Read an Excerpt
Window Left Open
Poems
By Jennifer Grotz GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Jennifer Grotz
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-730-6
CHAPTER 1
The Forest
During the day I have watched them stand around and chew the yellow grass,
the longsuffering cows. Sometimes steam comes from their nostrils.
I have also visited them at night, seen an entire herd standing
in the rain, as unreacting as the trees behind them
when the jitter of flashlight warned of my approach.
Those were the cows in the field by the forest, and those
were the days when going outside felt like going inside.
There was the sound of a woodpecker pecking, and that was a kind of
knocking. And the sound of the pine trees creaking, and that was
a kind of door. And so you could enter the forest,
and although each moment you trespassed further
became more tense, it only lasted until you could no longer see the road.
Then you would be inside, on a kind of unending
staircase of roots worn silver like the soldered iron
that holds stained glass together. From a distance, it would be
mountains, but up close, under the arrows, spears, and ropes of trees,
it was a forest floor, palatial leaf-meal mosaics on the ground.
There was a little carpet of stream so clogged with leaves
it had stopped being a stream. And such a surfeit of silence,
it had become a kind of sound
to which, for a while, you could pay attention. Though
it's inaccurate, I want to say it was like staring at a light.
All you could do was sense it; then you had to recover,
by which I mean to wait for everything to grow dim again.
Then the mind was the only flashlight,
a little bobbing beam that would illuminate
randomly and too little.
Locked
And yes it is necessary to admit
walking in the forest
the heart is a lock
it has inviolable chambers
like the woods fallen trees
that block
access to the river
snowdrops surprising its edges
moss crystalline with frost
What I thought I wanted what I have tried to be
was the slender instrument that opened
a key presence moving deeper into the forest
that releases the birds from the trees
and sends them ascends them
to sky by definition
open
but now there is nothing left to be solved like a riddle
this time the lock must be broken
what's left has to be seized
because God only loves the strong thief
I mean the man who breaks his heart for God
The Snow Apples
All fall their dropping was so insistent and
simultaneous on different branches it made
a syncopation. Now the end of February
and the snow apples that still hang
on otherwise bare branches,
why won't they let go?
There's a stinging
sensation of cold on the skin, a singling
realization, a stuttering that outs itself, has it out
with itself oh Lord I'll make a broken music or I'll die ...
Dulled, shrunken, nicked by wind-flung branches,
squirrel-pawed and beak-pierced, infested
macabre baubles hanging they are, it is —
a hard knot
deep in the core, something winter
winnows me down to. An uneasy seizing
that relaxes in the presence of sky.
The ones that fell have piled beneath the earth's pelt of snow —
the flesh inside them once white and wet as snow —
inedible and sad as the stones
on the lakeshore, pink or gray sandstone,
granite, rusted iron, eroded talc-smooth and uniform regardless —
Something gulped, indigestible —
something sad as the stones.
Snow
Rising as much as falling more mesmerizing than fire
when it lands it seems like dying because
when it's falling it's still alive
settling democratically on stone shoulders
underarms of branches but it sinks into absorbent moss
itself a kind of snow a saturated carpet so green
the eyes feast on it green
illuminating its own intricacy
miniature blades fronds needles bushy clumps
* * *
I don't understand growing up in the desert
how we ever kept time the wind let nothing accrue only the sun
gave us a psychedelic dust-infused nightly blaze
I never saw moss rarely saw rust jewel-colored cousins
moss grew on trees and there were no trees but rust
I looked for on metal that was everywhere gleaming
you could drive by whole fleets of cars and planes
parked in the desert to protect them from
the rust I longed to see the orange and purple
nowhere near all the oval windows with
no face waving goodbye the title of every day
of my childhood wandering would be
Landscape with No Human Figure in It since I myself was
the hungry lens but I don't mean to say still life
nature morte as the French call it there was life
* * *
in its tiny throes smaller even than mine lizards fire ants
snakes and groundhogs that lived underground
but I never saw snow didn't see rust only saw green imitations
of moss hot-glue-gunned on mother's cuckoo clock
or fuzzy-textured spray paint on a figurine but now
I know how moss floats treacherously
like a toupee covering a scalp of thick
mud my boots set into a slow motion of choppy waves
it's snowing hard now covering the moss
covering the mud there's a frenzied and
wavering synchronicity of flakes darting like fish
but snow differs it gets to swim in the sky
* * *
before it settles on surfaces and
I am lucky to have a desk by a window in winter
where falling snow entertains the mind the mind entering
the depths the layers the flakes I see in the distance a uniform haze
making the bare branches of trees more gray than brown
in the middle ground a zone of falling impossible
to absorb like a crowd interrupted
by zigzagging showoffs renegade flakes that zoom
surprisingly diagonally in front the true protagonists
of snow all three of these layered one in front of the other
like screens in a play a play about slowing time down to
something palpable or a song about what time does to man
less ominous later in the afternoon sun
when a dripping icicle keeps time like a metronome it's only
meaningless only harmless when nothing sticks to the ground
Snowflakes
Yesterday they were denticulate as dandelion greens, they
locked together in spokes and fell so weightlessly
I thought of best friends holding hands.
