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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780870136856 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/30/2003 |
| Pages: | 79 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Laura Apol is Associate Professor of Education at Michigan State University. Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including a full-length collection, Falling into Grace. Her co-edited collection for young readers, Learning to Live in the World: Earth Poems by William Stafford, was the winner of a Hungry Mind Book of Distinction Award. Laura's book, Crossing the Ladder of Sun, won a 2004 Oklahoma Book Award.
Read an Excerpt
Crossing the Ladder of Sun Poems
By LAURA APOL Michigan State University Press Copyright © 2004 Michigan State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-685-6
Chapter One About Wings
Cellular Memory They say cells remember: each falling star blazes forever across the dark retina sky. They say cells remember; mine, stubborn, refuse. Your hands remind me of someone I loved but I can't recall who. I think this time I will not forget. I think it will always be as it is now, forgetting that once my childless belly was smooth, once my fingers could recite each scar on each lover's face, once I believed in God. Now I wrestle to memory: a bald eagle circling the river, bats swooping at dusk, one bright-tailed comet searing a night sky. I am learning that wings do not always mean flight; I am learning that sometimes love wakes where it has fallen asleep. And so tonight, when once more my legs twine with yours, when I feel your breath in my hair as you slip into sleep, with care I will unlock each living cell. I will fill it and whisper an urgent remember, remember. Safe: A Combination In case of fire, four things matter: who you are, what you save, where you go, what you've learned. Clear four turns left; stop at forty. Four decades of lilacs when you wanted roses. You married too young. Beneath the white veil, your hair shone the color of flame. Two turns right until fifty- five. Son, daughter, photos, a file, one trip for yourself. Emerging alone, arms empty with choice and a hunger within you like flame. Back to thirty- six. Winter dawn, moments before light and street silent. Your stride noiseless, the sun's breath a thin filament of flame. Right seventy- seven. Primary colors. In case of fire you know: touch the cardinal and it will sweep upward. Its wings, bold, are the color of flame.
From a Traveler Who Does Not Speak French With prolonged drowning, I have developed gills. W.H. AUDEN I have not yet given up breathing, but I have fallen out of love with words. Their wild resonance in my chest sounds more like a heartbeat now, less like a vowel-and-consonant-shaped voice.
I have fallen in love instead with the ravenous tones of a saxophone at dusk, the morning scent of lavender on the stairs, the almost-still skin of the river, fracturing trees with its own rippled light. I have fallen in love with days so clear you can see Corsica from each hill, with bougainvillea and laurel blossoms, smooth Bordeaux, and night swimming as thunder arrives. In silence, I feel sentences settle years after they were said; my skin dampens with Mediterranean mist even here, miles from the sea. Now the memory of vespers at Notre Dame peals, wordless, in my blood. Chopin, played in St. Julien de Pauvre, speaks once more in the language of tears. Rodin's Kiss moves from my lips and tongue into muscle and bone, where it will stay. Drowning and drowning again, I inhale mute planets. I exhale the names of hushed stars. Ocean We are the ones who are always hungry, who stand, mouths open, to catch on our tongues flakes of impossible ice; who chafe at the only word we have to describe the kaleidoscope of crystals: snow. We are the ones with books unread on the table beside the bed, with music stands ready and instruments always in tune. We look forever for our names written faint on the moon. We are the ones who give life a come-hither look. We are certain the trees part for us and the mountains remember. We plant more than we prune, wake to see islands rise from the mist. For us, there is never enough light. On the edge of the ocean we stand, looking out. "It is not so big as I had imagined," we sigh. Its insatiable tongue licks at our feet. Edge of October (Two Voices)
The cat is herself a text, Shadow a dark shape curled on your lap, writing her feline grace into your words; the low hum in her throat weaves through each successive draft. Tell yourself you were stalled in the Horse Latitudes, not a breath of wind. Only a voice telling you how happy you are happy you are happy you are on an ocean smooth as a plate, still as a cloudless sky, cerulean blue. Tell yourself you are throwing the weight overboard to lighten the load: things you have loved like poems and letters, music, your children's dreams. The wind picks up as you go. Choose a name, not of your father or lover; a name of resistance, igniting language, melding the mother tongue. Allow for the fierce taste of fire, the power of naming: cat, shadow, bittern, window, lie.
