maureen seaton Poems

I never had a nemesis before. I kinda like it.
~Felicity Smoak, The Flash

Wonder what I'd be today if I was still married to my Wall Street husband
besides married to a Wall Street husband and puking gin in a silk sheath

at Delmonico's. I might be a blond size 4. I might be a secret Democrat
or a weekend lesbian. This morning five planes flew over the yard in a V

as I was about to dig into a pile of lavender pancakes al fresco. The V
flew low and slow. It flew loud and ominous. It alarmed me, sounding

a lot like the war movies of my fifties' childhood. My cranky Chihuahua
was proverbially biting at flies and I was sitting there not thinking about hate.

Recently, I experienced life with cancer. An intoxicating time, richly infused
with the liquor of death, but good too because no one expected much of me

and I was left to my own mind, which is what I'm missing most these days.
Unless that's it over there, screeching on two wheels around the racetrack.

Today I typed gnos instead of song and I wondered if it was some new app
designed to mess with me. I've never thought to call the world sweet before.

A nemesis can do that for you, make things taste different. Suddenly you're
a hero/ine. All this devastation—and you're still standing in the middle of it.
...

Colorado

Forever is so unfathomable it cannot be held responsible.

Or it is the joyful repetition of the increased effect of sun at high altitudes.

Meanwhile, birds are wise in thin air but live such a short time.

One lies broken in the snow; others surround it, screeching.

Normally I would say there are no images for infinity, but today I am not so sure.

Infinity flows in a blood-red path to itself.

(War spills infinitely into other wars.)

Five planes fly in formation over my backyard, as in war movies.

In reality, I kneel beside this infinite bird.

I am nothing but a string of bells, the hand of a minor god.

I will walk in snow four more times before spring arrives in the foothills.

Snow of burial and keening jays—the opposite of forever.
...

The first time I saw hundreds of fiddlehead ferns boiling in an enormous pot I realized
what an odd person I must be to hear tiny cries from the mouths of cooking vegetables.

Similarly, when you hurt me, I curled like a mouse behind my third eye. I realize what an
odd thing it is to believe as I do in my third eye and the mouse behind it that furls like a fern

and whimpers like a fern being boiled on a monster stove beside its brothers and sisters.
Poor mouse. The things that make a person odd are odd themselves. Think of DNA,

the way it resembles the rope Jack climbed to secure his future and that of his aging Mom.
Or the way a sudden wave can drag a child under, that addiction to adrenalin, her

siblings farther away and more powerless than she ever imagined, the pure and ecstatic
irreversibility of undertow. It's odd to come back to life, as they say, she came back to life.

I think I'll come back to life now. It's odd to think of something so big we could miss
the elephant we're living on, like this planet Earth, is she alive and we're her brain cells,

each one of us flickering, going out, coming back to life? Even Chicago looks poignant
from the top of the Hancock, organized and sincere. Think if we were photographing

Earth, how dear she would be, how we'd watch her shimmer in the shimmering black soup
of the firmament, how alone she'd look and how we'd long to protect her, the way it feels

to protect a woman at the height of orgasm, the liquid giving, the seawater slide of coming
back to life. When you hurt me, I evolved like a backboned sea creature, translucent

nervous system sparking along in the meanest deep where I was small enough to not care
and my passions ran to swimming, gulping, spitting bubbles back into new oceans.

Once when you hurt me I slept at a Red Roof Inn. I double-locked the door and tried to
watch talk shows to keep my mind off sounds like someone suffocating someone

in the next room. I thought I saw blood on the box spring and imagined needles and bulgy
veins, there's something odd, I thought, about someone whose imagination runs this wild.

So often I dream you're here and I wake in the middle of a prayer from my muzzled
childhood. Jesus Mary and Joseph, I say, appalled that I'm stuck in 1955 when I need

something profane to see me through. Serrano's submerged cross. Ginger tea.
The idea that we're moving between horizons and the Earth is so wise she sends us

Winter and red-tailed hawks when we least expect them. I can do this, I say,
and the planet shifts imperceptibly. From a great distance she appears to be at peace.
...

I love Fresh Market but always feel underdressed
squeezing overpriced limes. Louis Vuitton,
Gucci, Fiorucci, and all the ancient East Coast girls
with their scarecrow limbs and Joker grins.
Their silver fox husbands, rosy from tanning beds,
steady their ladies who shuffle along in Miu Miu's
(not muumuus) and make me hide behind towers
of handmade soaps and white pistachios. Who
knew I'd still feel like the high school fat girl
some thirty-odd years later? My Birkenstocks
and my propensity for fig newtons? Still, whenever
I'm face to face with a face that is no more real
than a doll's, I try to love my crinkles, my saggy
chin skin. My body organic, with no preservatives.
...

This is where the poem holds its breath,
where the usable truth sways, sorrowing,

and the people sway with the truth of it,
and this is where the poem enters the dark.

This is where the book closes and the clock
opens and the clock closes and the book

opens to song so the snow geese murmur
and the coyote swaggers along the aspens.

This is where the geese fly unabashedly out,
and the sky turns white and wild with sound.

This is where tumult, this is where prophecy.
This is where the poem repents of language.

This is where the poem enters silence,
where the child holds the book in her lap

whose pages are aflame with life, whose
song sways with a usable truth, sorrowing.

And this is where the poem holds its breath,
and this is where the poem enters the dark.

This is where it leaps wild about the child,
where the snow geese seize the seamless sky

and the universe splits open for one poem—
the way a life lived calls on us to praise it.
...