Margo Stever

Weaning

A sodden act, this wrenching apart.
The bald cicada remembers us
trying to adjust.
Milk fills an empty space.
The infant's gone on, gone on.

Children rustle in their beds,
dried leaves, their bodies
crumble against covers.
The rocking horses are wooden
with sleep, soot
where their dusty eyes should be.

Train whistle, noise of daybreak,
weed-grown reminder of whistles
back, trains back,
corridors of trains, dreaming back
So little lasts.
Could a man or woman live
10,000 days or years, my son asks?

How hard could a car hit a house?
Across the road a man is raking leaves.
This is the way it will always be.
He holds a gold-pronged rake.

Fir fragments, filaments, nest builders--
the leaves are disconnected
from the trees, plugs pulled out,
bare space.

A Little Bit Morning

If he could get out of bed again
and enter their room and tell them
that it is morning, he could forget
about drowning, about losing himself.
Getting to the door before invaders,
before moonlight, the specter,
he was racing for it,
from his bed to the door, a chasm.

The child comes in the middle
of the night to his parents' door,
his agile body prying open,
prying into their sleep.
The corpse of a headless monster
bleeds on his bed.
He hopes to be rid of it.
"It's a little bit morning,"
he announces so tentatively,

his bare feet cold on the bare floor.
The door to their room is wide
like the ocean and just as cold.
He swings it back and forth
making hinges squeak.
He is afraid of what they will say.
They will tell him it is not morning
and he will have to go back
to his room and the empty bed,

the empty bed with the corpse.
More than anything, he wants
to sleep next to his parents, press
their warm skin against his,
measure the rhythm of their breath.
If he could wedge himself in bed
between them, he could forget his dreams,
that he will dream again,
the noise will start, the shrill
pitch of invaders enter him.
He will drown, the water rising
above his bed. The water creeps up,
colder than the ocean, colder
than the door to his parents' room,
whiter than his parents' door
in front of his face.

The boy's heels press down and down.
His heels have made an impression.
He refuses to go back to bed.
He will stay here in the doorway
bent by refracted moonlight.
He will neither enter nor return.
He will not leave or be quiet.
He will stay here as he is at this moment
in the doorway, waiting.

On the Possession of Horses

Their heads hunker forward when they canter
as if only one direction were possible
and they don't understand fire.
They gallop back to a burning barn.

Nothing about horses compels me now,
though once I wanted to be one.
What do horses have to do with love,
the quivering limbs of their bodies,
their hearts chiseled from stone,
and riders cling to them
as if just this holding on,
this staying on, could be everything?

Once an entire village banned horses.
You couldn't blame them after all the trouble.
One minute normal, and the next
the children were possessed,
leaving their comfortable beds at night,
cavorting with horses from all around
under the laden apple trees.
No one knows how they planned it.
They rode horses by moonlight,
bareback and bare-assed
even in thunderstorms.

When horses trot and canter,
their hooves clatter, their bones
chime like funeral bells, like clappers.
They ring against the earth, their heavy
hooves beat against the earth.

Bringing a Father Back

Nothing can bring back the dead,
not the dream-- the relentless
father returning from the far field,
past wooden villages, the women
in flowered aprons who lift offerings
from hot ovens, the men who
carry home dandelions for wine.

Perhaps he notices what is new
or everything he forgot,
the way the Penobscot swells
after the seventh storm, how
the Monarch fans a zigzag path
or the ants. They tend their fungi
underground, bringing down the leaves
to mulch and fertilize their crops.
From meadow to rock beach
split by an obdurate moon,
footsteps knock against granite steps.
His movements staccato, he tries to talk.

Lines of the night fisherman
carve through dark waters, let
the bluefish blood, and the waves
suck the beating from the gills.
Not dead, no longer truly living,
the hushed mouth opens and shuts,
each tooth shining, a separate star.

Conversation with Bertolt Brecht

Solely because of the increasing disorder
in our cities of class struggle,
some of us have now decided
to speak no more of cities by the sea, snow on roofs, women...
As if the Chilean songs of revolution
would bring back the gray fishing boats
sailing through frail, deepening waters
at dawn and the seagulls making earthly sounds.
As if these songs could restore the balance,
the driven leaf, nail old
and rusted, shoved through the bent bough.

Each step through mirrors brings us
back to the pitch of sleeplessness,
the unstrung dream, an oil slick
on an ocean still and black.
As if all the songs of revolution
could bring the murmuring tree back,
could restore wind to the rigging,
full sail to the morning light.

How many years, messages, wars,
strange incidences, ironies?
The wary eye of the mother
wanted to protect her child,
promise more, cities near the sea,
clear waters, full sail,
the morning light.

Frozen Spring

Once, long before swallows
ever thought to live in barns,
before crickets chirped on hearths,
was a field of glacial flowers, their bright faces
caught forever like little bog men,
but the pond water, clear,
totally clear, pristine, not
murky like the bog, and their
dear flower faces shone mercilessly,
day and night.

People were born curled over
like seedlings, frail figures bent,
flower-shaped, bowed over as if
the constant weight of something large
cupped them, until they, too,
looked frigid like the flowers.

How determined flowers can be,
their faces fixed like porcelain,
like little mourning things, encapsulated
forever in the frozen spring.