Tag: Poetry

The Bear in the Buckwheat

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

In Cape Breton, perhaps, some fiddler
could tell me what it means:
it’s the only place I’ve tracked the phrase —
a reel by that name that plays in the Dungreen Set
after “The Primrose Lasses”.

And for him, I’m sure,
there was no connection
when he offered up the line
one morning in a sales meeting,
off-hand, slightly abashed.
He said, “So I told him where
the bear goes in the buckwheat.”

I know very little about bears
but I do know it’s
always the imagined bear
that disturbs our sleep.
The real bear roots in the furze,
tunes out the hiker,
and then turns away
to his termites and his truth.

The image remains from that day —
the animal’s brown flanks
disappearing among the grain,
the stalks shuffling shut behind,
the rooks wheeling in the prairie sky,
and the field left
undisturbed for memory.

For Jeff B, dead of a heart attack

Birth of One Thing, Death of Another

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Crows and ravens,
they tell us about change.
A famous crow in Vancouver has gone missing;
his mate hops the fence expectantly,
and at the same time, here in the foothills
a young crow in distress
circles our house, calling plaintively.
She has lost something:
a parent or a plan, the usual order of things.

For the Druids, these black birds
stand between us and the other world.
For them, the raven is Bran, the healer,
though sometimes we heal into loss.
Sometimes we are missing from the old world,
sloughing it off with illness.

Hope and horror both
have their hands on that gate.

The black juvenile circles me
on my morning walk along the Hogback,
drawing a net around my lack of superstition.
She has something urgent to tell me,
in what can be
the static doldrums of late summer,
in the season’s dangerous inactivity:

child-changer, she calls,
child, teacher of the man.

Closing

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

No more than a few steps from the bottom of the stair,
on my way down the hill to get the newspaper,
in the green shoots of ribbon grass where
climbing roses had begun to bud, I saw
a white plastic label with a pointed end —
the kind they put on potted plants to name,
give preferences for full or partial sun.
This advertised a pink geranium, long gone,
covered by growth, invisible in summer
in what drought-resistant brush grew
in the high plains of the Rockies.

I knew at once the woman who lived here
just before us placed it there.
I’d found other labels
clearing the border at the front of the house:
for pansies and yellow tea roses.
They’d all perished, of course,
and only plastic labels stayed,
stubborn for her hope,
enduring the two-foot snows,
the rabbits and the deer, the desiccating cold
that sapped the moisture
from my lemon thyme and sage — but these stayed,
stubborn for her hopeful hands.

When we closed, they drove up
and showed us round.
He took a clipping from the cactus
in the living room, while she sat in the car
(she smiled weakly in the realtor’s office,
made a joke as we signed the papers;
her oxygen tank discreetly sighed).
I looked out on her calm white head
gazing through the window of the Oldsmobile
where the sage and ribbon grass grew wild,
those two months before we heard she’d died.

Advice on introducing yourself, from a random Internet search

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

You’re at a formal gathering — say hello and state your name.
Say something like Hey, I’m first name.
You may also want to say the name of the other person first.
You’ll need to walk and stand with confidence.
Mention that you like to eat pizza and ice cream and going to the beach:
something they will find interesting and compelling,
like how you pour cold water down your back
because it helps you move faster and keep the right posture.

You’ll want a full, firm web-to-web handshake.
Test your handshake on several folks before important introductions.
Don’t stare down at some aimless point or at the corner of the other person.
Instead, be anything you are interested in.
Listen to my daughter —
she mentions that she likes to eat pizza
and ice cream and go to the beach.
Or you can just say Hi everyone,
it’s great to meet you Mary.

Bus Conversation

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Their voices, fatted with gossip
and nimble as bats spun out of the dark
conjure backshed bottles
weeping unpronounceable spirits.

And their scarves touch singingly,
the two nodding Easter eggs of their heads
spring and relax,
their mouths red with exclamations.

A ruddy hand, mottled like sausage,
touches her sister’s
as they pass the Ukrainian church
and its gilded saints.

A man gets up, a sober Canadian man
in a doeskin shirt,
leans cheek to cheek
with this good Canadian woman.
“Can’t you speak English?” he says.

Copyright © 2019 Lilibug Publishing.

Ready-Banner-728x90

Kite

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

When it had flown first
he felt like an idiot
to have spent a nervous night,
doubting the wind at the park
was strong enough for kites.
But Roger said, “You wait. It’ll go.”
They’d seen the scud of clouds fill up
with rows of diamond and delta
and box kites — Indian fighting kites,
a shock of hibiscus on the pale
tweed suit of the sky.

His was no beauty:
dowel and glue and butcher paper,
but it flew on the third try
when his brother turned a little toward the bay,
the two of them running north, northeast.

Then taking the spindle back,
he eased the cord in starts,
as it tugged or pulled away,
and for almost half an hour
he watched the thing become a stamp,
a thumbprint in the gray,
and then, imperceptible, a narrow smoke,
a speck that might have been a bird
above the grounding tension of his grip.

Well before he was sure, the string went slack,
bowing and never going tight,
though the brothers squinted for ages
into the inlet air.
They found it in an oak,
a full sixty feet above the parking lot,
too high for pulling down.
“We’ll make another,” Roger said, and so they left.

