4lb Hammer

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Jenny posted on the facebook
I was some kinda slut
and Cassie wrote a comet how
I was a redneck mutt,
and the comets kept coming
cause girls y’know don’t stop —
that’s how I found myself one morning
in my daddy’s shop.
They talked about the social
and talked about the promenade,
sayin so-and-so’s got crinoline
and so-and-so’s got laid,
and guess who out in Bleekers Woods
doesn’t have a date,
but I got a 4lb hammer.
Its such a lovely weight.

I say Hi Jen!
you and the girls just slummin?
But later in the back she don’t see it comin.
Her dates got jewry, faux as gold,
but all his cardine cufflinks
do not hold a candle
to a genuine hickory
hammer handle.

Declining Your Wedding Invitation, Liza

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Doctor Hide and Missus Heckle
request the pressure of your company
at the nuptials of their nubile
to that gin-soaked wrench William —
Bill, call him Willy,
Built-to-Spill Bill, lately.
Johnny Cum Lately, often.
Lately, too soon if you ask her.
Got the deckle edge
guilt script, ripped it
from the headlines.
Doctor Hide and Missus Heckle
resent the persistence
of your matrimony
to the moany, moany,
stop, stop! do you hear something?

Dear Liza,
Whole in my bucket,
the bamboo strip
weakening and about
to brake:
no more moon in the water,
no more fluid in the brake,
no more breakfast in the morning,
by the scream,
the cattails dancing,
the coattails flying,
the tent open,
the guests dying or unconscious,
the groom disheveled,
the bride ungroomed,
the horse pissing on his hobbles,
our mumbly peglegs soaked.

Here’s hoping there’s a hole
in the thatch of your hovel
where the rain gets
what’s coming to it.

Yellowjackets

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It isn’t that I see them human,
these yellowjackets dying in the trap,
or compare the size of brains,
or say that there are other lives
(if there are other lives
as some monks believe),
or claim no wasp will ever cry for me —
none will ever miscount,
innocently kiss,
regret a dull
insensitivity.

But only absolute sadness
in a piece of plastic
hanging from a beam,
the circles they trace on its wall
in the town’s first frost
a million miles from purpose.
It’s just the fact of it is wrong
and nothing else.

I compare you favorably but ill-advisedly to the moon

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Out your window
a tiny fingernail of moon,
that far dead thing,
pale as a side street
movie screen,
burnished silver of old watch
orphaned under cigar box lid,
lit by the gloss
of magazine and candle wax /
reflected light:
the thing itself dried up:
a buoy, salt-rimed
so long untethered
even gulls slip ignorant over.
I want to conduct life
from my bed, you say.
You have a cough
but you are still able.
A feather ticked loose
from the pillow
dances along your arm.
You do, I say.
You are not so old as that.

Aperture

~ Kat Couch ~ 2 Comments

When you constrain freedom, it will take flight and land on a windowsill.
Ai Weiwei

It was a lighthouse first,
graywacke iced with the shit of seabirds,
guiding ships away, steering them clear.
the very opposite of keeping and holding.

What we notice about prisons,
even this one in San Francisco Bay,
are not walls, but everywhere windows,
cracked spectacularly,
small and thick as paperback books.

And then fissures, pierced stone,
elaborate grates in the floors of gun galleries.
We cannot build a wall without needing to puncture it,
to make the windowsills
on which freedoms perch.

There are jails, we know
and there are prisoners,
but always there is an opening,
a cracked glass too wide for despots,
and through it, sweet and punishment,
the shape-thought of a gull in the fog,
the blade of its cry
so sharp it cannot be held,
not even in the heart.

Collared Dove

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Released to play, my brother and I
kicked a football
against the wayside chapel
that stood at the end of the driveway
of our new apartment block
in a distant suburb of Brussels:
a rural town of chicory fields.
At night, the lights from brothels
along its one road,
framed in new windows,
kept us awake.

But in the morning, school out,
we kicked the ball against the Madonna,
thinking no one here
would need her comfort:
here was the new building,
the red lights,
in the evening, new plaster.
The car ran well; the ball,
with each kick, made a satisfying bounce.

But then a different thud
against the window,
and Mr. Klinsmann walked
around the corner, as though
he had been there all the time,
picked up the bird
that had hit the glass
and paused,

cupped his thumb and finger
around its throat
and twisted, like a cap, its neck.
Stuff came out the other end,
the neck drooping on his knuckle.
Es ist besser so.
It’s better this way, he said,
the gray neck softer than the Belgian sky
against his thumb.
Kinder, he added,
shaking his head —
and I thought at the time
he had just mispronounced
the English word,

because it was hard
it was hard to imagine
it was hard to imagine ourselves
that kind.

Eight Years On (Guided Meditation)

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i.
The white wolf,
the one who comes out
of the woods in the northeast,
pads into the circle
between two ash trees in leaf.

She doesn’t say anything.
I don’t raise my hand.
She stretches at my left hand,
head turned to the side,
head in the grass,
her breath moving the blades of grass.
And like old lovers
we sit that way for a long time.

ii.
By my foot, at the base of the tree,
someone has left a compass,
dented on the top,
with a needle that doesn’t spin.
I hear you laugh,
saying, whichever way,
whichever way,
we can never be wrong.

Not now in the shade of the white ash,
the one that cools,
the one for damp-heat, for childbirth,
not now where the wild wood ends,
where small waves rustle like aspen,
where water gently rocks the coracle
you were
too soon
cast in.

iii.
I held your head in my lap
one birthday,
in my wickerwork lap,
like a nest of white-gold birds,
like ribbons of smoking resin,
cupped, cradled, out of the wind.

iv.
I close the book I was reading.
I close the thin red cover of the book
and bind it with a leather cord.
We sit there for a long time,
not touching,
humming wolf songs,
and you know when I have left
because you have never left.

Aston Quay

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I go down to the Liffey
to think of girls.
Not because the English
called her Anna Liffey,
unable to pronounce her Irish name,
not even because she begins
in the mountains,
hill dark girl,
her feet in pig shit
in the Wicklow bog.

Not even because every life
is an unfinished life
every one emptying, always emptying,
every one again leaking
up from the mud

but because I have never mastered either,
neither girl nor water,
but at least I can see,
from Bachelors Walk or Aston Quay,
bridges, hard bridges,
open for her,
and on her skin
unscrolling to the sea,
the rain in Dublin paint
her margins silver.

Telephone

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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.

Mail Creek

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When I am right in what I do
I sometimes see a red fox in the open space,
along the top of the ravine
where Mail Creek
works its five-hundred-year-old course
through flood-ravaged shortgrass plain.

She greets me full-faced,
neutral, brave, and unimpressed.
It doesn’t matter that I’m there.
Whatever threat I represent
she has places to go:
remembered ribbons of trail,
dry thickets on the riverbank,
subterranean passages
I will never see.
Who knows?
a pair of kits among
the fur and bones of old hunts.
She has places to go.

On a more timid day
she might recognize around
the orbits of my eyes
the look of prey:
the shallow breath,
and all my purpose hushed —
but this morning we have come out bold.
She passes on,
just another hunter in the brush.