The Long Arc
Collected Poems 2010- 2014
by Rebecca Cross
Free Fall
for Sean
I asked my brother what it was like, his first jump.
He said he remembered it like it was yesterday -
the radical drop into the slipstream,
white noise followed by sudden silence,
the round canopy opening above, as the earth beckoned below his feet.
And I thought, love is like this:
the awful climb, the hot smell of anticipation,
clouds scudding across the promised horizon,
as you survey the fires below.
100 pounds of gear on your back,
the wind blowing through your heart at 96 knots,
and you wantonly hurl yourself into space.
As in love, you are trained for this, and though it happens in the space of a minute,
time slows as your body registers the extreme rush.
The cord you pull violently rights you into a sure, gradual float.
It’s automatic: jump, then pull.
You are suspended for a few perfect moments before
you land, where you begin the hard work of containing the flames.
A wet cord once bound you to your mother,
its tug and severance commencing the long search for other ties:
some that attach, others that insist upon release,
and many that need to be held, or tended, or repaired.
Each time, though, it is love,
in some proportion of daring leap and faith in the pull.
I laugh as my brother describes the seven of them, mere boys,
rising from the Alaskan tundra after landing: cocksure, giddy and talkative,
their breath wild, their luck newly imagined, to be here, to do this.
When suddenly their crew boss yells at them, pulling them out of their amazement:
Pack your gear.
We have work to do.
This Edge
an ekphrastic poem in response to Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1222 (Scribbles: Curved Horizontal Bands), 2007. From the collection of the Oberlin College Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio.
for my daughter
Before our deafening loss,
I beheld this graphite drawing,
noting its tiny hatches made by many hands
over many days,
its composite, ample gestures undulating skyward,
at once contained and infinite beyond all measure of its containment.
Pattern is intrinsically endless,
proposing a continuum, as it presses against the edge:
of the painting, of the woven fabric, of the musical rhythm,
the roiling waves, the circling tree rings, the pulsing nebulae.
Pattern traverses the edge of a thing and the airy universe,
a peripheral echo of steps and marks and minutes
describing the parameters that make a day,
or four days, or nineteen years; a life.
And, standing here, then,
asking myself wordless questions about what my own hands
might make next,
not an atom of me knew
that these lines’ vibrating whispers and indescribable assertions
were a path to knowing, a quiet communion
that would lead me to, now.
Now, when every question has only one reply: you.
Now, when I realize that you inhabit that delicate, thundering, in-between place, oscillating at the edge of a life
we made with you,
a greater life we imagined for you:
a life of daily reiterations of the ordinary, with scattered
sparks of the extraordinary.
Now, an answer as ephemera, or an alternate truth
that I can, still, only intimate.
I create small rituals around your memory:
Light a candle, draw meaning from repeated numbers, collect slate from a river, breathe in your garments, sleep on your pillowcase, place the weekly roses, kiss a wooden spoon.
Weave out and out and out to the edge of the warp.
Stitch, tie, immerse in dye, wash, rinse, untie, iron.
Leaf through images that sing again and again and again
the particulars of your dimple chin, deep eyes, apple breasts, willowy spine, and your varied glances: each a distillation
of your luminous, evolving selves.
How must I understand this new, attenuated pattern:
frayed, discordant, dissolving,
and wholly strange?
This rim, this edge, this border, this boundary:
There. Here.
You shimmer.
Vessel
Through the moist and late darkness, the wind sings tonight,
making its presence known, however invisible.
Its sound and effect are my interior mirror, as,
bone-tired and restive, I sit on the porch, thinking of you.
Thinking about thinking of you.
In the swaying boat that is my chest, the pain has dimmed
into something approaching calm:
the scar of the heart a reminder of mending, the searing gape starting to close.
And yet another panic unmoors me: am I ready to change direction?
Am I ready to come home?
Sometimes I miss the abandon with which I first knew this grief,
when we swam in untested waters, learning to expect unbidden storms.
These conditions were meet for the occasion.
Now, I fear the sharp emptiness may diminish into a thing,
lidded, shadowy, thudding against such enormity with a regular rhythm,
the pendulum contracting to normal as the waves subside -
docking at a place where all that was promised comes true:
the sweetness of the sunlight, the smell of today's coffee, the beckoning morning,
the slow rustling of wakened voyagers upstairs.
Against the clarity that this journey is an eternal loop,
a new day surfaces, into which I carry you, still, but softer.
Shelter
Your quiet quiets me:
it's your form of resilience.
Believing that you are the one to whom care is owed,
I watch you, instead, looking outward,
curious, each new revelation a sapling
that you carefully plant in your heart.
How you consider the frailties of others
without losing your core, softens me.
It slows my pace.
It is how you lash your family and friends
to the tree, to weather the storm.
Or maybe you are the tree.
You tower over me to keep the sharp, screaming things away;
you extend your long fingers to cradle my tired and calloused hands;
your roots seem to deepen as your body expands.
You meet my gaze steadily.
How few people, let alone the young,
can know themselves well enough to be so direct?
