Eight Poems from “From A Winter Notebook”
***
Imagine that I do what is essential only:
walk past a church or subsidized commuter homes,
past children reaping joy from movement of their bodies
in this pink light, gone puce, of early-setting sun.
Voices from the roof fall to the ground — they're human.
They may lack personhood but their timbre holds accounts,
and class is as if augured in the wind, emblazoned
as a crest upon their cadence. Shadow creeping
over me, is it you? Whose key is in my lock?
My friends, my mostly-smiling sound bites, bluntly tapping
quick-fire news, year in, year out, upon the screen
that fades to crystalline, true silence when inactive —
I’ve seen your cursor flashing, flashing next to mine.
And if I took these poems to the livid street
in mad abandon, in stockinged feet, half-naked,
you'd sign the affidavit for the state to take
possession of my will, or vouch for me and tell me
in a letter: soon luck will turn, keep scribbling
on what lunar scraps are given. I pluck my eyebrows
one by one to play the part, pray curtain opens
on the depth of winter. Enter. Exeunt omni.
***
You ask what became of coming home —
I to you, you to me, our simple
parity, our broken shield. But now
I frame art inside of life, draw space
around it, not foreign to it, not
outside it. And words unrushed by pen
to paper, by the key in the door,
heard but never written. What to do
with your request for sperm, to frame me
for someone I can’t know, make image
of what life would be? Callous, away,
I stride, go past the kindergarten,
kick the winter kindergarten leaves.
Hannah Whitaker, Glass Head, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
***
Post-Fordist tedium of waiting after clicking for the grinding
hum of this machine’s plussed workings makes me stiffen
so that I spy through inner windows, sniffing at library air —
my animal, morose desire — deadpan, death-like — for the space
between each book, each page of long-unopened books stuck close
as sticky as the child’s hand in the honey jar of Sartre’s viscous,
for the daring, darting glance of one whose breath I can intuit
opening a book, whoever — for that one I lie in wait, quietly
fine-shredding thoughts, here in the corner, by the scanners,
where pale veneer hides the unthinking, wordless half, where
dry pages hurt dry hands, as outside it may as well be winter.
***
Snakes of steam from winter roofs and potholes
streaming make in these faubourgs an atmosphere,
its cemetery morning lasts all day.
I’m hitting coffee out of the park, lining
up the tasks, like bowling pins, and striking.
Breakfast waits. Into recycling, the journal
with a hundred poets and I the oldest
of those still alive. It’ll soon be dark.
I’m heating up my breakfast; the plates drip dry.
What’s to be done with day as many grays
as pigeons, chronicles of poor decisions,
whims, fantasies that spin under my needle
feeling for the sounds, it slips to starkness
of the final circle, now tapping slowly
out slow tap of its defeated purpose.
Hannah Whitaker, Background, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
***
Winter Landscape: ice floes on the beach,
dismal rosemary in the garden,
crow calling crow — the pallor of sound.
A bird against the screen: absence of sun
on a blue wing. Back of light, wet bark.
A moment that passes passes by,
I listen to the tremolo of years
changing hands. No trace of change, humorless
earth: black rot on tall stems. Missing parts,
parks full of them. Breath still, silent grass —
obituary; in hindsight, a life.
At 3:12 am, January 5th,
the night of the 4th, I thanked you for
everything you thanked me for, and more.
***
Winter is dwindling. It’s humid
in Houston. Got a new notebook,
how happy the blanks. Mostly white
neighborhood, $3 coffee,
not saying no, just pay the rent.
A Lebensraum of lofts, LaCroix,
gelato, yoga. Thick people
dress not so much. No post-posting
pout, we’re taking pictures! To each
their own. Oily skin. Coed Coders.
No judgment, swipe me to the left....
These rhythms underneath the breath.
Hannah Whitaker, The Eye, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
***
Winter, have I lost your thread?
Downwritten whole around you?
I laugh at my poems, scare
my friends, see carefree moments
in the distance, at what cost?
And if I write this backwards,
stay time’s goosestep march, with this
superfluous smoke, one more
glass of claret, one fragment
of a poem — all too poor
copy of wild abandon.
Without your thighs to burrow,
I smell the passing age, quick
era passing over me
to where it proudly hurries,
cold of heart. This penmanship
delights in its own decay —
downgraded to scribble, a
palliative effacement,
bathos sutured to my hand.
***
A thousand winters’ words have sounded clearer
than my own. I hold up the wind, admire its color.
A thousand trees and no one speaking, no light.
The cup tries to empty but I keep it full alright.
I regret that while I lived, I never drank enough.
It’s my own fault if my life is bitter; tough
things will flourish here. It makes me sad that need is lost
for torches — as day dawns misty, I’m a ghost.
Hannah Whitaker, Cold Head, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