These may be the last fine days of October, its edges burned brittle-the last ripening of berries, the last haze of leaves and smoke. Resettle the cat as you create once more the woman on the far edge of these words. Tell yourself she is moving now. Tell yourself she is saying yes. Traveling Light 1 Olive drab, he says. Moss green, you think. It's your traveling dress. Five buttons, ankle-length skirt, no sleeves. Like skin, it holds memories of who, of where you've been. It brushed the grass of an Iowa farm in August, orchard ripe and pond glinting in the mid-day heat. It was soaked by Nebraska rain, dried in Kansas wind and Oklahoma sun. It walked the edges of rivers without names, lay on a bed of prairie flowers, counted stars and city lights from a wall of rocks on a hill. It saw daybreak in New Mexico, danced under a Missouri moon, wandered New Orleans after dark.
Some days it's too cold; some days it's too hot. Most days it's like breathing-easy. Just right.
2 You never unpack your bags. Never hang your skirts in the closet, find a place for your shoes on the floor. Never did until the day you arrived and he cleared a corner and invited you in. Not enough room here for you to stay, he said as if you might misunderstand and rearrange your life like the pencils you pushed aside to scatter your earrings and bracelets on the desk. Not to fear; you had one eye on the door, kept judging the distance to your waiting car. But before you showered, before he served pasta and you brought out Dutch windmill cookies, he found a hanger and separated shirts to make a narrow space in his closet. At first you refused. In the end you hung it after all- a dress the soft color of moss reaching lower than his shirts, quietly brushing against them in the dark.
3 You walk through the house a dozen times, gather up words, music, coffee for the road; you wear a new T-shirt that tells where you've been. You think you've said everything you wanted to say, but walking away, words come at you like driven snow. You think you've fit yourself into the battered Samsonite one more time, but hours later you remember the green dress still there on the closet rod. Never imagine good-byes can be tidy, their edges filed off. In the next town you phone, ask him to mail the dress.
4 Imagine he holds the moss-colored dress in his hands, buries his face in the folds of the skirt. Imagine he fingers the buttons-one tidy row of desire. Once you wore dresses over mandatory slip, hose, matched bra and panties. Now when you think of this dress smoothed from your shoulders, you see nothing but skin polished by light.
5 When the dress arrives, folded in a package tight with tape, it is still warm. He must have laid it out on the bed, must have matched the edges of the full skirt, the shoulders, the seams that run up the back. The top button is fastened-his work, not yours. For a moment you forget this is a traveling dress, forget that your bags lie open, half-packed for another trip. For a moment you wish you knew how to stay, wish someone wanted you to, wish the words folded into the olive-drab dress sounded less like good-bye. Magnolias Yesterday there were magnolias, cupped like a hand, with petals the silky scent of a kiss. Today wind caught those kisses in flight, turned them like the seasons we've known, spun them to the rim of the earth. Fierce heaven curves toward ocean waves where angels repeat your name with the tide. Somewhere sea and sky meet in a moment seamless as spring's flowering. Perhaps there you will remember me.
Night Driving When you drive too late, too long, whooping cranes rise from the blacktop night, span the front of the car, rear up sudden and out of sight. You warn me of this over dinner, your words a caution I fold into my all-night cross-country wandering. Why whooping cranes, I wonder. Why not common gulls or gold-bellied hawks? Why not road tar transformed into raven, crow, shadow-rimmed owl? Mile after mile, I keep vigil, search the headlight's glare for those wild white wings, the long curve of neck, the spindled legs. I wait their perfect appearance -the just-right word in a prayer saying stop here, my young son's hand saying stay, insistent love saying now. The twelve-hour road stretches on, each lane blank as a starless sky. The white dashed lines never falter, never rise to take flight. I am near home, eyes gritty, black coffee cold in a styrofoam cup, when at last cranes appear, breasts lit with dawn, bright-feathered grace descending. No whooping cranes, rising; these wings are your warning ushering me, safe, into day. Hanna Teaches Me about Wings Her slight hand flutters against mine- my daughter, wide-eyed in the house where wings (white, pale yellow, black-marked, blue-edged) pulse and pause and wait, breathing, breathing against the thick air. Snow melts on the glass roof as wings consider our fingers, fanned, the drift of our shoulders, slip through her live fire for some safer shade. At night, her hands work for hours to touch only the word-red crayon, yellow paper: BTRFLS. * * * The winter lover I will not marry knows my heart has wandered. I tell him it's about wings, how I fear having mine pinned. He disagrees: it's not wings, it's all the other flowers, he says. Perhaps he's right. I want them all-purple and blue, orange, yellow, red passion. * * * Life cycles: egg to hungry larva to the knitted pupa's sleep-and-wait. All week we watch at the threshold of wings, press faces to the glass box, searching for shadows unfolding. One day she hurries to tell me how they opened, one by one, and fanned air to color; how the teacher took the box outdoors and lifted the lid. Three flew away; one climbed the teacher's finger, her sleeve, perched on her shoulder, lit in her white hair- only then caught the wind and took flight. * * * A note arrives from a distant friend. She says the monarchs have come-the skies fill with them each afternoon, the trees pulse before dusk.
