Nineteenth Century Ancestral
Dawn flies over the village
streets, the cluster of rooftops
ridged in rose.
The aunts and uncles breathe
underneath, nosing the fragrant
steam rising
from thick, white mugs.
Stories crowd around, waiting
to be told.
The sun raises one
dazzling eyebrow over
the Azorean hills and cold
azure harbor, where
sloops and clippers bob
like dozing sea birds
on swells of salted kelp
wrack. Next year a sin
will creep into steerage;
thin and blind, it will starve
itself clean on its journey
to the New World.
Map of the Atmosphere
If you see a shadow
it's no shadow—it's me.
—Eugenio Montale
1.
Already it’s mostly over: the ruler
laid down, the line drawn, the years penciled in
inches. One yellow smear
of highlighter for where I am right now, a dot
in space. Where am I now? (In a half-lit corner, reading
about the death of a poet, his last conversation
with someone severe, someone in a black hat…)
Outside, a red paper lantern
wobbles in the wind.
2.
It's raining so hard inside the shed
of my heart I sometimes think the flood-
waters must rise, the creeks
overflow, my diligent spirit-boat
sink to the bottom of its lifelong wish
for buoyant days when thoughts open
into melodious blooms, into praise-poems. Yes,
it’s pouring down while I stare inside through grief's
wide eyes at a sadness, at how difficult
an afternoon can be, even in the middle
of spring, even with the dogwoods' blossoms
lighting the inner dark.
3.
I can see how the old voices might say spirit
in the leaves, as the wind catapults them
toward me—sycamore and linden, gingko
and ash; coppers, carnelians, amber jewels—
so alive in the dying!—each of us preparing
for deluge, what the TV meteorologists are calling
an “atmospheric river” headed our way.
(The magnolias are unbelievers, all green
gloss, impervious, unmoved.) A sycamore leaf
floats down before me, landing on wet asphalt
like an ancient tablet, the veins dried-up
scripts. An entire familiar world is erasing
itself before my eyes. I'm walking through
a soon-to-be tabula rasa, a vanishing
bible of leaves.
4.
The ants march in columns like good
little Nazis, carting the bodies of the dead
to some place hidden, a camp
for the poisoned or those with bitten-off heads.
They scale the walls of an iceberg
rose, and surround the glowing glassworks
at the center of the floating city. Imagine
pollen-lit factories, workers blowing molten gobs
into honey wicks, fragrant goblets; imagine
each rose standing in for every sweet
and impossibly fragile thing, as soldiers begin
to pillage the city in broad daylight.
5.
A third self popped out of my body: I’m leaving
you, it said—smiling down from above
with a bicuspid gleam.
The place on my forehead where
it had pried itself loose puckered up
like a pink anthill.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and the author Gravitational Tug (Main Street Rag, 2020), Spider Season (Cold River Press, 2016), The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press, 2008) and nine previous small press and online collections. Her work has also appeared in many anthologies, and in print and online journals at home and abroad. She is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the Northern California Book Reviewers Association and a contributing editor for Poetry Flash. She is also an exhibiting visual artist.