Judith Skillman: Five Poems
The Pleiades
You would be the flock of doves
that came close to no man
but hovered forever
near the horizon,
close to red eye of the bull.
It would be you who knew best
how to shun Orion—
warrior with the stunning belt of nebula.
You ushered in the sailing season
while the solstice moon floated
into that corner
of sky still reserved for star-gazing.
The six of you woven tightly
together, caring for one another
even given cancer.
If Sisyphus, a mortal,
could tempt the seventh one of you
into marriage it wouldn’t be
to extinguish that one,
rather to ignite and scatter her.
When my eye rests
on your cluster
I see through my myopia
a face lifted
towards me under crimped blonde curls.
Her blue eyes distort, like water in a glass,
the greatness of our father, who,
when he grew tired of holding up the world,
allowed a kingfisher
to poke holes in the reeds.
*
Another Ice Age
Grasshoppers fly from rocks
to roots to moss
to goats beard.
Queen Anne’s lace
opens its snowy doilies.
Bees make a heavy frieze
of Scotch Broom.
I wander farther
than the master ordered.
I grow sick with thoughts
of the homeland.
I pine for the highest
province—altitude,
the desert country
that never loved me back.
And when I stare down
at fire ants, I see
their segmented bodies—
half black, half red—
teeming millions
who rush from nest
to warfare like Lilliputian
soldiers. They cross twigs
and bent flowers
as though the works
of aggression could stopper
the brutal animal of ice,
that changeling
who lives off the crust
of the earth.
*
Blue Agate
See how it rounds
out the rock
like a jewel,
a sapphire
taken from the mines.
Only a wish,
a sparkle,
the hope of a counterfeit,
gem, a stone
kept in body of the earth
until it could
no longer pretend
that time would allow
it to become
what it would never be…
And yet, the color, that color—
where ice and cornflower
stand and wait
for the meeting
of sky and water.
*
Woods Shock
We pressed on into a clearing hung with ribbons of dusk. The cottonwood familiar—a relative huddled in a torn jacket, unwilling to leave the flowery sofa of comfort. We kept going. Trail-blazed. Alder ranches tore our faces and exposed arms. Crashed into moss of a ravine gone berserk with thirst. Meals bloomed like flowers in our minds and went to seed. The stars went from a pod of sky. Zenith grainy—sepia photo taken with a tripod, the woman in her starched collar, the man telling you nothing and nowhere again with his faraway eyes. Forty-eight hours since the circling began to take hold, thirty-six since the last bottle shook its rancid drip into my mouth. You were still too much the hero to admit we got lost in terrain so benign it could have escorted your ancestors east to west and set them down to grab an Aussie dinner on the barby. With dawn a light will burn, warm the bits of thannatos come down from the trees to visit us in this sleep we have no choice but to re-invent.
*
Five Orders of Vein on a Leaf
At the Stonerose museum and shop, housed in a house, the curator took her time. Her hands wandered over our specimens, numbering them, and she chose from our treasures one piece we brought along as an afterthought. A small chunk, thin as cardboard, on what was once a leaf. There inch-long veins followed right and left to intersect with the half-inch, quarter-inch, eighth-inch road, until, the boundary between sections bearing witness to having been broken into territories so small we understood how the smallest things undo us. Within the delicacy of line and blot, in triangles engraved by eons, lay meat for discussion. The paleontologists would meet downstairs, cool as if time had finally agreed to melt into one place and stay put. In the low tones of academe, their hats tossed off to one side, the experts might find something to put on a stand in a glass case.
*
Judith Skillman’s tenth book, Heat Lightning, New and Selected Poems 1986 – 2006, was published by Silverfish Review Press. The Carnival of All or Nothing is forthcoming from Cervéna Barva Press in March, 2009. Skillman is the recipient of WPA’s William Stafford Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from Academy of American Poets, King County Arts Commission Publication Prize and Public Arts grant, and Washington State Arts Commission Writer’s Fellowship. Skillman’s poems have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), The Iowa Review, Midwest Quarterly, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She has been a frequent Writer in Residence at Centrum. See www.judithskillman.com for more information.
