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

Ten Haiku Written at 3600 Metres

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

high on Tincup Pass
thunderclouds form — but far south
a plump pika cries

bumble bee dances
on alpine golden aster
holiday begun

at twilight an owl
curious, cocked his wide head
two-legged elk? he asked

three a.m. panic:
eclipse made me pitch black blind
or else — cap on eyes

the climb short but steep
I hurry to set up camp
sleeping bag leg cramps

done! a fair exchange:
I gave up my trekking pole
the trail offered rain

waiting for David
to get down off the mountain
I’ve finished six poems

switchbacks ease the climb
so why do they seem more like
switchblades in the back?

like a kid’s squeeze toy
pika wants to hide and seek
but I ain’t playing

a skanky motel
outside of Buena Vista
but — Magic Fingers!

Magpie on the Reservoir Wall

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Slow, driver.
I’m all that’s left after the thrill
of homecoming and nesting,
in my black and white,
skipping into the road
for car kill, to pull
at squirrel skin and
your suddenly toneless thoughts.

I’ve come into focus again,
tailtip glistening
like spilled oil / I’ve remembered
where I keep
the bones of winter.

But they were always there,
weren’t they?
while you summered,
distracted by the full green,
the snapdragons, the pink petunias
hung on the railing,
the spending cloud.

It’s more pensive now.
Can you feel it?
Even the escarpment frowning over
the reservoir stays in,
writing its journal
with cuttlefish ink and sienna.

And while it was not
what you wanted, this year:
you didn’t have her,
the pool was less clear,
the work was unsatisfactory,
you aged ungracefully —
whatever it was.

I’ve watched you.
I’m here to help.
If you let me,
we’ll pick clean
your memories, too.

Climbing El Capitan Naked

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We climbed into what we were,
into our loneliness,
into the spinning world.

I expected
I would be reshaped by it,
that the million-year-old stone
would carve me young —
younger for peeing at hanging belays
like kids, escaped from school,
feather-light under the sun.

But we aged against the granite,
and staring back on the valley floor
we knew, the way astronauts know,
that there wasn’t an ocean green and deep,
a continent raised above it,
above that, much higher, another stratum
of sky and cloud,
but a kind of snow globe,
almost self-contained,
collected in a ball,
pressed together / and moving together
like the two of us,
like the circling hawks,
and the ferns on the cliff face
revolving.
Our bodies on the rasping rock,
as plain and
bare as space.

Selkie

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

In the end it was easy
to steal her skin,
even in the full moonlight.

I was surprised how heavy it was,
and how weightless she looked without it,
those years ago, dancing on the Cleggan sand.

The day she found it again
I was on the boat with Finn,
having tea, just setting out.

The kettle boiled over
and steam burned my hand, red
around the wedding band.

Finn, usually so quiet, said,
‘Just like you, Daire,
thinkin water’ll allus be right!’

I turned with a quick word
and climbed up the headland
above the bay just past the house,

called to her, too far along the path
to catch / I was going to say
something about the boys — what of them?

But the sea already possessed
her hair, dancing, taunting,
and when she looked over

she was no longer their mam.
There was no more love and defeat
in that obsidian eye.

What was the point?
And anyhow, I am a fisherman:
I know knots and cleats and nets — full nets.

I do not know how to keep
a wild thing free.

I’m not going to say this twice (but if I do I’m going to add more birds)

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

Be sure in your art.
By all means be tapped out, hard up,
on-your-beam-ends poor if you are,
but when you dance,
dance mansions, parks, chestnut trees
with pale pyramid flowers.
Flex an arm: banknotes
flutter from your fingers
like swallows. Mint motion.

Even your journals grant
principalities to princes.
The huge coffered door of your hall
bends and groans with the press
of secretaries and goatherds
clutching spice boxes,
ranch hands with gold watches,
bluebird navies, teak-timbered ships.
Go out to the harbor this morning
and swing your ideas against
their sides. Send them on their way.

Be nervous if you must,
flop-sweat stopped
like a drowned bottle,
but your hands when they draw,
draw water from rock —
white pelicans,
the most self-absorbed things in the sky,
wheel and rest at your feet,
canyons open,
the horizon duplicates itself
infinitely,
dark for the pearls of stars.

Lack faith if you do,
but your voice, when you sing along,
peals from Spanish mission towers,
beams creak with the weight of bells,
dun valleys fill and green,
dwarf pines whistle and whisper.
Keep your head down:
vesper sparrows have made a nest
in your faithless hair.

It has always been that way.
The monks have gathered for Matins
and the abbot is on the stair.
He has your arms and eyes, your hands.
And the old voice —
the one we put together
from sewn leather, trail dust,
sage, salt, wind whipped,
like a prayer —
lifts, hums, moves
the whole goddamn building
from the rafters to the crypt.

Copyright © 2019 Lilibug Publishing.

Hawk Hovering

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Above a stretch of buffalo grass
a Rough-legged Hawk sits in the wind.
The snow has blown in west-north-west
but it seems to come straight out of Wyoming,
hard enough that he beats his wings
only now and then,
otherwise suspended,
over a colony of prairie dogs,
over deer mice,
over small skittering birds.

