Ann Townsend

[from Ann Townsend's Dime Store Erotics, Silver Fish Review, 1998]

Trimmings

Restless, pulled outside by fog

and fitful rain, she carries scissors

and basket to trim the last wild things.

She crouches, wind-shaded,

before parsley, tarragon, thyme:

herbs weep into her hands,

spiders scatter across pine needles.

Half-dark, wholly cold,

the evening of first frost

falls down as rain, cool mouth

against her unprotected neck.

Across the lake her lover waits

in a room warm with smoke,

jukebox's muted melody,

deep brown bottles ranged

across the bar. Once she leaned

into his mouth, whiskey sweet

between them. The tiny napkins

beneath their drinks grew wet

with condensation. Then

their fingers touched,

an accidental convergence of the stars.

She shakes loose a bunch of sage.

It swings like a heavy skirt

in her hands, one caterpillar

dropping free. In the sky

the constellations fuzz and fade.

After the End

Because I left him there so you could see

        his body, broken by the fall, the hawk's

small relatives hopped from higher branches

        and called a kind of glee that he was dead.

               By afternoon, the ground around him dusted

with feathers and gravel kicked up, he looked

        like a bundle of rags tossed

from a car and tumbled there, but still

        graceful, neck flung back in the moss and dirt,

               and the yellow claws curled to question marks.

Then the trees were quiet, the other voices

        gone. When a car turned into the driveway,

I knew it wasn't you. They sat a while,

        four men, the same dark suits, carefully

               tended hair. Missionaries: I could tell

from the window where I stood beyond

        their line of sight. All their doors opened

as if by a common feeling, something

        unseen and insistent in the air.

               They did not see the hawk lying there, dead

from its long fall, or age, or driven down

        by the crows that nest in the pines above.

They did not see me. I stepped back, behind

        the curtain, and wished you home, who could see

               these things and know what is beloved, what is dead.

Mid-February, White Light

Country music and a black dog barking

on a chain, and the voices of grown children

complaining — Dad, when are we going to burn

this pile? — cast over from next door

on the first nearly warm afternoon.

Everyone has come out to see the sun.

Slow bees cluster at the porch step

and the cat has wakened in a pool of light.

So when the chainsaw coughs into gear,

to clear dead wood away from the gas line,

it's like some strange natural description —

the ground frozen in its dream of January

creaking beneath our feet,

the impetus of metal cutting into wood,

the urge to flight when the bee

hazards its way, wind-driven or scent-impelled,

into my hair — to touch, to continue.

Even our unmade bed, framed by the peeling

slats of the bedroom window,

looks not like a tranquil reminder

but disturbed, shaken from a measured stillness

of white sheets, pillows, red quilt

cast on the floor, a reduction from action to disorder.

Or the gift of a warm wind that feels wet.