Emily Warn: Poems

Emily Warn was commissioned by Hugo House to write new poetry on the theme of Laws of Attraction as part of the final event of the 2009-2010 Hugo Literary Series. Warn read her poems at Laws of Attraction on March 19, 2010, alongside essayist Philip Lopate, playwright and actor Marya Sea Kaminsky and musical group Happy Hour Hero.

Conductor

The trout are the only ones who know what love is.
I don’t.  My sister doesn’t.
You there in your great overcoat, take it off—
where the lining’s torn, rain,
inside a leaf, next year’s leaf,
inside a poem, another  renegade
dissing fig balsamic vinegar,
tracking love’s time-delay,
its lightening  fast as fingerlings
leaping at shadows of striders,
a flash mob, forming and flocking,
unnerving and predictable
as the rhetoric of chores.
I wash out the compost bucket.
I bury ashes in snow.
At night, I walk along the harbor,
watching reflections of what we make:
dock lights, skyscraper lights, shimmying.

I Want to Hold Your Hand

I had a girlfriend once who tattooed a Hebrew word
on her belly, the letters going backward not forward,
She later regretted it, wouldn’t tell me what it meant.
We were not mirrors of each other. Not even close.
Her clothes neatly folded.  Her straight A’s.
Our lust, stalking  a future about to happen,
never had a chance. We pitched tents
in abandoned pastures to lie naked all morning,
admiring how tanned and toned our Midwestern  bodies
looked in the yellow light of rip-stop nylon.
With no cause, no name,  for my obsession,
frightened by Its intensity, she eventually left.
It was during the Vietnam War,
vets older than us joined our classrooms.
One, a  trumpet player, smoked endless Luckies
with his one hand and hid the missing one
in a trench coat he never took off.
He befriended me and a boy who never wore shoes
even in winter walking through Michigan snow drifts.
They consoled me when she didn’t come back.
The last time I saw her, she changed sweaters
in our dorm room and hugged me, perfume
of Clairol Herbal Essence in her pageboy hair.  
I replayed that moment for years, a memory
becoming a prophecy of a life spent.
Now what was that line she used to say?

 
Drought

To be furious for love all one’s life!
Black hopping hungry crow, what if I feed you almond honey?
What if I align a satellite dish with talking experts each slinging
a word hammer?  God could have picked any verb he wanted—
he chose Let there be high barometric pressure and squabbling,
the monotony of a failed marriage, meaning no job within 70 miles
for your husband. What he would give to become a cog again.
Dashes of rain. The crows can no longer squeeze water
from moss in gutters. They stab at it from the rim of a birdbath
sized for bush tits and chickadees.  Ashamed of their large black bodies,
bobbing perpetually, like bird toys that only need a thimbleful water
to teach us the laws of gravity and fluids.
The wind-tossed dyed sugar maples—ninety-six percent on the foliage meter—
could be amusement rides for crows except for their thirst.
The other verbs are all about God this and God that,
all about God talking when no one is listening
because they are all talking to Him.
Dashes of rain.  Leaf rave. You are free
to appropriate the commentaries. The sun saying so.  
The muted crickets. The lonely spouses
all trying to fit together.  Then love calls,
throws off its blankets, a mad deity beside the road.

Raven

Inevitable hush to raven’s spooky melodic throttled call
in the season when the flamboyant have departed:
no hummingbirds no waxwings: a dwindled river.  
We swung picks all yesterday afternoon to wrest
50-million-year-old alder leaves from layers of shale.
Cold kettle.  Weed brew.  The steadfast pines grow crops for manic squirrels.  
I turn toward those who no longer occupy days,
now that there are so few left to unfold.
Sauntering impossible.  Innumerable possibilities, too.
We dig a foot-deep moat around the potato bed, line it with chicken wire,
an abyss we hope voles aren’t engineered to cross.
I walk to where the river road climbs from the valley floor,
to watch the current disappear into a marsh.
When the sun begins its descent into the pine tree,
each needle seems to spark a spark on the still water.  
Each wink an insect probably. No forward motion.  
Quiet marsh in a mountain valley drained dry by drought
and Tussock moths. The raven rounds up the abyss for another talk about it.  
Too enamored with cleverness to believe in its clamor.
A pair of dragonflies lowers their landing gear
and come to rest one on top of the other on a lily pad.
I think about acting out love as a chef—oil smoking, crushed ginger, seasonings.
Countless wicks of the pine tree. This looking for something
to appease that which rages when I’m not looking.
Sharp stones on the gravel road delay the wind’s sprint.