Sewing a Kayak

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

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

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

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

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

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.

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?”.

Meteor Shower

~ Kat Couch ~ 3 Comments

for Seamus Heaney

Was there any other way to see it?
On our backs, a map of the heavens,
on the ceiling of our schoolboy rooms:

two-dimensional, papered and purple-black,
the whole night sky mimeographed
with periods and static blots for stars,

for the span of our adolescence,
so unmoving we began to hate it.
Perseus, for all his stone-making, dull.

Orion, the winter-maker, dull as ditch swill,
cocked this way and only this.
And then one August new moon night,

away from town, unable to sleep,
hours before dawn, Perseus himself awake,
there is only a depth.

In that depth a speeding light
that starts the puppets talking,
that moves the stuffed bear on the sill.

There is only a depth and one light through it.
A dust that one time only
makes the whole world new.

Sick in Bed With the Cats

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

i.
Like ragpickers they keep the cut sleeves
of men who have loved them:
the sleeves of prayer robes,
coarse jute,
French cuffed gingham,
drooled on gabardine.
They are not trophies, these bits of cloth,
they are bedding.

ii.
I am pinned sick like a swallowtail
by treacle-colored cats,
one at the head,
the other through my belly.

Liam kneads my stomach
the way a crust-eyed baker works dough,
expressing the memory of milk,
memory of sun in night sweat,
four o’clock black silk.

He tucks his head in my armpit
for the pheromones.
Our cycles synchronize.
I take to sleeping through the day.
If I could, I’d curl in the old rocker,
chafing in the winter sun.

iii.
To make a ginger tabby poultice
you will need fresh ginger root,
a cotton bag, a wooden spoon.
Place grated root in bag,
boil in a liter of water,
throw out the stinking thing and instead,
apply cat directly to the head.

iv.
That old lie about cats
sucking the breath from babies —
they only do that
if there is not someone older
or more innocent.

v.
I become a cat head god,
rubbed raw,
red as a strawberry,
my seeds on the outside,
my wounds plastered with honeycomb hung
under the browning yellow of the light.
I find a cave, a closet they have all forgot
at the back of the Salvation Army shop
and make my bed in pea coats
smelling of the alley piss and three-day pass,
jackets of kids shot young
for wearing boots and hoods,
blouses shucked by lovers in the park,
and find a cave and rest,
healed, whole, waiting
for some unspoken good.

Keeping a Fern Alive in the High Plains

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

I’m guessing the last thing Custer saw
wasn’t the pied pony dead,
or the infecting iron of the arrow
looping through the air,
the leather of a cartridge belt,
dropped when the man dropped,
but the colorless grass of that knoll in Montana.
It is hard somehow not to blame
the ground for the sky.

Against reason I hang Boston ferns
in the corners of the living room,
and for several weeks, over-fertilized,
still lush for nursery customers,
they pop like vegetable fireworks.

And still for weeks against reason
I take them out to the porch when they pale,
water them again, talk sweetly,
sing them songs of the Queen Charlottes
and Scapa Flow lullabies
when they go,

and think ruefully, comically,
how nothing survives the high plains —
when of course nothing survives
the channel and the undercliff.
We just die wetter on the coast.

Or wonder,
when I put another one out with the trash,
if they dreamed, still damp,
in their dark green potted plastic,
of the shortgrass prairie and the chaparral,
if they were tempted,
like the sibyl suspended in a glass cage,
or the boy in the bubble,
to exit, to open the door,
to say the hell with it,
to hell with all our circumstances
and sentences,
I’m going anyway.

Persistence Hunting

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Everything I know I learned in the wild.

Find water first.
In the heat, find shade.
Wake early.
Eat late.
Adapt.
Take the high ground
and be quiet about it.
When attacked,
fight tooth and claw.
Wear your skin,
your beautiful skin, unknowing,
and when the sky turns
black as your eyes and the stars
arrange themselves in your image,
disappear.
Leave that counterfeit behind.

Survive,
but failing that
lie down, sleep,
and in your other dreams,
through the creeping shade,
chase self-pity til it falls.
They call it persistence hunting:
chase it running until it falls,
collapses, withers on the bone.

Lie down now and sleep.
The cold will take you.
These things were never meant to last.