Poems by Mary Ann Larkin

WHAT SHE LOVED

        i.m. Rachel Carson

The ocean’s long snow of seed
and sediment, shell and skeleton—
limy and silicious—
the flecks of husk and weed,
castoffs of mountain drivel,
river ooze. The sea’s purchase,
its constancy. The calm and unrelenting
diminution of matter:
the diatom’s unseen shells,
what the floods took and released,
skimmings of desert winds,
tooth of whale and the bone’s shearings,
the glacier’s blue bounty
lost in the hair of clouds,
all endlessly arriving.

Nothing refused
of these fragile chroniclers:
silt and melt and meteors,
the irresistible flakes
of the soft radiolarians,
the whispery mollusks
once plump with light.
These possessed her,
not the sea’s high billows, the crest,
the depths where color’s lost,
the trough that toys with ship and gull.
Not these, but what was worn
and unwanted—earth’s detritus,
the sea’s snow, flake by flake
falling through a watery patience
salvaging time’s story.

MY LIFE’S A SPECK ON A HORIZON
I CAN’T GET TO

My life didn’t want
lists and parties and houses.
It was greedy for a rhythm
like the drum of a pulsing heart,
or maybe a silence,
the one the stars poke through.
My life begged me to live it,
not to be sad and worn, but juicy
like a red-headed girl turned thirteen
whose silhouette bounces
on a drawn green shade.
What my life wanted danced that way,
not frightened and skittery,
not worried about pills and money.
So I don’t blame my life for going.
I want everyone to know that.       
I would’ve gone too
if my mother hadn’t taught me
to finish my dusting first,
and if everyone’s hearts
didn’t forever need mending,
and if I weren’t scared
that when I got there
my life might be only an echo
I’d once heard.

IMMIGRANT DAUGHTER’S SONG

All gone--
the silver-green silk of time
winding down centuries
of custom and kinship,
the pouring of the sea,
the stars, bright pictures
on the slate of night,
the moon stamping forever
the spire of the church
on the sand,
bird-song, wind-song, mother-song.
Even time itself changed
to a ticking, a dot on a line.

Customs of grace
and gentleness gone
name-saying
and knowing
who begat whom
and when and where
and who could work
and who could sing
and who would pray
and who would not
and where the fish ran
and the wild plums hid
and how the old mothers
fit babies’ hands
to the five-flowered hollows
of blue ladyfingers,
and whose father fought whose
with golden swords
a thousand years ago
at Ballyferriter
on the strand below the church.

All gone--
changed from a silken spool unwinding
to rooms of relics and loss
behind whose locked doors
I dream
not daring to wake.

DEATH OF A FRIEND

Toward the end we talked fast
as though the brown shirts
were rushing at the door,
but I always went away thinking
I was forgetting to tell you
the most important thing.

We were never big on talking anyway.
Mostly we looked
at waves and morning skies
and wallpaper books
at light and mist and paintings.
And we walked. We walked
in the sun and the rain,
on beaches, in woods, over the twine fields.
And we breathed
with the water and the dunes and the trees
marching along, looking and looking.
And the only thing you ever did wrong
was bring sand into the bedrooms.
And the only thing I ever did wrong
was that once someone gave me a Waldorf cake
and I couldn’t remember what it looked like.
You’d sigh and wonder about the cake
while I’d sweep sand down the stairs.
And I made my poems
and you painted your waterlilies,
and all this went on for years,
which is why, at the end,
I could never remember
what was most important to say.

So I’d put ice on your arm
and you’d tell me I’m so blessed
and we’d doze, and finally,
in the mustard-green silence
of a July afternoon
they came and took you.

DEATH AND THE OCEAN

Walking at Head of the Meadow,
l try to wrap my mind
around the water
like Thoreau did,
and when I can’t--
I get that exact defeated feeling
I got with your death:
Death and the ocean give no quarter,
yet they’re beautiful.
Easy enough to see
in those seal-back swells
wheeling to marbled swirls,
but your dying, too, had beauty,
no matter the mess
and the pain and the smell.
Even though you were scared
and had no use for death--
slinking somewhere between the daylilies
and the picture of Jesus
the church lady pinned to your wall--
you still never said why me or
tried to bargain or got angry.
You stood straight up to death
the way a wave stands up,
transparent
and, really, loveliest then,
before it falls.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

           Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors and publishers of the following publications in which the above poems first appeared, some of them in a slightly different form:

Fathers and Children, and Ireland in Poetry, Harry N. Abrams; and The Irish, Hugh Lauter Levin Associates; and The Irish Americans, McDougal Littell, a Houghton Mifflin Company: “Immigrant Daughter’s Song”

New Letters and Voices of Cleveland, Cleveland State University Poetry Center: “Certain Things”

Poetry Greece: “Death of a Friend”

from That Deep & Steady Hum,

     Broadkill River Press, 2010

THOSE DESERT AFTERNOONS

The heat exhaling
a breath just short of burning,
as though across the dusty porch
some somnolent beast padded,
myself half-awake on the plump pillows
of that sheet-draped couch.
The baby asleep inside,
bat-mouthed, bird-boned.
The sun high, almost hidden.
A copper haze. And the stillness.
Only shadows moved.

