Eleanor Swanson

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Summer of the Hawks

In the spring we started to see a pair
of Cooper’s hawks, tiercel and hen,
high in our neighbor’s catalpa tree,
long before its white blossoms appeared.
The hawks were mostly silent then, brooding
in the uppermost branches of that tall tree
or sometimes flying together, diving
and gliding over the trees.
 
But then the chicks came, and soon
they were fledglings, and catalpa petals
were floating down and carpeting
the street our aerie of hawks flew over,
high and low, their calls half a cry, half
a whistle, cries for food, feeding cries,
call and response, all day long.
Sometimes they flew from the catalpa
to the enormous dead elm, skeletonous,
in our front yard, or they perched on
the utility pole in our backyard above
the bird feeder I hoped was well-concealed
by overhanging branches of the plum tree.
 
More than once I’ve stood, watching
a perched hawk gazing down
unflinchingly at me—a mere mortal.
 
The neighbor across the street calls
out as we both stand in our front yards. 
“They’re teaching the young to kill,”
he says, and then, he amends,
“to hunt.”  He laughs uncomfortably.
 
When we walk the dogs, we pass
clusters of feathers, doves, flickers,
and more, fanned out on the grass,
no other traces of life.
 
In the back, there’s a tall branch
in the apple tree, pointing upwards
in a Y shape, a perfect perch where
the finches often sit.  I want to tell
them, danger, fly away. 
 
This afternoon, some chickadees are at the feeder
and some are deep in the trees, calling dee,
dee, dee, wanting more seeds.  
  
I watch that high branch where a rosy finch
now sits. I watch for the flash of wings--
beautiful and terrible too--
and the tiny bird, vanished. 

Disturbance of Surfaces

Strange metaphors succeed: solstice fish,
carnal soup, swallowtail taxidermist,
and other phrases that ripple
the once-glassy lake where chakra eyes
now appear, floating provocatively.
 
A coyote appears in the park,
(this poem will not bring peace
to the grief-stricken or explain
blood or how to staunch it.)
 
Comments will be included
on how the wind has ended
--with a few terrifying gusts--
the life of a tree.
 
That through all of this cold,
pure daylight, a coyote walks
across a sere field, its long
thick tail moving at a metronome’s
slow beat, reminding you this
isn’t the dog next door.
The day has fierce teeth
that break the skin without
drawing blood.  The body
alive, the skin alive, lips
that can suck, the tongue,
that plump wonder,
the brown grasses telling
you to love this brown,
its delicacy, its mutedness.
 
What should we memorize.
as we live, speak, sing?
I try to memorize the cold of this day;
cold that burns, breathing through
fleece, breath slime.
 
Omne ignotum pro magnifico
Whatever is unknown
is held to be magnificent. 

My Name is Rupa
                    Savar, Bangladesh

In April, I sat at my sewing machine
holding the yoke of a shirt, a Wrangler,
mixed colors, a plaid fabric. I ran a seam.
It takes two hands to make a shirt, sure
hands, no hesitating for the bosses
want the work done fast.
My mother stood near me saying
we’d take breakfast together.
We both worked in Rana Plaza.
She made shorts and I made shirts

Later, in the building’s rubble,
they’d find labels and much
unfinished clothing—C & A,
Benetton, Mango, Primack, Cato

The factory floor rolled beneath
my feet.  My mother vanished.
That morning, we’d seen cracks
in our building, but were told to enter
or we would not be paid.

I dropped the unfinished shirt and ran
through thick dust, screaming, save me.
I am alive.  I am here.  I am Rupa!

Landmine Museum
                    Siem Reap, Cambodia

I walk down the leafrot clay
path toward bells, flutes, soft
drumming, sound traveling
in waves, as light falls
through the gum trees.
Khmer music.
I stand before the band
of men—one blind and others
missing legs, faces unflinching
as the temple bas reliefs.

Many landmines are still buried
in the outlying forests.
The men play halfway
between the road and the temple--
Ta Prohm.  Serenity unflinching.

Frogs screech in the river.
Strangler fig and silk-cotton tree roots
snake down through and among
ancient stones and devatas--
female deities—.and wind
 into the Hall of Dancers.
The tops of the trees rest
on towers and the walls
of the inner moat, abundantly green.  

Temple and trees have grown
together in fragile symbiosis.
Down the road, near Banteay Srey
Temple, is the Landmine Museum.

Next to the many types of landmines
on display, are drawings of the fighting
during the war.
Next to the house is an artificial mine
field,  showing the how the mines
have been hidden in the jungle.
We meet some of the landmine
victims the curator of the museum
has adopted into his family.
Before we leave, we make
a contribution and take further reading
with us, about the fields, still killing fields,
the dark, rich earth holding
the mines in an unspeakable embrace.

Last Light on the West Face of Nanda Devi

Before the second summit party began the ascent
of the princess of mountains, an ominous black cloud
settled slowly around the summit block, persuading
us to take a rest day, but morale was good.
The next day at seven in the evening, my daughter
Devi was on her last pitch, and it took her until
midnight to haul up over the final lip.  A long day.
 
Two days later, a blizzard kept us in our tents, but
The next morning, Devi was stricken, saying calmly,
“She is calling me. I am going to die,” before
she fell into unconsciousness.
We tried to revive her, mouth-to-mouth,
but I felt her lips grow cold against mine. 
We had lost her. My daughter
was gone, and I and the other climbers wept.
 
Her fiancé Andy and I bundled her in her sleeping
bag and slipped her off the precipice of the North-
East face.  Later I said we had committed her
to the deep.
 
