Gymnastics
My daughter is learning
to launch her body up onto the bar
and perch there on her hips,
core strong, arms and legs extended impossibly long.
When did she get so long?
She balances on the pivot point below her belly button,
steadying herself in a straight line,
then tucks chin to chest and flips —
abruptly
elegantly
around the bar.
I watch her negotiate this movement.
She uses the momentum of her body bending
as an engine to power her turn.
Her feet point high above her head
and then gravity seems to propel her up
instead of pull her down.
No matter how well I understand the physics of her movement
when I watch her spin I cannot shake the sense
that it is the ground itself that actually repels her,
as if the earth notices her twisting into impact
and puts its hands up,
pushing her backwards
into the safe embrace of the bar.
I am no gymnast
yet I too have felt that plummeting.
I have felt the thrill of being righted
by invisible hands,
felt the authority
of my own head hanging high above my feet.
I too have led myself by bending,
lowering my weight deftly into a spin.
I have felt the breathlessness
in that moment of turning.
Like my child, I have been convinced
that if I practice enough of this spinning in place
it will learn me how to fly.
Newark on a Sunday
The woman stands up straight
in her fancy fur hat and long coat.
Next to her the preacher with the microphone
calls down the Holy Ghost onto passersby,
baptizing us all, repentant or not.
The woman in her Sunday best
sways and calls out,
halleluiah, halleluiah.
She has not, like me, stopped to listen
while on her way somewhere else.
She has come here for this.
She is at church on this street corner,
her hands waving open above her head.
Last night the city was loud and crowded.
There were men calling to each other from their front steps,
musicians laying down sound
from one corner to the next,
a fight spilling from tavern to street,
and ringing everywhere, women’s laughter.
But this morning the city is made of light and air.
The music and anger of Saturday night
have moved over and Sunday morning
is sparse, one lone voice in a microphone
calling us sinners forward
to join him in the presence of the Almighty
and this very well-dressed lady,
whose open hands
make me remember
sometimes you must be empty
in order to receive.
Why I Wander Room to Room
Always, there are fragments.
Articles, with most of a cup of coffee cooled next to them,
set aside half-written because the doorbell rang,
or a child cried, or the cat announced I had once again
neglected the punctuality of his morning meal.
There are lines I caught, like fish, in the middle of the night
but did not bother to get out of bed and reel in,
only to find the poetry had unhooked itself by morning.
There are dream scenes that throbbed vivid and true
right up until the alarm,
the hoofbeats of syllables
that gallop along the fences of my consciousness
while the words still whinny unreachable
in the wild fields beyond.
Most days, fragments are all I’ve got.
The poems no longer arrive whole and perfect and all at once.
My mind’s floors are strewn with snippets
of beautiful things I read somewhere, or maybe heard,
that I meant to seam together
with senses, memory,
before they float off like chaff
slipping through the chinks in my mental basket.
Am I a basket case?
I even interrupt myself.
And yet I keep collecting these pan flashes of inspiration,
the sentences whose endings take off and run
like fleet-footed fugitives,
those lost continents of ideas.
I seek them out like search and rescue,
dig for them like truffles, tuck them safe in pockets and word docs,
certain they will turn out delicious,
certain they will one day offer the exact flavor
my poem-dish is looking for.
Words are why I wander room to room,
picking up and putting down.
What I want is to weave a tapestry
out of these pieces of string too short to be used,
to pair them together in a beckoning texture,
nothing grand, you understand, but
into something so small and strange and unlikely beautiful
that it changes you, like a burst of orange
when you really expected blue.
—Lucinda Bowen
Littleton County Road
