doesn’t curl in the heat:
when the sun wasn’t yet
a red ball in the smoke,
when we got the call
and we spoke to each other,
you and me, and took the photograph
and not the clock
and took the brooch
and not your letters in a box
tied sometime in our third
(or was it the fourth?) year
when we were younger, proud,
full of piss and vinegar:
pride enough to slay
a world of dragons,
nest or night awake,
but not this.

The smoke rose, the letters lay
like wounded partisans
whispering to each other.
Each to the other.