And then of mating hawks that soar into the air to link their claws
and somersault down, separating just before they touch the ground.
Sometimes the snowflakes glitter, it's more like tinkling
than snow, it never strikes, and I want to be struck, that is
I want to know what to do. I begin enthusiastically,
I go in a hurry, I fall pell-mell down a hill, like a ball of yarn's
unraveling trajectory — down and away but also surprising ricochets
that only after seem foretold. Yesterday I took a walk because
I wanted to be struck, and what happened was
an accident: a downy clump floated precisely in my eye.
The lashes clutched it close, melting it against the eye's hot surface.
And like the woman talking to herself in an empty church
eventually realizes she is praying, I walked home with eyes that melted snow.
On the Library Steps
The way the lips siphoned a stream into my lungs
and the body ever-so-subtly convulsed
in what was never actually pleasure but involuntary relief,
a shudder as poison moved steadily into the bloodstream,
so strong that the body mindlessly did it again, or the mind
bodilessly willed it again, then again, until the actual sensation
of smoking couldn't really be felt, and gray-brown clouds
filled the winter rooms, soaked into our coats and dresses.
That is what I remember this morning when I see
the leftover tobacco crumbles students stomped out
on the library steps, the abbreviated butts
excreting urine-colored stains into the snow,
the paper linings of filters all unglued,
pale and wet like raw calamari, and I suppose
there is a Buddhist click of recognition:
what I had desired had turned undesirable, yes,
and this ugly mess did not represent my sadness,
it only illustrated how catatonic it had become,
the mind numbly staring at it, and the convex globs
of spit nearby, not the sky, not the snow, gone
the reflex of shirking back. Don't do it, just write it down,
is what I had decided, but that just kept it lyric,
how I didn't want to live.
No attempt
in the poem for transcendence.
Just to lock up something wild.
Because a poem could still be good for
suffering. Choosing precisely how to.
The Whole World Is Gone
Driving alone at night, the world's pitch, black velvet
stapled occasionally by red taillights
on the opposite highway but otherwise mild
panic when the eyes' habitual check
produces nothing at all in the rearview mirror,
a black blank, now nothing exists
but the dotted white lines of the road,
and the car scissors the blackness open
like the mind's path through confusion,
but still no clarity, no arrival, only Pennsylvania darkness,
rocks, cliffs, vistas by day that thicken to black. It's
sensual, though, too, and interestingly mental. What
I do alone, loving him in my mind. Trying not to
let imagination win over reality. Hurtling through the night,
a passion so spent becomes a fact one observes. Not tempered,
just momentarily out of view by the body that perceives it.
So that if it desires, the mind can practice a prayer,
the one whose words begin: Deprive me.
Denial
Like a giant illuminated book, but with gold dust
hovering just above the pages, the glass cases house
butterfly wings, furred mummies of butterfly bodies,
butterfly antennae, and also moths,
humbler ones that look like they'd been found
in a junior high school, covered in dust
from the janitor's broom and smudges from
the math teacher's uncooperative piece of chalk.
In a room full of dead things, why can't I love what's alive?
I reach the glass case I'd had my back to and see
a still life of branches, but that's because
they'd spaced themselves exactly to appear as leaves,
and when one leaf starts to crawl atop another, I check
the sign: giant hissing cockroaches. I try
simply to watch them. But when an antenna begins
to flicker deliberately in surveillance, my body
shudders in a way it knows how to do
without me. Not a separation of mind and body, quite,
but neither a cooperation. There
my attention stalls until there's
a conversion into truth:
just as there are menial sins, and cardinal,
so there are the little and numerous and big and obvious
truths I deny. Let me start with the cockroaches.
Flat-backed, carapaced, geniusly engineered, how
quickly they skitter out of sight. Then wait
the way a mouse might, or a fox at the forest edge,
knowing most of the time we aren't paying attention at all.
Tears finally, in the parking lot,
head resting against the steering wheel
after my whole body fought for an hour against
the simple act of looking.
When will I get stronger? Is this how?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Window Left Open by Jennifer Grotz. Copyright © 2016 Jennifer Grotz. Excerpted by permission of GRAYWOLF PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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