A Selection of Poems by Colette Inez
(Chosen by the poet, republished here with her permission, all poems copyright Colette Inez)
The Perseid Meteors of August
Only insect insomniacs turn up the volume
of their music, oblivious
to the celestial visitors whose paths
arrive and depart for us.
We, who crane our necks upward,
wait for them to speed part the meadow's
silverrod, candelabras of vervain,
past that garrup of the bullfrog in the pond
as he calls for his share of rapture.
One then another, they hurtle over the barn
beyond farm lights, and outlying reaches of town.
Tipped into earth they jostle the dreams
of our ancestors
and the about-to-be born who are crowning.
Blood-smeared, out of their mother's pods
they hammer the air with cries
to the heaven overhead that does not see them
Advice to a Writer Imagining Conception and Birth
Look for a tree stump in the woods. Compare it to love,
examine the particulars, how your mother mounted
your father on Labor Day in a bungalow, Liberty, New York.
Describe a snowfall before your parents met. Take your time.
Leave out myth and literature. Relate it to life in an American
town, one with a rotating cocktail lounge.
Now imagine yourself as a parchment worm
wedged into a crevice to avoid attack. Liken your fear
to a clamp. How does it resemble the opal clam
from New South Wales? Speak up. Check it out.
Write a poem of departure in which you use the color blue,
a hue like the glow of fish cast ashore by a stormy sea.
Your parents are leaving town. They've rented a bungalow
in Liberty, New York. you're not around to say: after dark,
exact change. You're not even a tiny moonlet in a microscope,
a bluet in the woods. Contrast your nothingness to words
that start with "k": killjoy, kisscurl, kelp. Are these words
comical in any special way? Say how you feel about kale.
Will you grow to leave it on your plate?
Your parents sit in a trance. They have just made love
and are counting snowflakes: uno, dos, tres...
Are they from Bogot‡, Columbia, and in New York on
a whim? You are about to divide. Say something about the
intricate coil of DNA. Double helix. Double Dutch. Jump in.
Make the leap. Now you're a nation newly emerged.
Dispense with history, the transitory passions of people's wants.
Words are dropping fast.
Escape
Atalanta, outrun the suitors
your father lures to the palace,
and when Hippomenes pitches
golden apples to trip you up,
fly over them, defy the man
who claims to love you and not
what your offers him.
Run, Atalanta.
And should you stumble, imagine
that spouse grown cool.
You've lost yoru footing
in the clutter of the household,
swollen breasts and belly
as you try to race away,
the children shrieking,
and Mercury's ghost tsk tsking
above the bedraggled wings
of your running shoes.
Pound Noted for Measures of Weight
Gondolas, gods and goosenecked girls,
long gone. The money goes on, clinkers
and wads, bankers and clerks, deposits
are made in the dangerous dark
as radio waves snake into space
thinning Ezra's harangue
on the swindling class and vanished
kings. Ashurbanipal, warrior, greedy
for books and heads on a pole, things
to gorge on in one's own time, thinking it
tame as a prize or a plaque. No need
answer the universe back or to rail
at speechless tribes. Gold corruptions,
even in the leaves, wars, cartels,
and idiocies continue to favor the rise
of churls, low deeds done in hunger's
name. Damn it, all these words stink death,
the coroner's nod in the corner
of the morgue. Son of a money-monger,
poet, come another canto from the wind-
shaken pines of the coast, another canto
for the concubines of paradise.
Spring Clouds,
Leaving Stroudsburg, PA
Goat-gray, horn-white.
Blur. Blur. Winter's over.
Yellow-green. New again.
A boy turns eighteen,
probes the knobs of horns budding
in his skull. In the dark
smells roots crushed underfoot
after rain. In dreams of towers
and pyramids, he's a lord.
Circling his lay's blue frame house,
he snorts and roars, rattles his spear
in the air, revs his car, hears the ancient
song of rain on bark, wind in the pines.
When the girl speeds toward him'
on her bicycle, he will marry her.
When she blinks in the honeyed light of dusk,
a six-pack in her lap, he will marry her.
When clouds spring over the Pennsylvania
mountains, Appalachian, Pocono,
over rivers, Lackawanna, Delaware,
they will be married and turn
year by year to bodies of contention,
flinging accusations to the hungry dark,
their shadows sprouting horns and cloven hooves
among sticktights, hawkweed, adderstongue.
Reflections of the Lady of Ch'ang
Half-awake she hears hooves at the door--
a stallion enters her Chamber of Longing.
When the door thunders hut
she recalls the fury of her childhood;
Mother's venomous beauty,
Father, adept at lighting amber
in the eye of the sexual god.
the listless husband picked out for her
has left her without heirs.
Beyond that gate the dreaming dog
paws at dragonflies that hover between heaven
and earth. The Lady
of the Hall of the Star that Rewards Long Life
conjures a horse to speed through clouds.
He balks at her command.
She twirls the gold charm sent by the lord
with his ode to a roan mare at autumn.
On tiles thinned by wind, rain, sun,
lie bare prints of her frenzied walk, back and forth.
Forest animals track the night sky.
The reconciliation she struggles to release
is a Leaf Wing pressed form a cocoon,
the cracking of the tortoise through hits shell.
The Telling
They sit in the refectory
by the closed kitchen door.
