Goose Pity

In the nursery the walls are bare

and cracked to half split open

The rocking chair has disappeared

as has the goosey blanket.

The rhyme have fractured and flaked

on the window frames and the moth-

eaten curtains beg to be chop off

from all memories of kings

and pies and blackbirds baked

alive, of spiders crawling

into fabric and aged women

tossed up in a blanket

"to brush the cobwebs

off the sky" Mother lies

six years in the cabbage patch

of dirt and thorn and notwithstanding that I tear

through the involuted, untamed path

in May, July October,

I at no time go deep enough

to find her, hear her, warn her

that the scope is a ruin,

has been turned

upside down. display her the twist

of my skeleton

face, by what mode I chew on

the memory of the billnob

of the disappeared swan

(the volume called it the perfect

aphrodisiac) for a like reason I can forget the longing,

how he really did advance to call,

rubbed oil from right above

his tail to maintain

his gorgeous plumage.

Too stained we the pair became--

aslither in preening.

How we'd dip and pump

Wings all expanse--

pinioned single to each other.

Late white-frosts and early floods

were the weather of not notwithstanding True,

the crows and tricks snails and foxes

drooled and waited and watched

as inevitably

I did for him.

Took up with others,

fixated upon the changing designs

of their beaks, their thick fleshy

tongues--surf scoter king eider,

horned screamer--always hoping

for the soughing creak of wings

of the lonesome mute swan.

Talk, talk to me I'd plead

to the ignorant forest,

that unlike him or mother, answered.

It was the stiff flight feathers,

the down underneath,

that I can't forget.

How he swam into me all

grace--the white spot flutter.

Some days I remember him

as retailer trickster, monster;

others, the omniscience transformed, zeroing

in on me--the waiting, blazing center

How mythic. by what means cliche.

Either way. Better than OK

Woo hurt Woe. Whoa.

I'd scream too loud

how strange, for a like reason he found

another--quieter--and now

I find him only

for certain, filling up my page.

She read me rhyme in the nursery

as I watched the flicker

of her hand pick on the outside her hair--

one by one--rub the inflamed emptiness

to message, scabs I could examine.

Animal skin I could learn from--

parchment unscroll by means of tiny fingers

with secret world maps--

translucent, simple, readable

under the porcelain bird

lamp--terrain thus navigable

it would travel me into calm.

SUSAN HAHN is the author of five works of poetry, editor of TriQuarterly, and a 2003 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

photograph by dint of Jennifer Girard

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Sep/Oct 2003

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