Evenings, we breathed deeply again.
I showered, sweat-damp
as though from love. The baby
tottered around. The sun
arced away. Coolness coming
as though the rumored beast
had at last inhaled us
into spongy lungs and slept.

All this happened long ago.
I was alone on the porch,
the baby asleep inside.
I can’t tell you how it was,
but I gave myself
to those desert afternoons
the same way the baby,
knowing nothing of denial,
fell upon the breast—
with just that amount of birthright
and greed.

LETTERS TO CLINT EASTWOOD

        I don’t think he cares now
        how people see him.
                                       Meryl Streep

                 i
You pan through our lives
like a miner searching for gold,
stirring up the meanness,
the stench and the fear,
sifting down to layers
long buried.
Sick to death of waste,
you pick from the muck,
love, muddied and abandoned,
to show us, how it falls like light,
unafraid of our violence,
our timidity, our hate.
Look! you say, love glitters.

                    ii
Pelted by the rain, you stand
in that time-forgotten Iowa town,
your halo of hair now lank and streaming,
your self erased
down to agony’s ancient face,
and you really don’t care
because, at last, something is important.
You, all those years groped toward that face,
peeling back layers of custom
and rectitude, even of beauty,
tunneling toward some absolute
you wanted badly, the way
you want those crosses in your movies.
You tuck them away in tattoos,
on rear view mirrors, and chapel walls
backlighting unlikely martyrs,
hide them where only
someone who needs them as much
will find them: love going one way,
agony the other, the crux
where they always meet,
where, whoever crosses there,
must let fall
whatever he has to hide.

from gods & flesh,

      Plan B Press, 2007

BODIES

      All my members felt His in full felicity.
      I wholly melted away in Him.
                            Hadewijch of Brabant

Even the solitary mystics—
it was their bodies God came to.
Love knows no abstractions.
It licks and sucks,
wounds and devours.
Even the infant stiff with desire,
tensing and mewling, roots
in tumescent flesh, hungry
as the mystics
for bliss,
that pure white milk.



THINGS

All things wait,
humble and profound,
in the stillness of matter,
in the lushness
of their being.
Their patience
old as starlight
huddled and pooled, content
in what they are:
wood forever thirsty,
spade and spoon
and your grandfather’s quilt—
their dents and scratches and tears.
All contained in a long solitude,
in the mute eloquence of themselves.
Unknowable, no matter
the dark boulder
of our desire, no matter
the blue-milk light
of their yearning.

from A Shimmering

       That Goes With Us,    

                  Finishing Line Press, 2005

HOW TALK CAN MOVE LIKE WATER

We talk all day in bed,
talk like music or water.
June already,
a blowsy kind of Cleveland day,
air full of love.
Death skulks around
and we let it be,
like your tawny cat
rippling in and out
of the tree-filled window.

Not grand talk,
rolling like an ocean swell,
more like creek water,
transparent,
taking small sweet turns
we might miss
if not listening hard,
which comes easy
as the past glides away
and no future drifts toward us
while we talk all day in bed
a month before you die.

CERTAIN THINGS

The worst of it is
I’ll never be able to tell you
certain things. For example,
about Dorothy painting
her bedroom furniture peach
and all those years
we drove so near her house
but never stopped.
We were wild to get to the ocean.

And Yeats had a brother
whose watercolors
have the same break-your-heart music
as Yeats’ poetry,
and Charles, knowing this,
began the Irish book
with a watercolor the brother did
of Innisfree.
It tells everything about Ireland
down to its tenuousness.
You know, that wavery feeling
made of water and light.

And in the Sunday paper, a photo
of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward
as a Midwestern middle-aged couple,
maybe in the late 20’s,
right before the Depression.
It was fall.
She had an airborne quality to her,
one hand up to the brim of her felt hat.
He stood planted like a tree,
thumbs hooked in his vest pockets,
a gold watch chain glittering between.
But what I wanted to tell you
was about the way she held her hand
in the crook of his arm, the way
it lightly rested there,
the way her hand became a part of him,
his arm a part of her.

This morning on the white sunporch
the light was so brilliant
when I awoke
that for just a second
I floated weightless,
remembered your saying
a few days before you died:
We each have a shimmering
that goes with us.