Carmen Butcher- two poems


My world swaying

on its nose sun and snow and now you said the danger is it was not upside-down
enough, but we know nothing of this -- remember Charlottesville -- when that
curious wet sweetness rode us down Main Street bursting to a loud tenderness
thinking parades of pioneering whites, greens, "I'll ALWAYS remember them and
this," and I was more than left after fruitless hours slanted with my New
Yorker, Pitocin whispering, your feet are too near mine -- next, one huge sail
-- swaddled heads, solidness in my left hand only, and a forever convex thing
hanging vexing.  But, hey, this is my party, decorations don't matter, and
strangers are the most important guests.  I am a naked joke, they are a great
crowd (if just us, and since not, my skin thought only of our guest of honor,
calmly swimming with my nose and calmly swimming with my mouth) and when the
sharpest knock-knock let there be -- listen to the thin butterfly wing of
astonishment in my standing other:   "Spring water, a clear pure gush of
spring water," into that fountain a long -- and I felt kind -- hand I trusted
reached unseen, ripping burning cloud through my deep rising, as even my joy,
wounding, the entire length shouting silently "DON'T MOVE" -- fishes drowning
mouths on land, soul glued to one palm, swum down that much movement, down
that wave of "Is it...Are you...Can you" from good brains until my teeth must
thrown out like "Yes" when I was less in the in the in the

And then there was clapping, and smiles all around, and a white angel was
carried to a table, and plainly my husband ran across to her, and I turned my
head to the right to see them, and the tears ran the short distance to my ear
and as they flowed I swam -- unable to see, till then.



A Season of Violence in Two Different States

And everything was greening, you said, and did not hear my wan bend hail great
tired dead happy fields between us. (Newness crying, milk ran, I was a buttered
breast.)  You meant trees, shrubs, anything you saw sunk in the seat on the way
bumpy way back home from that strange place where you left left and right
breasts in exchange for calendars of clean tissue.  And everything was
greening, you said -- not the assault on me midnight black and near-death
blue, not follow-up surgery shocking pink, emergency fluids and all drains
red, not endless tests made me white.  And again, as if silence meant this
could maybe be beyond conception, you said, And everything was greening.
Well, I could not disagree then; smiling at the reclining inadequacies, I
cradled the phone closer to hear (I hardly knew who) saying gently, Yes.

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