Ballast

POEMS

Linda Aldrich

deerbrook editions

published by

Deerbrook EditionsP.O. Box 542Cumberland, ME 04021www.deerbrookeditions.comwww.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions

first edition

© 2021 by Linda AldrichAll rights reservedISBN: 978-1-7343884-9-7Book design by Jeffrey Haste

Cover artwork by Georgia artist Lillie Morris. www.lilliemorrisfineart.com

for David

In the Well of a Wave off Kanagawa 11

i. Seven Scenes from a Single Life, 1985 13

Red Removed 17Buried Deep 18Nothing Else 19Prayer before the Gallows 21Helix 22

ii. 25

Properties of Fracture 29Chicken Scratch 30The Turning 31The Final Appeal 32Wherewithal 33To My Rumored Other Sister (whispered sister) 34Penmanship 36

iii. 37

Edith Ginn 41Capt. Thomas Ginn 42Thomas and Edith 43Sonnet for Winter Sky by Will Barnet 45February Again 46

iv. 47

Beveled 51Antigone Buries Polynices 52Blueberries 53Composure 54Hereafter 55Par Avion 56Bells, Bells 57

Table of Contents

v. 59

Seeds 63Mother Gone, Notes in the Back Box 64House Tour 67Getting Back before Dark 68Resolve 69recon 70Regret 71Lost-Wax 72

vi. 73

The Disappearance of Mademoiselle 77The Mime 78Dream of the Green Bench 79To Mother on the Anniversary of Your Death 80Notes from the Library Lecture 8146. Biblio in the Age before Recrimination 83

vii. 85

To My Students Who Danced 89Cameo 90And Then It Comes 91Graveside, Colorado 93Last Poem with a Train in It 94Watercolors 96End of Summer 97

Acknowledgements 99About the Author 101

Ballast

11

In the same boat with Hokusai,I watch other boats, slenderarcs of yellow moon, struggle in the dark water, ride the backof a wet dragon that roils and risesmightily over them, all froth and disruption, a tower about to collapse.This is the day they will die. Thisthe moment before it happens, before they jump through small windowsof time. They are facing away, pullinghard on the oars, hoping to slide up one side, down the other, as though theirs is just any row of eyes going someplace, their oblivious heads lined up, thinking of those they left on shore? But look, they’re already dead and don’t know it. Hokusai has filled their sockets with black ink, their mouths fall open. He looks past them to Mt. Fuji, and the mountain looks back at him, cloaked in white, impassive, unmoved, like a line of rope thrown to us. Our boat steadies, holds taut. If Hokusai decides to jump, I will take his hand.

In the Well of a Wave off Kanagawa Hokusai, 1830

13

Seven Scenes from a Single Life, 1985

i. At the Berkeley Psychic Institute, seven students and one teacher watched the airaround my head to see what might appearabout past lives and contracts I had hiddenfrom my consciousness regarding children. A boy and a girl, they finally said,will come to you according to a pledgeyou made one day before this incarnation,but if circumstances aren’t right for themto come, they understand and let you gocompletely. They know San Francisco’snot a mecca for straight men, and then, there’s the matter of your acting career,how paying the rent is a daily fear.

15

i.

At the Berkeley Psychic Institute, seven students and one teacher watched the airaround my head to see what might appearabout past lives and contracts I had hiddenfrom my consciousness regarding children. A boy and a girl, they finally said,will come to you according to a pledgeyou made one day before this incarnation,but if circumstances aren’t right for themto come, they understand and let you gocompletely. They know San Francisco’snot a mecca for straight men, and then, there’s the matter of your acting career,how paying the rent is a daily fear.

17

The sharp-shinned hawk got the cardinal yesterday—so many tiny feathers, each tip dipped in vermilion.But the greater part of him, the bright pumping heartI saw sing from the maple, is nowhere to be found.No overstatement to say he got me through winter,his unabashed presence at my feeder, his color pulsingagainst darkness. One night, I chased the owl awayfrom him: running, waving my arms, the snow lyingin drifts behind my eyes, my legs spindly from cold.Each day I could find his flame branded into the brittleblack of woods, an ember longing for spring and almostthere, his song more voluptuous, his balance in the tallesttree, more reaching and reckless. I cheered for him,my bold, bright bird: our coming season of fulfillment.Now this leeching absence, this handful of down.

Red Removed

18

Six months before her banishment, Mary Dyer gave birth to a stillborn;unearthed by Puritan magistrates, the baby was used as proof of heresy, 1637.

They say the baby had not legsor arms but a horned face(because no round head)

and sharp talons for toes,indeed all ugliness, and for the sins of her mother was born dead

and buried with haste in a blanket,the lantern’s circle the only mark, and that the midwife, Mary’s one friend,

whispered a small prayer into what was not an ear. The Elder admonished silence,

lest all women be encouraged in their lust, lest evil hear its name and grow among them.

She named the baby Anne, after the onewho whispered and later showed her where the baby lay and sprinkled

there some seeds of featherfew. In the child’s monstrosity, she never believed, or in any kind of sin

brought manifest to children. Of her loss, she could not speak and found herself put straight to work

as remedy, but how she cried to gather eggs from under the hen’s warm breast, reaching into that soft dawn, as though to find a tiny handand draw it close again.

Buried Deep

19

Mary Dyer, Quaker, was hanged for heresy,Massachusetts Bay Colony, June 1, 1660.

It is what it is, a dangling of rootsexposed to air, a play thingfor a village, a doll separatedfrom its head, not a smooth,

slow pull, but a yank, her own weight a problem, coarse drubbing and drumming and the village foaming for a broken thing, an ungodly act.

Nothing to turn this into. Not the slip of a robe over her head, not a necklace clasp and her sister’s smooth hands, these gloved man’s hands, deer hide hands so sure of themselves, this place of certainty and so much hunting,skinning, bleeding out, and everthe lifting up and always the bringing down, and on the bowed heads of the lambs, a righteous clubbing, the ground thick with heretics. Nothing to turn this into.

Not a wide braid of hair, the heavyrope she will wear, not the measure of her growing yearsand the many careful brushings,

her mother pulling her backwith each stroke (oh where isher mother?) gentle tether. Not gentle what they do,

and better a woman to watch die, they believe, than another pair

Nothing Else

20

of breeches and an ill-washed shirt. Better the layers of petticoats and her wetting herself, legs a spasm of whiteness, her vile fecundity. Let her quake, they will say.Let her tongue grow numb with prayer.

21

She imagines herself in flight,perhaps a white owlfinding its way throughthe dark to settle on the brimsof the black hats soon to walk home, heavy with her perchedand galling weight.

But she would rather be the tall, gray bird found tangled in the ship’s rigging,how they took it out gentlyand built a wooden cageto mend its wings,fed it hand by hand small fish,long neck fluttering,a narrow stream of fish swimmingto the lake of the bird’s belly,and for the ship, an omenof good fortune.

Prayer before the Gallows June 1, 1660