She had been the driving force behind this expedition,
as she was inexorably drawn to her namesake.
The Bliss-Giving Goddess had claimed her own.
An excerpt from her last diary is inscribed
on a stone placed in a high altitude meadow of Patai:
“I stand on a windswept ridge at night with the stars
bright above and I am no longer alone but I waver
and merge with all the shadows that surround me.
I am part of the whole and I am content.” 

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Gravity
                Key West Cemetery

A film of insubstantial color magnifies the sun’s light--
white light on alabaster stones ashed by life’s
last fire smoldering, and then burning out.
Clusters of silky frangipani with yellow centers
fan over the plane’s geography of squares,
rectangles, semicircles, arcs, gravity constant
as bodies—mere objects—move away from
the earth’s center, leaving those dirty barges
that no graving will make glide over the newly
mown and already moldering St. Augustine grass.

Weeds spray from toe bones, and discarded khaki
shorts from an lovers’ rendezvous discretely drape root
thigh and knee of a gumbo limbo tree.
The many-fingered hands of saw palmetto mock
the air—and the dead themselves.  Moving.  Still.
Next to the bags of marblecrete ballasting a grave,
a wheelbarrow lies on its side, wooden handles
pointing respectively to earth and sky.
Someone unseen, not here, has been building
a new concrete block chamber above another,
its square maw rigid as the mouth of the ventriloquist’s
long-abandoned child.

The island’s gypsy roosters monitor the grounds,
gravely strutting and crowing, refusing
to have anything to do with the dead.

            Stone angels can’t fly.

James McDonald born in Glasgow 1836
Died in Key West 1894

Mosquitoes, hurricanes, pestilence.
Chit chit of tiny finches.  Mockingbirds
singing like motorcycles.

The voice we heard is stilled.

Delores Dobarganes nine months out
of the nine months midnight--
sheltered and safe from sorrow,
the opening bud to heaven conveyed.
Cracks run like fault lines along the oldest
stones and when the island floods
they’ll break loose and bob along
the streets, a parade of barges
and sepulchers—and angels floating
on their backs blindly looking skyward.

Alone, Isaac Newton sits sleepless in the predawn
dark, his table illumined by candlelight.
A stone angel stands behind him,
her hands on his shoulders.

“Every body continues in its state of rest,”
he writes, “or uniform motion in a straight line,
unless it is compelled to change state
by forces impressed upon it.”

H.G. Wells Re-imagines Time Travel

When I left my study, an unlit cigar lay
on my desk near the manuscript I
was editing, a tome sure to bring
the critics down on my head.
After pouring myself a glass
of sherry, I returned; the cigar
now rested in a crystal ashtray,
its smoldering tip red as Mars.
Had I traveled through the wormhole
to moments into my future?
And if so, to what consequence?

I am an old man, who regards
The Time Machine a puerile
work of pseudo-science
and a too-youthful imagination.
Morlocks and Eloi indeed.
Unworthy antagonists.
So…I do not recall lighting
this excellent Havana, but
a single puff tells me it belongs
in this dimension.
Perhaps I am suffering
from dementia, as I approach
the ultimate door to another world.

I hear footsteps in the kitchen.
“Who’s there?”  I call out,
expecting no one.
Rebecca appears in the doorway,
bearing a tray with five glasses
and decanter of sherry.
“It’s been years since I’ve
seen you, hasn’t it?”
“Not so many, Bertie.
Moura and Constance and
Martha have all come as well.”
I laugh.  A legion of my lovers
have arrived.  Descended?
Near twilight on a late Autumn day.
Dare I mention the Tangent universe?
Albert would be appalled.
Ah, no matter.  I shall enjoy these final moments.

Walking Colfax Avenue

It’s not quite twilight when I step
from the bus into a crowd of revelers.
The streets are cordoned off with
signs and encircled by yellow tape.
The buses can’t go east, so I walk
and walk on, leaving visions behind
me, most disturbingly a joker, and not
the dead Heath Ledger, but one of old--
in yellow and red with a belled hat.
And a hand beckons me from a dark
doorway framed by bare wood, leading
into a darker place that more hands--
shadowy hands—wave from, leaving pale vestiges.
I hear a song with a repeating verse,
the singer’s voice harsh, then harsher.
Stop. Please, Finish. But as I walk, the
voice drifts away on the wind, into the west.
The twilight is deeper now, grey and thick as soup.
I will never be alone on this street, the longest
in the whole of the United States, in the world.
If the universe had streets, well, non finito
gifts us with an understanding of infinity.
I am going to a tribute for poets whose works
were unfinished.  Their words unravel and become
dénouement multiplied and enveloped in
the unyielding darkness.

Tracing the Light

At dawn, the bare trees are glazed with ghostly copper
light, light that changes with the click of the second hand. 
If I could be an inanimate object, I would be a clock,
and finally understand my essential nature.
A shadow ascends and descends.
Your sleep sounds are light as mere
breath, mere murmuring in dreams.
 
            Passion
                        Passion is
Who’s asking?  Love
            What love is…
 
Even while running I close my eyes
to the strong midday sun and forget
to look for my totem—the kestrel.
 
            I dream of you
                        in my arms again.
 
I am tracing the light as bird
shadow ascends and descends
outside my window, blinds closed.
 
            I think of holding you
                        in my arms again.
 
In late afternoon, I see matter sweeping
across the sky, through the light.
 
I trace the paths of this cosmic dust,
through the light.
 
Sound moves through the light.
 
            Soon, I will hold
                        you in my arms again.
                        Corporeal.
 
Our dying neighbor sings inside her house,
but we can hear that clear, pure voice from
the street as it moves through the light,
into space where it will never dissipate.    
 
            Passion is…
            Love is.
 
As night falls, trace the light with me.
Don’t stop, love.

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