She wants me to see them; she is sending a gift. The gift is a box-blue as mid-day, my name on the lid. Inside, a white cotton square pillows one perfect monarch, black veined, an amber mosaic of place. She found it, already dead, mid-migration. * * * I wash the skeleton blades of her back, kneel at the side of the tub to towel her dry: head, shoulders, outline of ribs; little girl hips, thighs, winged shadow between her thin legs. She raises her feet-first one, then the other, steadies herself on my shoulder, the top of my head. My skin is alive where she touches, achingly cool when her fingers let go. * * * Under the maple-a scatter of hand-shapes the October color of wings. As I watch from the window a breeze swirls them, wild, into flight. River of Then and Now
If you tell me the river is here I will ask you which river. Not its name; I ask you which river? D. GERBER
You say there is one river, and we crossed it. I say every river is two: the river it was, and the river it is becoming. Just as every silence is the silence it is, and the silence it will be. We navigate the past on aching wings, Orion mute in the sky, winter moon lined with the faces we've known and will never see again.
Is there one river or two? I only know this: there is the garden the garden is growing into, there is the tree the tree is dying toward. And every long silence has a river in it- a river that moves on.
The Whole World Between Us
In New York City, 1979 Joe Favata, you were the Italian boy with the beautiful name I met outside the cathedral of St. John the Divine on a windy day half a lifetime ago. The stories you told were magic because they were not mine, your Queens childhood far from my open Iowa fields. You were the mystery of that whole city in one afternoon; I fell in love with your world, bright as a red-checked curtain in a dark paneled room. I never told anyone whose name was written on that matchbook cover, the one I carried in my pocket through more than a decade of flights back, the one I didn't phone. March afternoons the wind still carries your voice. Your amaretto kisses, far from home, are still the sweetest thing I've known. Next Time The children are asleep in the back seat, their breathing steady and deep as the wing strokes of the great owl calling to them in their dreams. Near the rim of the east, the moon is lifting; driving into it I rise on words we have not spoken- words carried on the sweet scent of apples, ripening in the orchard to the hum of bees. Once again you have taken me in. And I have drawn sad thank-yous from my bag: a book I have already wandered; instant coffee the color of dust; a half-empty jar of sweet peppers. Next time we will begin mid-sentence, before you open the door, or I turn off the car. And I will remember lilacs, dark purple, and I will not forget to ask the meaning of your name, as if you were a cave that would spring open. Such treasures, the stories you hold. In the dark, driving into the moon, they sing to me without words. Hanna Teaches Me about Distance Think of love-how it stretches: you under hot Texas sun, me seeing Asia's thick moon and stars, exactly the whole world between us. Even the telephone wires crackle; I hear only half of what you say. I have never been so far from you, daughter. The equator pulls taut, a long umbilical; anywhere I go from here, I am closer to you.
