Anna Sudderth
Conversation
Owl in the tree,
I alone see it there
preparing to call
a friend I don’t know
if I can forgive.
The owl is not
a mirror and not
a friend, though its head
turns toward me like
the beam of a searchlight and
its black eyes gleam from the white
bowl of its face, as if
something were passing
between us, the owl shifts
its beak, I feel the tongue
inside my mouth.
Philadelphia
We used to walk, we used to take
the train, we used to cry and vomit
wine into the alley, not that we would
say we did this. But we used to sit
outside in the cold by the fountain and
the wine was wonderfully bracing. Grace would
say how good it was to drink
at the stone table, with the feeling
that this was how it had to be done. How
what had to be done? There was never water
in the fountain, but it was filled
with plastic flowers, once a year, to celebrate
the real flower show they held
in the park, which I never went to. Molly said
that was okay. But I ran in that park
alone, and once what I thought was mist
sticking to my skin, as I took
the shorter path which hewed closely
to the lake and marshes,
was actually gnats, coating me like beads
of sweat. I wiped them from my face,
the corners of my eyes and mouth,
and liked it. I like to feel a place
like that, on my skin, when what you see
at a distance matches up
with what you can touch. We lived
later by a different park, and did
almost nothing on weekends, saved
by the park’s leafy corners, where sitting
on one bench or another felt like moving
some distance: do you want to face
the hydrangea? The bar? But even when we
stayed in, Grace was rarely happy. Molly
was never close enough to her. Their rooms
shared a wall. Not mine: from my side
of the apartment, I watched the window
opposite, which framed a white staircase
and the green vine climbing it, either fake
or the slowest growing vine I ever saw.
At night, the vine and I performed
for one another. I undressed, danced, touched
my hair, wondered what my friends
were doing down the hall. On New Years we drove
in the morning to plunge
into the cold Atlantic. The water and sand and air
were all gray and our bodies shocked me,
emerging from their clothes, so white
and private. Molly and Grace were fighting
secretly, I was between them briefly
in the waves, freezing
then running back out. Waiting
for the inner warmth the cold would make.
Florence Nightingale
The tree branches hold
wet morning, light rain
soft through the deciduous leaves
of the fruitless mulberry,
leaves in the mist like shadows
of hands on a wall. Short
and domestic, they reach
toward each other, blind
to the neighbor letting his dog
thrash in the ditchwater,
to the strands of smoke rising
from the shed. My father inside
making a cloud of his mind.
I am in the branches, I am
in the leaves. I am a child,
I am a nurse holding a lantern
in the black and white
night, walking the rows
of injured. The sheets of the beds
rustle, murmurs of men whose faces
my lantern doesn’t reach. My lantern
has a heat of its own. I hold it close
to my chest, it lights my apron,
the heavy wool of my dress. I move
like what the dress suggests. Slow,
separate from those men
who require so much of me, I move
forward through the cots, I listen,
I touch the soft green box
of a t-shirt, cotton, mine
and beneath it, the wet bark
of the branch. Returned,
but no one looks for me.
How many hands did she touch?
How many touched her
in dreams, the portal of her open,
lamp-lit face?
The pool rises
from the grass, plastic blue,
makes a surface for the rain
to disturb. My father in the shed
still, among the rotting furniture.
Dusty, not good for a person
to breathe. I see the neighbor
and his dog, born in the ditch
where it swims now,
follows the neighbor by day
and curls at his door by night,
though the man refuses
to leave out food. I’d like to see
where the dog eats. To meet it
in that place and put my hands
in its fur, to heal it.