Festival July 30th at the Boulder Library featuring Veronica Patterson and Tim Hernandez, a poetry slam, a bookfair, and more.... |
Veronica Patterson's poems: Margaret | Around the Block of the World | Blue on My Mother’s Hands | Clown of Light | Room | Unreasonable Shoes |
| Margaret is a field. In the field goldenrod thickens. Weeds grow so tall that by August you can't see. Margaret is a path through the field and she is where the path disappears. Margaret is the house with the red door and the room with the maroon floor where four children sleep a troubled sleep. When they wake, she sends them outside and they raise a calf, a collie, each other. Margaret smokes so she can see each sigh. She smokes constantly. The ashtrays overflow. Later, as therapy, she will make ashtrays. Margaret is a dream Margaret once had. Margaret drinks toward the dream she can’t quite forget and doesn't dare remember. She wakes to choose sleep. She is a wrong turn Margaret took or several turns; she is bad about directions. Margaret is not a door that opens nor cruelty nor a bed nor forgiveness, but she can be forgiven. I repeat, Margaret is a field and a path through the field and the point where the path disappears. She will not come to find you. Because she will not come to find you, you start out deep in this gold and weedy field. Colorado-North Review
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I A story is being told to hold off pain, the listener thin, pale, a slight smile on her lips. The story could be about anything broken: a wall in a certain city, the day you came home from the hospital to this street, to all the years we walked around and around the block. It was summer. Or leaves fell on the children who had followed us. Laughing, hiding in hedges. As we were saying something about desire or renunciation Once when I asked if there were anything else I could do, you said, “Can you heal me?” II This isn’t, whatever you think, a cousin of pity. It is a happiness or resembles one we often had words in our air we taste them suspicious of pleasure then finding it Finches in the garden thistle lovers now the cosmos is tall the light is moving and stippled, cautious coming to you with its shadows. Outside, now, something flashes. Your new cane holding sun? A leaf? A message? As we walk, you tell me something to tell him, after you—“But not right away.” III All afternoon clouds pile toward, but then move past. Your eyes grow larger. Later, a dream wakes me with the words bear your form I’m trying to find something to close off, shut out, something to balance the landscape opening in your eyes, but despise means not to look at and it’s too late. I look and look. I keep, though I don’t know what¾ watch? time? Last night, in sleep, I walled you in a garden, but you said “I can’t see you,” so I cut a window. You wanted a door. “I don’t know,” I said. You said, “I want to be in the world.” “It’s so expensive,” I said, as we walked slowly around one block of it. You agree, “So dear.”
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The last time I saw her she wore a star sapphire intense against the tan of her fingers. How easily her skin darkened on the way to California one summer or was some of it nicotine? Her hands holding a cigarette, deft, in ceremonies of tap, light, flick— from the center of the world she blew smoke rings within rings. Her hands steady on dispatch phones, she sent sirens to what was still in progress—or in silence to what lay beneath the bridge even as what happened inside her grew as sure as any such leap. Even if her hands, her lovely hands, shook near the end, surely veins still fell like rain-fed rivers blue on my mother’s breasts—no, in her face—no, I was speaking of her hands.
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“What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” Edward Hopper When Edward Hopper said cupola, he meant light. When Hopper said wind, he meant light moving. that great principle of undulation in nature When he said people, he meant “human figure” or “distance.” House meant opportunities for light. Rooms furnished with interior angles, each room a mansion. When he said drug-store window, Ex-Lax, he meant America after dark. When he said Nighthawks, he meant solitary foragers, residual loneliness, insomnia. When he said hotel lobby, he meant where light stays. When he said Sheridan Theater, he meant unities of light. The wood catboat he built turned into the wind. So he planed light. Not he . . . who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. Every building said, Edward Hopper, Proprietor. Jo in Wyoming meant roadside light. Clouds meant interruptions. He painted her painting. When he said reclining nude, he meant flesh luminous and diagonal. Brick (texture and weight of light); water (light moiré); trees (pattern and fling of light). There is no trifle. Sidewalks circled the block again and again past his (other) work. Doors were openings for light. this day he has seen something truly When he said morning sun, it was direct address. When he said 7 a.m., he meant and again light. When he said 11 a.m., he meant bright sills. When he said second story sunlight, he meant Genesis (no light before Thee). Young woman leaning. Very little yellow pigment. the days are gods When he said automat, he meant light waiting on a woman, one glove off, fruit. When he said summertime, he meant cloth of light, architecture of thigh. When he said South Carolina morning, he meant light’s home or desire for light with one large red breast. He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. Hypotheses of light: street, elbow, mansard roof, arm, from here, curb, edge, longing, tunnel, lace, room (often room), tablecloth, window, nose, never candle the circuit of things through forms When he said “soir bleu,” he meant clown of light with cigarette, “fool for light.” In all this, the paint was thinking. I am nothing. I see all.
—one story recounts that when urged to read Walt Whitman, Hopper read Ralph Waldo Emerson instead.
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I don’t know why I was awake at the window. The sky cleared and the moon glittered on two feet of new snow. They came into view, my father carrying my mother, or, to intrude in my own telling, who else would it have been? I say that because they seemed unfamiliar, figures in some other story. The car was surely off the road. She lay in his arms, laughing, one foot in a sparkling sandal, the other bare. He might have been laughing too, though of course I couldn’t hear them with the window closed. I wanted to wake my older sister, but she was sleeping in her own tale. I wanted to throw open the window and call them back into my life, interrupt their solitude, which seemed prior. Every house is made of stories, and perhaps every story of houses. Like this one, where (or in which) I watched from the window on New Year’s Eve in Ithaca. When I was in high school, I would have insisted that my mother drank too much that night. Ten years later, I saw how beautiful she still was, and believed my father’s story, told after she died, about the first time he saw her walk down the steps on Falstaff Road, in a white muslin summer dress (though once he might have said it was white piqué), and he thought, my chemist father, She’s the one, not knowing yet she was engaged to someone else, who was sick that night, and so they danced. As he carried her through the snow, he slid, they dipped, her head back, throat silvered, the last waltz of the night, the band packing up. Now, I think of the sparkling sandal in the snow, see that my own cells might have multiplied exuberantly, to a beat. Like truth, radiance moves around in a story, lighting up this or that.
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