KiH nr 5/2003
Mary Kennan Herbert
American poet Mary Kennan Herbert, originally from St. Louis, Missouri, now lives in Brooklyn, NY. She teaches literature and writing courses at Long Island University. Six collections of her poems have been published, and her poetry has appeared in many journals, in 15 countries. This is the first of her work to be published in Poland, home of her father’s ancestors.
THE MUSE RIDES A GRAY HORSE
A colleague questioned my desire
to write poems about my Polish roots.
“Aren’t you mining that old territory too much?
Why not focus rhymes on the here and now?”
Defensive, I said I need some distance
from those days of plunder and loot,
in order to see time in my imagination. Lost
days fade so fast now, like cavalry horses
in the forest, the sounds of hooves
ever fainter, like icons crumbling in the fire,
like sand drifting from my hand, even now,
as we speak.
POETS KNOW TERRIBLE THINGS
look at their slanted cartoon eyes
see how their tricky smile might be a leer
before it dies notice how poets’ hands
shake a little bit when telling a story about
some little incident in the kindergarten
long ago when one could not trade stamps
for lies examine the ink-stained palms
notice how those wavering lines lead to
late night cries or occasional laughter
because poets may laugh at something
that is certainly not funny not only that but
poets are thin-skinned and yet thick
sometimes turgid or torpid a biped that
tries to weather adversity with words
aiming to be sunny observe how poets
hoard their torpid words and then trigger
them like a torpedo aggressors in verbal
arts of war resorting to language even in
steerage a war chest of breasts and
fresh-fallen snow those eyes looking
half-closed don’t be fooled those bedroom
eyes are plotting poetry using rhymes to
tell the world all your little flaws and
weaknesses creating couplets to reveal
chinks in your armor holes letting in stiff
winds across Lake Michigan before you get
a chance to sin again a poet will spill the
beans and everybody will know everything
so don’t trust them their round smiley
faces are just a mask hiding sonnets or a
hornet’s nest avoid them like the plague go
to the theater instead and fall in love with
a playwright or a cop or a carpenter keep
your ears open because poets know too
damn much for one to live comfortably
there are no secrets here poets will tell
everyone what you’re eating or wearing or
believing they find out stuff words bubble
up in their devious brains knowledge
unwraps itself openly and lasciviously and
minutes later it’ll be on the Internet
beware of that woman writing sestinas
or even making soup her cauldron or her
children might contain the alphabet in the
beginning and all through the night a poet
keeps stirring until even the Deity might
taste it and declare “God, that’s pretty
good.”
THE TOUR
A modest three room apartment:
from room to room I ran and roamed
in search of my self, my home.
>From those bleak windows I watched
trolleys turn and repeat their run.
Here, on Saturday nights my father
gave me comics in color to read.
Prince Valiant explored the New World
and so did I, watching the trolleys.
This repetition of images can’t be helped.
Things do repeat, turn, leave, return.
The factory next to our apartment
burned. I stared at blackened walls.
Things begin, end. We could smell
charred remains for a long time.
At age six, I liked the way the trolley
tracks led this way and then back
again. Things disappear, or come back.
My mother was afraid of thieves
in the sullen night. She propped a chair
against the front door, and placed
a tea kettle on the seat. “That thing
will make a racket if he tries to break in,”
she said. Our tin guardian was dented,
old like a survivor of WWII, but bold
like the knight in Prince Valiant’s story.
Clatter, clatter, when it fell off the
chair, I thought I heard the clank of
armor in summer dark, a thug fallen
as Sir Kettle held a sword to a guilty
throat. Then we retired to troubled
sleep. I woke to see the bedroom
curtains stir, as a minor breeze fingered
limp veils. Movement of thin cotton
fabric: a hint of life. At my station,
I stared into the dark to see if a thief
would dare climb in our window to take
our treasures: my brother, my book
of prayers, my princess doll in lace.
But if I should die before I wake- voile
became violent. “No one is there,”
my mother said curtly when I woke her.
She escaped into exhaustion, humidity
flung like a blanket across her face.
Summer nights, I listened and waited,
a young sailor on the S. S. Alarum.
WARTIME YEARS IN ST. LOUIS
Sidewalks in the older neighborhood
were often of bricks laid out in a
herringbone
pattern. In our neighborhood to the west,
we made do with cement slabs, bumpy for
my roller skate wheels, but considered
more
modern, superior to the sleepy paths we
might
have taken had we lived on the other side
of
Kingshighway (or the Berlin Wall, if this
story
sounds unfamiliar). Around the world,
pride
of geography is instilled into the very
young,
along with meals we were told to not
waste,
because children were starving in painful
places
far, far to the other side of Kingshighway.
“They get so hungry, they scrape their
fingernails
along cracks in the table top, to get at the
crumbs,”
my mother told us. Step on a crack, break
your
mother’s back. Nursery ditties were
applied
even to the sidewalk, that portion of the
planet
under my control if I could master the
wheels
on my feet. With scraped knees from many
a fall,
I skated with caution to avoid disasters of
all kinds, especially encounters with Nazis
or fearsome
hungry kids with their flinty fingernails or
their
harrowing bones. Echo, echo.
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