DAVID GRAHAM
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A poem from my chapbook, Stutter Monk

Icemaking
 
--for my mother
 
 
At first it seems the groan of a tree limb
grinding another in zero degree wind.
Then spooky owl hoots and bullfrog gmps:
Piseco Lake, our Adirondack whale,
our cloudy bassoon.  Creaks punctuate the song,
and everything from almost-not-there sighs
to the highest pitched zings and sproings.
Sometimes a gunshot crack echoes under our skis
and the heart plunges.  Then the whine
of jets far over Panther Mountain,
but there are no jets.  No interstate
drones down our lake’s belly.  Just the crimp
and boom of one vast ice drum muffled in snow.
 
Whatever it sings, I strain to hear with my mother’s
dimming ears, under the same pearly skies
she knew seven decades ago, same heaves
of rifted ice up these narrow beaches
cobbled with mottled stones and backed by pines.
Same spring sending out its finger of open water
ten feet from shore in the coldest of years.
 
This year colder than most—she slides
her walker across the icy slate porch after dinner
and lingers to listen.  No whalesong tonight.
Just a swaddled grunt she cannot quite catch
and I might be imagining, just as I imagine
my father might shake off the snowdrifts
building in his mind and join us here again.
I might try to envision his demented arias
as the natural adjustments, the groans and sighs
of any body entering a new state. 
 
I might.  For now, I listen hard for as long
as she wishes.  Wind rushes through the pair
of hemlocks blown down last winter; snow ghosts
twirl across the dark oval of ice cleared for skating.
If she is thinking of love or madness now
she does not say.  Bathed half in moonlight,
half in fireglow through the windows at our back,
she clenches and unclenches her walker grips
as the lake goes on singing too low to make out.
 
--Stutter Monk. Flume Press, 2000.
 
  • ABOUT
  • Books
  • Poems
  • Essays
  • News & Events
  • Photography
    • Homage to Siskind
    • Imaginary Ancestors
    • Landscapes & Nature
    • Black-and-Whites
    • The Pencil of Nature
  • Links
  • Contact