selected poems

Selected Poems

I and the Village Marc Chagall

The Leaf Warbler

inspired by Marc Chagall's I and the Village

In the middle of a morning we leave each other

holding only a bouquet of words.

Isn’t every nest temporary?

In the middle of our lives, we lose parents,

surrender the tall trees of our children,

walk away from houses, villages, jobs—

like the dog that becomes faithful to the goat,

we choose the wrong people. Who is born holy?

A man with arms stained the deep jade of a leaf warbler

strums a stranger’s body like a harp.

His fingers travel over her skin. He apologizes

to heaven on a cross around his neck. We can’t

unwrite our histories; we will hurt, and we will heal—

our nests, bowls of moonlight, the years will undo.

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At Edward Hopper’s Self-Portrait

My father wore that same fedora—brown felt,
wide brim—forty-five years ago when he would
navigate his Plymouth through the tangled braid
of L.A. traffic, peddling life insurance to people
dead now. Every December he’d send his clients
Christmas cards with Audubon calendars inside,
color plates of indigo buntings pecking at worms,
white-crowned pigeons nesting in strangler figs.
At eighty-five my father is stooped—a slow, gray
emperor penguin. This visit he is hoping to sight
a cardinal. We stand together scanning the winter
landscape. Like a Hopper painting—bare maples
against a watercolor sky, our backs to the viewer
—two small figures in the stillness. Not one bird.
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Autumn Aubade

There is another world, but it is in this one.

—Paul Eluard

A sparrow mistakes my window for sky, shattering glass
feathers and blood—death builds its house wherever it wants.

Mystics believe sorrow takes seven years to reach the soul
—our histories enter us while we crack an egg into a skillet

or stand on our porch watching leaves disappear inside
the rusty bed of a truck. Our work is to record the flawed

world—I wanted to save this night, our mouths moving
like moth wings, dusting one another’s shoulders, bellies

and thighs, but daylight stole the foreign and familiar lines
we mapped on each other’s skin late in the animal dark.

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Lament of a Bare Branch

Dedicated to the bare branches: young men in Asia and India

who will never marry or become fathers because of the ongoing

genocide of women in those cultures

On my way home, I will not steal a red pear for my wife

I will not place a ring of kisses on the throat of my wife.

She will not pour my ginger tea or stir steaming noodles

I will not watch her watch clouds dress the moon, my wife.

In our bath, she will not wash my head, chest or ankles

I will not softly trace the gentle hills of her spine, my wife.

I will not gather our babies like fat bushels of sweet grain

She will not lift their hungry mouths to her breast, my wife.

At the stream, I will not draw herons beside our children

She will not find crickets hidden in their hands, my wife.

Like a branch in wet snowfall, I will not bow in sorrow

When she leaves this world, I will not bow for my wife.

I will curl around myself in sleep, as wolves do in winter

I will not tell the dragon stories of my dreams to my wife.

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Wintering

Earth’s electricity pulses in their bones,

their bodies are fat with knowing.

At dusk they sing and pace—

their slick feathers clock wind,

terrified and impatient to fly.

Sometimes they misread

the sun’s compass,

the cluttered roadmap of stars,

and land in hostile territory,

or never arrive at all.

Predators anticipate the tired, the slow,

and men make sport of wintering flocks.

The birds face every cruel weather,

waters or deserts too wide to cross,

sharp mountains, wind funnels—

a hundred ways to fall.

Those who survive the journey

struggle across borders,

a cacophony of weary voices,

a sloppy choir of beating wings—

their wide flyways etch the foreign sky

like dark rivers where so many drown.

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Definitions of Grace

The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that

it was made by someone capable of believing an angel might

come and sit on it.

—Thomas Merton

Morning travels slowly as a train, south

out of Los Angeles, passing the Wai Sang Meat Company,

where women in hairnets wash their hands at 7a.m.

speaking Mandarin and Cantonese.

We commit to this morning, like oysters in their shells,

resigned to the scratch of sand, the coarse

borders of the world,

because we want this day. We want the trouble

of thousands of tomorrows, the promise

of rooms being built.

Like a caterpillar,

black and spiny, dangling from a Chinese elm leaf,

neither of us knows

we are waiting for wings.

I never learned the definition of grace.

Perhaps it is only beauty, the favor of God

or an angel sitting on a chair.

Perhaps grace is the percentage of an ounce

the body loses after death, a statistic so convincing

to those who already believe. We skeptics know

it is only the final breath exhaling,

rising, rising up to follow

one last imperfect prayer.

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Her Face, Crimson Petals

—for Du’a Khalil Aswad

a 17-year-old Iraqi Kurd girl

stoned to death in an honor killing

for her relationship with a Sunni Muslim boy

Afterward

an uncle gathers her in his arms

like kindling—

the body takes so long to surrender,

a palm tree straining its skinny roots

for the chance to stand.

Once she watched her boyfriend

nurse a wounded parakeet—

he fed the small green bird

grapes and sunflower seeds

until it flew from the sill.

What is honor?

A father teaches his son

to skip stones on a lake—

across the gray water

they watch the smooth pebbles

splash and leap.

There are no bad stones,

only the world reborn in us

each morning—

the question of rain or no rain.

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France Etude

All across Normandy I study the sex of the statues—

women with their two mouths—their insatiable hunger,

their endless mosaic of words; men with their two heads

—to think of themselves twice? A fool, I question God

even as he holds me up, even as he tosses me back—

my life brief as a mackerel’s. Outside the cathedral

a mourning dove performs its hollow music of wind,

barleycorn, and sorrow. The rain comes again, tentative

as a girl’s voice—you are here now, you are here. There

are doors you close only once, the way the world disappears

one artist at a time—a lace-maker of Alençon stitching

by window light, delicate snowflakes gathering in her lap.

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The Cries of One Crow

The cries of one crow can destroy a morning—

somewhere in the world there is always a war.

At Arlington National Cemetery the headstones

rise like white birch stumps in a ruined forest,

armed guards protect the Unknown Soldier,

though what human does not go unknown?

In the National Liberation Museum in Groesbeek,

a Dutch sculptor carves clay soldiers climbing

from their graves, smiling figures offer each other

a hand. Cutting down a tree will not kill its roots.

One crow can torment an entire neighborhood—

whose childhood is not scrabbled in violence,

each plastic grenade an education in war?

The tally of the dead rises like snowmelt in a river,

I cannot unwrite their stories, unbury their graves.

I can only hug the tall tree of my daughter, and

imagine the parents who wait for a soldier who will

never come home. Somewhere in the world

a forest recovers, a stump is sprouting new growth—

give one child a branch, he creates a weapon

give another child a branch, he raises his hands

to conduct a symphony only he will hear.

Note: The sculpture at the National Liberation Museum in Groesbeek, the Netherlands,

is by a Dutch woman, Fransje Povel-Speleers, and is called Resurrection

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All poems by Valentina Gnup