Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World Kathryn Cowles (english readers txt) 📖

build the overpass is

now filled with water, a campsite

right by the onramp

surrounded by trailers, and in the overpass pond

roiling screaming kids with inner tubes

then field field field quiet

line of trees

then a cemetery then

field field field field field.

*

And in the winter

the snow flattens things further

a two-dimensional version

of landscape, a map of itself,

flattens everything around it

flattens even the sky.

POEM FOR THE PUTTING IN OF THE NEW CARPET

Findlay, Ohio

This day’s a green one, breezed, wet with air.

I sit by the window, wonder

if I will become kind again

once the carpet is in.

I am far from home.

I am in a house I have bought I have

come far.

*

We put up a painting we have bought,

a painting with pieces of figures taken from Courbet

and spliced to other figures

one’s part of a head that turns into

part of a hand that turns into—who knows?

*

I have painted the two desks green

the kitchen table wine rack

side tables a chair all green

the chairs around the table brown.

This is the stuff of our old families.

We have taken the stuff of our old families

and put a layer of green on.

*

How to hold

to have my house contain.

It keeps out the humidity keeps in the cool

and we will pay for it later for

all of it and our

secret togetherness, now housed,

is put down in a book

and calculated and summed

and the average part is

I have become cold.

Meantime the sky

is heavy without girth

like the wet air.

The sky is a blue roof and not.

*

When the sky is daytime blue

it is a curtain

drawn up over the stars.

At night, the curtain opens

to a flat map of the universe,

the near and far side by side,

one single surface.

*

They are putting the carpet in

right now as we speak

and up will go the green desks

and up papers and books

I will become kind or

I was never not kind

or I am what I always was.

*

Can I have your hand?

Can you put your hand on the top

of my head like a cover

and can you turn it on my hair?

*

Rooms become smaller

with new trim paint and nothing but scrapwood flooring.

It’s an optical illusion—I was never blue.

Can’t count on a house

and the calculations are already such that

I am green. Let’s start again. Again.

Put it in, the carpet,

I need a bottom so as to catch me.

OHIO

This day has a quietness

that sticks. The writing

makes a noise like sheets,

then a quietness.

Yesterday, a sky I could

live with. Day before, wind.

I pushed the side of my car

up against the great nothingness

of air, and it pushed back.

Yesterday the sky had height,

the clouds were measurable

and various. Dark and light.

The blue between the clouds was blue.

SHOWER WATER

stood in the shower today

let water drip off my lids

it wasn’t crying

it was shower water

the top of my eyelids

if I moved back more water

if I moved forward less

Port

BOAT TOUR

You will see to your left the new port

you will see to your right the old,

l’obelisque, to the left the clocktower,

only remaining piece of—

bombed by the Germans when they left,

now a great distribution center for fruit

all the way from Africa,

and the gulls on the roof scare

all at once, middle of the night,

all up in the air and yelling

their human yells, the fruit,

the stars, the war memorials in

three different languages,

bombed par Allemandes in 1944,

the waves are slight, very slight,

the water molecules, I am told,

stay in the same vertical trajectory

though they appear almost to be moving forward.

FIELDGUIDE

is it a red one it is

desert paintbrush it is skyrocket

is it a pink a purple

shooting star is it a wild rose

primrose a morning glory

is it growing on top of a cactus

so prickly pear is it cold

out still glacier lily

can you blow the petals poppy, orange

desert dandelion blown white

it is a weed nonnative pull it

it is this or it is that one

I saw a purple bell upside down

the width of two fingers

I’ve never seen anything

like that way out here

FIELDGUIDE MARGINALIA

Flax

is not yellow as I thought

but purple blue, thin skinned

as poppies—Sue

has got a thick patch

posing for photographs

with whole mountains

Dandelions, late-stage

here there are bones—

Addie has a bone she found

growing as if from the ground—

and greens and honeybees and

the dandelions have overblown

but there’s always another thing to be,

the puff of white seed only an early

stage of yellow

Valley lily

sweet bells, dress frilled

faced groundward like a little girl,

a picture book: a fairy in each

the bell is her dress part

wait till night only

the sweet

smell will

put you to sleep

take it for a nightcap, even

Radiotower violet

electric blue, blue electric purple

stacked as with signal

the whole meadow covered

all parts connected

Glacier lily

thin, but built for ice

meadow yellow

thin, thin stalked, then the field

turned to shooting stars,

not red like Sue said

but purple-pink, clumped

head first for the ground

petals back, a diver underwater

head first, a whole meadow wide

and the wind blows intermittent

grasses into brushed sea

this rapids, this blown grass

THREE POEMS CALLED “THE BASIL”

The basil

The basil wilted

clear to the side of the pot

and I gave it some water

and it’s back now

I’ve quit my Ohio job I’m

better than ever

The basil

It is amazing the basil

how the water was sucked dry

its wilt and fall

how it took to the new water

and how back to normal

The basil

The basil is big

I trimmed it back to make it bigger

each break a double growth

each stalk tipping with

its own weight

I cannot write about my dead dog

he is dead

the basil I can write is big and alive

KEEPING TRACK

five birds on the wooden beam

black and shaking their luck

no six I missed one

it was there anyway

PROOF

Sue has put bird houses

in big colors

on top of posts

and if god, god has put a sky here

for a roof

and if red,

red has made itself a wagon for dirt

and if dirt, the tree has

planted itself in ingenuity

also the sage

as Sue has planted

a whole small garden plot

PHOTOGRAPH OF A FRIEND TAKEN AFTER HE HAS DISAPPEARED

I take a photograph.

A telephone wire, a pole.

Nothing to see.

I write: I can picture you here.

I write: Walk out of the woods, Craig.

I write: Those woods, there.