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Janet Aalfs - 2


Farzana's Light

I am not this blood,
not these bricks and rocks
father, brothers, cousins
broke me with
on the courthouse walk.
Hell is theirs.
And I am not.

Chant by chant a lotus
rises above the mud,
and the moon in a river pool
sinks into the heart
of the song in this
starlit, stonelit temple
I am.

In memory: Farzana Parveen
Lahore, Pakistan, 2014


Ode to a Lost Sweater

     I see it now
like a simple word
spoken into the wind.
Bright button
in our mother's palm
from a hand-me-down
we had each outgrown.
Wool deep red as embers
that smolder in a circle of stone,
and the scent of Grandma's roses,
her gracefully wrought cable stitch
moths in an attic barrel
had chewed until split.
       I see it
like a phantom wound
knits itself a scar,
and a heart-spun word
chanted into the wind
calls down a star.

What the Dead Want Me to Know

                    and light finds us
                    with the other loves
                    dawn sunders
                    to define.

                               ~Eavan Boland 

1. John's Poem Cards

Happier than I had ever seen, my father
showed me his poem cards.
Not to regret the black and white
rabbit or the open door.
Not to make up for
sunshine mocking
long-eared shadows
that fled. And not
that he wished he could stay
more hopeful, less afraid.
Then he laughed because
each drawing, and the words
that went with it, meant
everything. How we only had
this table, our heads bent over
the cards, a certain
darkness surrounding, and nothing
felt distant.


6. A Bird's Tale

Many who die become birds.
I'd like to be one. An original
tai chi sequence,
Grasp the Bird's Tail,
urges me to examine
its homonym, each feathered word.
Later in the form, more alive,
Slant Flying, I'm there.
Bones of lace admit the sky.
This is what I know so far
about dying.


12. Coyote

Not there, but in my mind
a fur-cloaked body
hungry as an echo
loped across Egypt Lake.
I pondered the image
and a presence grew.
Wind through mountain
laurel shivered green
and licked the snow.
Hiking to a further shore,
I paused again
in the sound of steps
through crystal ice that hissed
like shattered glass.
From the future, or the past,
you stopped and turned to show me
who had called to whom –
and your yellow eyes burned through
the silent trees to mine, slate-blue.


15. Anne Jeanette's Tapestry

Anne Jeanette sat down in the snowmelt,
shallow span of water she swirled,
quiet from the sky, painted
from the trees, her baby
brother, my father, asleep.
He drank those lullabies.
I watched through an upstairs doorway
hands conducting the wind,
a palindrome for balance.
And though she couldn't have heard me,
she offered toward my fingers
in response to the question unasked
a cat's cradle of words. Strings
at angles hummed and shifted,
gray from the rocks, sung
from the finches, rooted in asters,
purple and gold. Yes, this story, she said,
a pasque flower my father trampled
is the one I told to the hills,
seven miles there, seven miles back.
I was only a girl
walking the world
to be here.


16. Ascension

I whispered.
Eyes closed.
I waited.
Neck still limp.
Beak darkly gaping,
the songbird's body grew
light as a shadow in my hands.
I had no face but the wind.
And though my prayer
enveloped me
I never thought
it would fly
huge and sudden
into the trees.
Between us
such daring.

The Work of Love

Blank

as the space between
a shout and an echo
I begin. Ebony
the smoothest wood
harder than all.
To sing these
black notes wandering,
sculpted scales and rain fall
shadows through my heart.
Impossible
as a snowflake
in a furnace
I begin. Nothing
I have known before
can lead me, disarmed
as I am. The way
a heart is made to know
what it knows
astounds. No guide
but rhythms breathe
music as I chisel,
softer, more inward,
more deeply
still.
Picture

​ Go to page 1 of Janet Aalfs' poetry
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The Tao of Zebras and Dessert

​                      The Tao is dark and unfathomable.
                      How can it make her radiant?
                      Because she lets it.

                                   ~The Tao Te Ching

Capitulation of stripes, no two patterned alike,
brilliant canvas older than the world
as dark and light. A poem within
can shift the graph to balance
rhythm's blood. What changed you,
the doctor asked, pressure lower, sugar too.
I've moved myself, been moved,
the taiji heart's reply, in points and curves
like caramel through cream.
Everything swirls,
even a murder of crows
the fog blows in from nowhere.
Softer, more clear, like an infant
before it can smile, echoes original strings let fly
return from past and future to the palms.
Down to up, back to front, center axis snakes,
full pulse and slither, no two chords the same.
Breathing ground to sky forever woven, roots
and leaves, even the wind can't flow without
someone to touch. We notice music
arrives. We sing the silence limbs can't hide.
Sweet sweet shiver of air and rain washes
the heart awake. Apple blossoms flare. A rabbit
nibbles spears so green its ears quiver fire.
​

Saying Goodbye

Lie down, but not too flat, she said.
We blew kisses
through the nursing home window,
hands flat as flounders.

I stepped on one once, buried in sand.
It wriggled and I fell
in the ice-cold shallows.
Ribs lashed like a raft, I wanted

to lie there, but not to die.
In my undershirt, too smooth for a bra,
I walked through the house
holding a mirror like a large platter

and looked down into it
like into a glassy cove
so it seemed like I was
walking on the ceiling.

I had to step over
light fixtures and lintels.
The mirror was completely flat
yet so many sharp things

flew out of it. Beyond those walls
her favorite tree shook its dark mane,
and the sky rounder than a wagon wheel,
and the clip-clop of hooves.

Through the glass, I could still see her
white hair. And I thought, I could lie down
in snow-clouds, and open close my limbs, and leave
an angel in the field.
​

Ground: We

tongue cracked
dust in her teeth
stomach a shriveled leaf
the groveling
length of time
it takes
a hungry woman
to pray

in the undergrowth
a wren's intricate
music roots absorb
cadence of honey
syntax of milk brilliant
phrase in silken corn
rabbit the brambles hide
mountain language soft
spotted newt and
molly moocher's cap
protection fierce
the ribald nettle stings
her voice to rise

*Italics: June Jordan

Heron, Mystic, Artist

...the plunge itself

their desire, a way to be

subsumed, consumed utterly

into their work.

            —Denise Levertov



A tall slate-blue bird walked

across the white rooftop.

Sharp talons splayed, it placed

each careful step, and turned



and paused. Feathers to shadow, stillness

liquid, every glowing curve,

and the pointed beak exact,

between us steel-framed glass,



each solid pane a mirage.

I have known

before and after,

more lasting than any wound,

the feeling in its gaze

I must attempt

to dance, though I fail
again and again, such a joyous failing.

Giraffe and Stone
        for Rose Gasherebuka of Rwanda

As the stone has been
misunderstood, and her wild
love maligned, and her still

bewildering music shunned,
so have I.
Lips soft as clouds, voice

so low you think me mute
as a shadow, I speak.
Loch Ness serpent's neck, gentle

tongue and teeth, leaves I eat
from the treetops sing their stories
inside me. Legs so high I stride

through lotus blooms and meteors.
As I gallop, the horizon lifts
my bones, and the moon rides me.

I have listened longer than memory
to the heartbeat at the core of earth,
stone in which the quna

shaped her alphabet
and wrote the first
human word.

***Quna: the word Queen comes from Quna, keeper of the written word, and Quna comes from Cuneiform, ancient writing developed 5000 years ago by women in Sumeria, the area now known as Iraq.

Endangered

roots shattered
in the mines
a catamount
my shadow
silent as hunger
staring
we could not find
our names
Picture
Go to page 1 of Janet Aalfs' poetry

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