Pilgrimage into Your Past I know I will make it someday, whether I tell you or not. What could you say that would make me change my mind? I will park on the edge of the town I've never seen (though in my mind it is always asleep) and walk along Fourth Street with measured steps. It will be autumn; the familiar trees will blaze, and I will name each one. I will find your mother; she will feed me tart applesauce and pie with perfect peaks of meringue. Later she'll show me the coal furnace, the hall where you slept on hot nights, photos I've seen. Right field, home plate, late-afternoon end zone-I'll learn them with my hands and lungs, as if learning a place is the same as learning you. If her eyes are yours and I look into them, perhaps I will understand more than I do now. If she sings-even one line-perhaps I will know the words. And if she pauses to bless me as I go, perhaps then the road will rise to meet me, and God at last will hold me in the palm of her hand. Why I Cannot Tell the Story The story is too long. Each day it goes out, returns hungry as geese in a winter field. You will never understand. The story is not a map. Polaris steadies the night sky; no other light guides sailors across the sea. In the story no one smiles. No lesson is learned. The narrator cannot change anyone's heart. The story is a gate to another story, which opens onto a story after that. I made it up, but the story is true. So ask me instead about the Northern Lights. Ask me the names of the islands, the years of the pine in the yard. Ask for a story with heroes-a story that begins Long ago, in a far-away land. I will turn my words over like a stone, like a shell, like a blossom held until the red petals fall. You are far away tonight. This is not a story that will keep.
The Switch Someone loves the man who comes to my house to lay wire. Someone loves the man who pours the concrete, the one who tears up the shingles, the one who puts in the studs. Someone loves the man who unrolls the carpet. I know, because once I kissed your smooth cheek in the morning and watched you dress-denim shirt, jeans, work boots, and a belt heavy with tools. After you were gone I made coffee, made the bed, made myself think of something-anything- besides the heights where you worked, the hot wires your fingers touched and how I loved those fingers, the thick palms, the white crescents of your nails. One day you threw a switch that almost killed you: sparks, fire, burns that covered your hands and face. It was before we met, but I saved the story, took it out in the morning after you'd gone, recited it like a rosary. I knew I could love you into safety, pray your world right, smooth your life like a bead between my fingers. This morning I say the story again and wonder where you are, which wires you are touching. Wonder who watches you dress, who prays over your scars. And wonder as I pour another cup of coffee just who loves the man snaking wire from my attic to the basement. I wonder who is praying for him as, right now, he is throwing the switch.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crossing the Ladder of Sun by LAURA APOL Copyright © 2004 by Michigan State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
| About Wings | ||
| Cellular Memory | 3 | |
| Safe: A Combination | 4 | |
| From a Traveler Who Does Not Speak French | 5 | |
| Ocean | 6 | |
| Edge of October (Two Voices) | 7 | |
| Traveling Light | 8 | |
| Magnolias | 11 | |
| Night Driving | 12 | |
| Hanna Teaches Me about Wings | 13 | |
| River of Then and Now | 16 | |
| The Whole World Between Us | ||
| In New York City, 1979 | 19 | |
| Next Time | 20 | |
| Hanna Teaches Me about Distance | 21 | |
| Pilgrimage into Your Past | 22 | |
| Why I Cannot Tell the Story | 23 | |
| The Switch | 24 | |
| Oklahoma Drought | 25 | |
| A Map to the Wilderness | 26 | |
| Not Only on the Island | 28 | |
| Mid-Flight | ||
| Nothing Begins with Us | 33 | |
| Hanna Teaches Me about Writing | 34 | |
| Two A.M. | 35 | |
| Stretch Marks | 36 | |
| Woman of Light | 37 | |
| Father Reading | 38 | |
| Meteors, Late Summer, 1993 | 40 | |
| Ending a Marriage: Six Lessons | 41 | |
| The Grass is on Fire | ||
| Waiting for Grief | 49 | |
| Synchronicity | 50 | |
| Miscarriage | 51 | |
| A Talk about Trees | 52 | |
| Scars | 53 | |
| Anorexia | 54 | |
| Learning to Dance | 55 | |
| Canon | 57 | |
| Chicago | 58 | |
| Hanna Teaches Me about Daddy-Long-Legs | 59 | |
| Twin Sister, Stillborn | 60 | |
| Crossing the Ladder of Sun | ||
| One Night | 65 | |
| Umbilical | 66 | |
| Remembering Eden | 67 | |
| Blueberries | 68 | |
| Late Winter | 69 | |
| Pedernal | 70 | |
| Learning What Is Enough | 72 | |
| The Way We Fit Ourselves to It | 74 | |
| see me beautiful | 76 | |
| Happiest Day | 77 | |
| Hanna Teaches Me about Monkey Bars | 79 | |
| Acknowledgments | 80 |