Seeing your eyes through my eyes is -as you told me-
also, now, to see through her eyes:
constructing layers of recognition,
as we build between us this ephemeral, vibrating strata.
For, surely, we all have known each other
through many existential iterations.
You dissolve the hard spaces with your laughter
(so like your father in this)
and your love is alert, precise and huge.
Never moving away from an embrace,
your low limbs invite me to climb to a greater vantage.
Schuyler means "shelter."
You are my care.
You are my blessing.
You are my shade, my son.
Enough
We form a curvy triangle in the bed tonight, in a house heavy with quiet slumbering,
even though I’m still awake.
The dog is pressed against my legs, restive in his dog-dreams,
as my arm reaches to touch some part of you, my toes just inches from your heels.
My fingers are tucked under your arm,
like our baby boy used to place his hand under your shirt in his simian fashion.
I trace that place where your freckled shoulder meets your wingbone,
which feels now as intimate as that place behind your knees,
or the albumen smell between your thighs.
We are now three, our son and us, enacting the stability the triangle insists.
Like sentinels, each taking our watch, we surround the flicker of our lost girl.
Her brother, our boy, her boy, too, is now a man, taller than both of us,
dreaming the restless dreams of all young deserters.
His wings will surely work, and very soon.
But head to heart to hand to foot, this night, we are touching.
memory pocket
my heart is a pocket: its rhythms variable and fickle.
at times, it is deep, deep and hidden behind my denim and zippered chest.
at times, it sits within the smocking of my girlhood dress,
delicate, embroidered, ancient.
sometimes it travels,
its sinewy veins attaching to my boots through some miracle of imagination,
the pocket in a hastily packed bag that I carry
as I flee
but, what it holds.
a stark moment of clarity as the four-year-old you emerges
from under the Christmas tree.
sudden, surprising, I was just lying there, reading, and there you were:
tiny, whole and dear.
countless days and minutes of memory, that beat and beat and beat
against the pockety walls
of threadbare cotton, or slippery purple satin, or sturdy woven polymers.
new pocket, where I store and then worry small treasures: the rock, the bead, the small box, the tooth, the petal.
holey pocket, where the rents in the seams irritate:
must I lose everything?
or, if it is my mind and not my hand reaching in, the space inside becomes a vast and textured cosmos, expanding and lengthening to accommodate a constellation of lights, flicking on as I burrow down and in and through
Holy pocket
love pocket
repaired pocket
pocket as refuge
pocket as witness
pocket, pulsing
pocket full
pocket empty
Pull
Sometimes the pull is sharp
Caroming me inward and far far back
The photographs like whirling tops - wait, that one- where your arm is curved
Around me and I want to once,
just once, for a tiny moment, touch your softround shoulder. I know precisely what my fingers would hear.
The rain is helping the walnut hulls drop. They are loud!
Each thud against the roof and roll off the edge comes as another surprise.
But the sough of the rain continues its cycle, from vast waterways, into the atmosphere and around again, dropping down down and down in its circling drops.
My heart is looser, a bit. The tight knot that wound around it has slackened.
Is it time? Is it the willful distractions? Is it the blossoming certainty of love, however new and remembered, spiraling back to me?
breath
The air is perfect this afternoon,
nigh on November and I am
in sandals as I pedal to and from my studio,
desperate to enjoy this autumnal glory, to move my shaky consciousness into something I can make with my hands.
The trees are shaking off their leaves into carpets that dance to random gusts of wind, brilliant swirls of gold and red.
Nothing ever settles.
So too my heart swings this way and that, my nerves flying, my chatterbrain and heavy bones restless.
However beautiful, this loveliness is excruciating.
I close my eyes to find that place where my mind can rest, but instead I remember your ponytail and blue dress with the little white flowers, your nose, pointed up and forward as you marched away from your high school graduation, robe tossed over your arm: you, done with that chapter, and proudly moving forward with purpose your while life ahead of you.
How little we know.
How could we imagine that death would blow its invisible breath into your lungs, taking your confidence and your stride with you?
How mutable, these sweetest of moments.
As I turn my ears to the scritching of your brother's drawing in the other room, the dog softly breathing at my feet.
The air is perfect this afternoon,
nigh on November and I am
in sandals as I pedal to and from my studio,
desperate to enjoy this autumnal glory, to move my shaky consciousness into something I can make with my hands.
The trees are sloughing off their leaves into carpets that dance to random gusts of wind, brilliant swirls of gold and red.
Nothing ever settles.
So too my heart swings this way and that, my nerves flying, my breath uneven, my chatterbrain and heavy bones restless.
However beautiful, this loveliness is excruciating.
I close my eyes to find that place where my mind can rest, but instead I remember your ponytail and your blue dress with the little white flowers, your nose, pointed up and forward as you marched away from high school graduation, robe tossed over your arm: you, done with that chapter, confident, your whole life ahead of you.
How little we know.
How could we imagine that death would blow its invisible certitude into your lungs, taking your confidence and your stride, taking you? Leaving us stunned into a kind of lifelessness, stricken and bare.
How mutable, these sweetest of moments.
As I turn my ears to the scritching of your brother's drawing in the other room, the dog softly breathing at my feet.