And it seemed to the kite,
tethered in the tree,
that they were leaving for the first time:
the flight before, just kids
agreeing to lose themselves
for an hour or two
and then, in silent counting
reel each other in.
But the boy with the strong hands
turned and walked away
and crossed the street,
until at last, far into the bright day
he disappeared from view.

My Microbiome Is Kicking Ass

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

You’re sixty in September.
You’ve gotta start looking after yourself,
my wife said, and she made a list
of prebiotics and probiotics —
a few biotics I barely remember.
Ease up on the tarts,
the lemon meringue and its sugary foam,
on Clif Bars, pasta, salsa, Oreos,
GMOs, bread and Eskimo Pies!
Have lentils instead, and onions,
Cox’s Orange Pippins, big as a fist.
It begins in the gut, she promised,
not in the heart.

So I made a start
with real raw honey
(really? she sighed;
ha! prebiotic, I said)
and if it hadn’t been for the cost
of tempeh, cacao, a whole lot of cha…
Hey, I’m not made of money, I grumbled
(well, something grumbled, and it grumbled
through the night like a fermented beast).
Are you all right? she asked.
Maybe some brewer’s yeast?

Feeling pretty good, to be honest,
and if it wasn’t for the gas,
I’d say my microbiome’s kicking ass.

It’s separated from my body.
It’s keeping a schedule
I just can’t match:
it addressed the UN Assembly
on Climate Change Tuesday;
someone said it broke into the boardroom
of a big oil refiner,
forced them all to eat kimchi,
retrained a West Virginia miner,
reunited an immigrant family in detention
(it rates a daily mention
in the presidential tweets),
brought four or five bird species
back from the brink of extinction,
refroze an ice cap —
how do you even do that? —
offset China’s carbon footprint
with a megaton of wind,
and permanently, single-handedly
just implemented the Paris agreement.

Lord Jesus! said my sweetheart.
You should probably rein that sucker in.
Put aside the yogurt.
This evening, take a break:
here’s a liter of Barolo
and a chocolate brownie cake!

Roofing Red Cedar

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Early spring, the house finches
and the big-bodied thrush sat in the black pine,
raided coconut fibers in the window boxes,
nesting long before the hummingbirds
and the wrens showed up.

We would see them above the ridge beam
on the peak of the cabin,
complaining to the morning sun.
I never saw them go in,
although the panels of the roof
were all that divided
attic and the open sky:
the thing was never built to code,
or else the builder loved the high plains enough
to make it easy traffic
for field mice, wood rats, or wasps.

The birds left when the roofers came.
Two days of crowbars and compressors,
hammer blows on plywood sheets,
the old panels, dimpled by hail, peeled away.
The new ones put down.

You never like a stranger
so much as when he builds your house
or makes it warm or weather-tight,
mistaking commerce for care.
Or perhaps it is a kind of care —
there are other jobs.

What do you think? the foreman asked.
Looks good, I said.
I hope there weren’t too many mice.
They pulled fifty from the crawl space
when they put the heaters in.
No mice, he said. We found birds’ nests,
five or six. The guys just tossed them down.
Some of them had eggs.
He looked sideways. Shrugged.
The birds never would have come back anyway.
When they’re disturbed, he said.

He was a local, a long-time foothills man.
We knew that magpies attacked songbirds’ nests,
that cowbirds were brood parasites —
that even the wrens turn out
the hatchlings of other wrens.

But when we walked up the hill
to admire the job
from the neighbor’s wall,
the house gleamed like new coin
in the prairie grass and scrub,
as though it had never loved the land at all.

Tervuren, Hit Not Hit

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Late summer in Belgium,
Dad with a job offer from the British school
and enough money up front
for two rooms in a hotel in Tervuren.
We killed time before the term began:
on the terrace, drinking Trappiste from glasses
big as fish bowls;
at the Africa museum
against the reflecting display
of disembodied heads strung with fiber,
impenetrable and stern;
doodling lists on napkins, the way a kid will.

I spy with my little eye
something beginning with S, Mark said,
and I said, “shopgirl? squid? Sayers?”
because we’d been reading The Nine Tailors
and Irish stories.
“Soul cages?” I said.
And then Dad, sensing we were bored,
started in with his three jellyfish song, slurring.
It still feels like merriment
and could have been,
until roughhousing, I shut my brother’s foot
in the bathroom door, and Daddy raged, shouting
I will not have a sadist for a son!
smacking me across the face.

But when we went down for dinner
in the little bistro
he had recovered,
and even put his hand on my arm
before the bread arrived:
ramekins of cold butter,
crust that cut the gums /
and the black-shirted busboy
grunting like a docker —
the whole thing so vague and threatening
I put my head down
like the cup of a flower
closing in the dark.

Palliative Care

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Outside, the children, off from school in spring,
march happily in troops of pealing voices
and you hear them, though just now
you couldn’t hear the doorbell ring
and couldn’t choose between the dinner choices.

When the daffodils came out
and we puttered round the house with sheets
you were the first to see them:
you brought me running with a shout
that shoppers must have heard on Granville Street

though just last night
you couldn’t read the headline of the Sun
before I left to get the errands done.

At midday, when the clouds are overcome
and sparrows fill the spaces with their song
while sunlight fills the nursery
you get up from your chair to see the plum
though yesterday the walk was far too long

and yesterday your legs were weak
and yesterday you wouldn’t speak or stand upright,
but all the evening watched
the steady breathing of the light.