From the Window,
The marina, Charleston

 

Susan Ludvigson

White and blues perfectly

still against a steel wool sky

and water bordered by summer marsh grass,

parentheses around the river.  Blocks

away my husband is being infused

with toxins meant to cure him.

 

An owl sits on a trellis over the ramp to the dock.

His job, though he is neither flesh nor feathered,

is to scare the gulls from the pristine walkway.

He’s as passive as the water I have to look at hard

to see a hint of ripple.  this might be a still life except

for the occasional pelican flying high above a faint

ruffling of palm.  My husband calls from the hospital

 

to ask how I am. I’m in the hotel, napping,

waking, staring out the window,

nursing a stomach upset by too much wine

and worry.  How can I whine

about my body’s minor rebellions

when he is grateful for the poisons that might save him,

for the time to write stories he’s dreaming up even now.

 

A boat is gliding out, someone walks the planks

where the owl keeps vigil.  A breeze picks up,

bending the grasses.  Cars begin crossing the bridge

that had been empty all morning, and the clouds

start scrubbing the air until some blue leaks through.

 

In the dream country

 

Susan Ludvigson

I walk with a cockatiel on each shoulder,

while a tiger slips through tall grasses,

leaps stalks of elephant-ears, a silent music

in the line he draws on air.

You, in Khaki, carry a hawk on your wrist,

nod to me from a distance.

When one of my cockatiels disappears,

I weep with grief deeper than bird-loss.  You tell me

it may have been your hawk who snatched

and ate it, but you’ll help me look,

and you do, into dry fields

with broken-down buildings.

I follow you back to the wilderness

of jungle, its soft green shadows.

 

The cockatiel returns and again I have one

on each shoulder—then another pair

of smaller birds, finches, both singing.  You smile

as if the world were unchanged, and you

had nothing to do with it, though peace and joy

have re-entered the garden.

 

a little boat slips out to sea

 

Susan Ludvigson

Again, I feel it rocking, reaching,

tipping toward the garden

I’ve never seen

at the sea’s bottom, where

fish glow against the wheaty weeds,

flower-fish, blossoms

scattering through the deep

like dandelion fluff

from breath.

 

I’m going bline

under the dark of the sky,

into night water,

alone in this small

creaking vessel.

 

I come here

night after night, for what

lives beneath sight, its murmurs

a foreign language, its mountains

a foreign landscape, its lure the lure

of what I can never name.

 

you could be drinking faulkner's bourbon

 

Susan Ludvigson

                                                 eating barbeque

                    already living among the stars

having drifted out of our garden

 

                                       beyond the yellow summer roses

       the read camellias of winter

 

                                                               into the airless beyond—

 

        who knows—

 

                           the answer to the interviewer’s usual question

                                        could be drifting toward another galaxy

 where millennia from now

 

 

we might embrace in thea crossroads of new planets

 

                        we tell ourselves we’d like to know   but knowing

 

                                              puts a period on speculation

 

     and we are opposed     even in theory

 

                                                                                     to endings

 

Poems included in forthcoming manuscript titled  Wave as if You Could See Me