Splitting Wood
It was the thought of his entering
their infant's room that drove her.She remembered his face the first time
she saw him. Now, half gone from whiskey,
eyes hooded like a hawk’s,
he said he’d kill the children when he woke.The neighbors heard it,
the screams. They heard.His workman’s hand,
his gnarled hand dangled down.
The knife lay by the bed.
She slipped from the covers
while he slept, placed her feet
on the floorboards just so.The dogs barked outside, snapdragons,
flowered tongues, and all the wired
faces of the past strung up. The ax
hung on the porch, woodpile nearby,
each log plotted, uneasily entwined.
The children’s tears were rain,
tears were watering the parched hills.The wild moon foamed at the mouth.
The wild moon crept softly at her feet.The arms that grabbed the ax
were not her own,
that hugged it to her heart
while he slept were not hers,
the cold blade sinking in his skin.
She grew up in the country splitting wood.
She knew just how much it took
to bring a limb down.✥ ✥ ✥
Why So Many Poets Come from Ohio
Some say El Niño blows them
over the Rockies and poets pool
like guppies
grounded by the plains, hollowed into Ohio.How easy it is to forget the nameless
places along the scant,
unremarkable rivers, the burning
polluted creeks. Even horsespull themselves back from the earth
to ignore where they were born.
Why poets come from Ohio explains
why shopping malls are built to lastonly decades, why deer end up dead on I-80.
Poets come from Ohio because
of the homelessness of the hills,
how they are low and rounded,as if long ago glaciers ran out of energy
on the alluvial plain, leaving them
unstated, looking westward for relief.
Poets who wish to intonecome from Ohio because nothing happens,
only the sonorous gestation of their interiors.
They search the soured hills for daffodils, for tulips,
for everything they thought once grew there.✥ ✥ ✥
The Hudson Line
The river stretches out
like a line of flight, a pattern
winging toward God.
The river sucks
oars down; it pulls
toward depth, toward
study of the under-soul.
The river is constant.The frozen forgotten earth
no longer speaks a language.
The dogs next door bark
at the clicking heels of the woman
who makes her way to the station.Passengers stare at me on the train
at Spuyten Duyvil—their metallic drift
of perfumes, their attempts
to read as I write this line.The river just stretches
with the Tappan Zee Bridge
into the green haze. No
river can deny the existence
of God, nor can trains travel
backward with people
shouting blindly out of windows.
This is a little train of reason.People cough on trains;
something sticks like silkworms
to the backs of their throats,
and we who do not yet have coughs
have no time for mercy.
This is a train of thieves, all of us
who never cared for our jobs or our mothers,who looked out over the Hudson
and saw only water.Poems by Margo Taft Stever