October rain blurs the tall windows.
They have met here before to part with secrets.
Morning light brushes gray on bare walls,
fingers his carrot-colored hair.
A wedge of lines deepens between her gold eyes.
She eyes the swelling flesh
beneath her coat, forms a steeple with her hands,
day-dreaming holy water on a the baby's face,
a saint's name for the christening.
he tugs at this collar and blinks.
Ports and pans clattering in the kitchen tell them
they're no longer along. Her fingers tense
as he skims them with his lips. They leave
by different doors. Inside her body,
a fury of division seizes attributes from each:
yellow-brown eyes, a fringe of auburn curls blooms
into the parcel delivered to the Sisters. Late June--a whiff
of incense and convent roses in my bassinet.
The Play of Lovers
Pears soft to the thumb, wine.
Now the sun is the moon, each
look a new word, phrases to arrange
like roses in a vase.
Lovers. everyone has seen them fall
into a blur of change' one leaf
and then another on the lawn. Shade
gives way to light. Snow comes down.
Do you see them, two figures
in the distance making their small mark?
Words, too, submit to years. Plain
flowers in the yard repeat their trick
of vanishing. The sun is the sun
and each look is seen again and again
until faces disappear.
Everyone has seen it.
The Letter Before A
The letter before A carries an absence
waiting to be born
out of radio waves and ghosts of lost rhymes
unnamable as god in the void.
Carrying a presence dense with text,
the letter after Z, waits to be born
into nothingness--phantom dispatch of anonymous
names blown at the illiterate fair
attended by every invisible child doing nothing
and the little brown fox jumping and scrambling.
Aleph's ox horns, an A upside down,
and zed on a sled to oblivion.
Read me twigs blown in the dirt, veins
of porphyry, cranes in a line.
That alphabet cracks on our lips, and in dust
lightly written, signaling hunger.
Lean flesh of words unspoken wait to unfold.
Meaning dances as we spin words, mysterious, reciprocal,
linked in marked conglomerations,
the alphabet of ashes in the absence before A
evolving to clouds
and the letter after Z buzzing with hypothesis.
Clemency
In front of a rooming house,
she asks will I let her take my arm?
Her eyes aren't good. She tells me her father
who called her angel, my wren, is ashes.
The ones who pressed roses into a book of verse,
Mother, is a name smudged on stone.
Saved and never used, a trousseau:
camisoles and pillow lace, white satin shoes.
Like my mother, who looked the other way
when I was born, I want to escape
but the woman is intent on going somewhere
not far off with me in tow.
I imagine she lays the silver
for one, just like my solitary mother,
who did not confide in anyone.
We arrive. The woman tugs at my sleeve:
"Here stood my house."
Her hand waves towards an empty parking lot.
Eyes milky with cataracts, she tells her story:
"We wore tulle gowns for Mattie Clay's ball.
Father said: 'Delia, Penelope, stop dillydallying.'
We had fire in the hearth. Servants below
readied for bed. Father consulted his watch,
said: 'My duchesses are always late.
Go on without me. I've work to do.'
He struck a match to light his pipe.
We left by cab. Later his smite would disappear
along with my childhood in a blaze horses and water
could not put out."
Now with hours to burn in a town whose indolence
I will shrug off like a shawl in a overheated room,
I recollect my resolute mother who said go on
without me. The past grows cold.
I clasp another woman's hand in mine
as if she were my child.
Missing,
the white A-frame with juniper hedges
bordering the garden. A deep woods
edges their land. The sky, fragile
as it cracked into stars above the husband
curving home in a blue Ford to chicken pot pie,
gingerbread and who was not that boy who snapped
his fingers to jukebox jive,
and hardened in surprise when she flung off her blouse
on the back porch glider, not the man who wrote
"I can't wait" in leaky ink and flew to Germany
or the Philippines, she forgets. Not that one,
but the someone missing,
the one who didn't feed the blank
with his height or weight, a randomness of envelopes
marked: Not at this address.
Listen, cobwebs sigh in parched grass.
And the vanishing lawn, phantom tools in the absent shed,
the fictive bed stripped, dismantled like vows.
Fairy tales not read before sleep, the children unborn.
In the woods the witch is missing. Hansel reaches out to touch
her form another story. We are lost, he says, without you.
Lake Song
Every day our name is changed,
say stones colliding into waves.
Go read our names on the shore,
say waves colliding into stones.
Birds over water call their names
to each other again and again
to say where they are.
Where have you been, my small bird?
I know our names will change one day
to stones in a field
of anemones and lavender.
Before you read the farthest wave,
before our shadow disappear
in a starry blue, call out your name
to say where we are.
Colette Inez is the Fourth Florie Gale Arons Poet. Ms. Inez will read at 7:30 pm on Monday 4 November in the Anna E. Many Lounge on the second floor of Caroline Richardson Hall, Newcomb College, Tulane University.
Everyone is welcome. The event is free, and will be followed by a reception and booksigning. Questions? Phone 504 865 5238
Colette Inez has authored eight collections of poetry, including Clemency; Alive and Taking Names, and Other Poems; and The Woman Who Loved Worms. Much of her work is collected in the volume Getting Under Way: New and Selected Poems (1993). Inez has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is on the faculty of the Columbia University Writing Program in the School of General Studies.
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