He is used to the weather.
They breed far north, in the arctic,
and this spring in Colorado
with the warmth coming on
and the dormant grass greening,
the dry blowing snow of the high plains
is a perfect comma:
the ground is awake,
the sudden squall has caught prey
in between,
neither low nor about,
neither resting nor vigilant,
and he can wait here,
all day, untired,
head to the wind.

Cecropia Moth

~ Kat Couch ~ 2 Comments

The giant silk moth has no mouth.
He doesn’t eat.
He sleeps most days.
He flies in for a few weeks:
his only purpose is to mate
(and yeah, I knew a guy like that
in college, too),
beating his big-winged beauty
like a paper heart against the doorjamb,
the dried-blood-red of those massive wings,
the eyes inset,
the cracked grin of a voodoo god
painted on,
saying “Stay away!”
in the old tongue:
you wouldn’t want this death.

But for all that,
for his disguise,
his single-minded fasting of a saint,
they get him anyway.

I went inside to grab a tape measure
when I discovered one last Saturday,
but he was gone when I got back —
the scrub-jays on the roof perhaps,
or the Bullock’s oriole.

All they left on the deck
was a wing the size of a toddler’s hand,
thin as a five dollar bill.

I slipped it in my wallet
between my license
and a coffee shop punch card,
knowing there’s a chance
we’ll wake up one morning
in a world where quiet grace
is currency.
I pull it out sometimes,
unspent, and stare,
my eye and his
unseeing voodoo eye.

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.

I May Have Left the Lights On

~ Kat Couch ~ 3 Comments

I may have left the lights on
in the workshop a few years back:
eight racks of glaring bare-bulbed fluorescent lights,
and as a result,
a flock of migrating geese,
navigating the rural dark of northern Colorado,
got confused,
fell out of the sky,
and hit the windshield of a Walmart truck
making a last-minute delivery of Christmas toys,
forcing the driver to swerve
into a ditch right off the frontage road
of the interstate.

He wasn’t badly hurt,
but most of the freight was a write-off
and the store never got the hip-hop penguin
that did the street dance waddle,
so when Karl Macklemore showed up,
who’d left it too late to get the one toy
his daughter wanted
(go to Walmart, his wife said,
everything else’ll be closed),
he found only empty shelves where
Pop & Lock Penguin should have been.

There was an argument when he got home.
Hard things were said,
things you couldn’t take back.
That’s it! I’m outta here, Karl said,
and he really left this time,
left the wife and his little girl Judy.

There were tears,
the worst Christmas morning ever.
But that was just the start:
on one salary, mom working shifts,
Judy missed more than a few days of classes
doing chores.
The school sent letters —
she was getting behind,
so Uncle Craig the engineer,
who lived just over in Galt and was retired,
said, I’ll teach the girl.

They met at Starbucks most afternoons
and did pretty well,
but Judy hated History,
she sneered at Social Studies,
fidgeted through French,
until Craig said okay,
I’m not much good at this stuff anyway.
Why don’t you come on out to the shed back home.
I’ll teach you how to solder.
You’re good at math and algebra.
We’ll kick around some schematic diagrams
and maybe we can work up something
for the county science fair.

She thought about the project for three weeks,
until seeing geese one night passing
in front of the moon —
a dark V and then nothing,
a dark V and then nothing,
she proposed this:
why don’t we wire the solenoid
so that when deer mice all over the world
breathe out
the change in air pressure
registers on this sensor here,
releasing the core,
and when barn owls move their eyes in sleep,
when prairie dogs jump and stretch,
all that vibration shakes the earth enough
that it trips the switch
and cycles the lights
on and off automatically.

And Uncle Craig thought for a moment
and said, that’s impossible.
Unless you calibrate the coil to account
for the minute shift in the geomagnetic field
when black bears dig at roots,
and then you know,
it just might work.

The day my nephew got back from the science fair,
a little depressed,
we asked him how it went.
He said, Okay I guess.
I didn’t win a prize.
It was that Judy with the green eyes,
inventor of the sudoSwitch.
We said, Who’s she?

He said:
She’s bat’s darling,
cousin of the winter wheat,
Spear of Science, Javelin Judy
with the jade-green eyes,
She-Who-Harvests-Stars,
called Watcher-of-Geese,
the moon’s electrician,
house god of the deer mouse,
the one who dances on the back
of ignorance
making the sign of the sigh.
Judy, whose name rhymes
with the taste of golden currants,
the last word on the lips
of den-bound foxes
when they say fox prayers,
whose name is the only password
in the wind-stroked shortgrass prairie;
hop-hipped hare hunter,
greyhound bitch,
inventor of the sudoSwitch.

No, I said, I would have remembered her.
So this sudoSwitch, what’s it do?

I dunno exactly, he mumbled.
They say it replaces want and fear.
It saves twenty-four megawatts of shame
each year,
makes colorful truths from white lies,
smooths crow’s feet,
corrects the camber of the wheel of the law,
autotunes the music of the spheres,
raises testosterone,
lowers the bridge of understanding between generations,
generates income, deflects
incoming insults, erects
lasting love
(but consult with a doctor
for an erection lasting more than four millennia),
deflowers virgin olive oil,
magnifies fine print, prints currency,
interrupts alternating current,
gives the sightless sight,
makes the indirect direct,
talks in pigeon-elf to elves,
and turns lights off by themselves
when you leave them on at night.

I laughed.
Good luck with that.
That’s not a problem for me, I said.