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Margo Taft Stever
Splitting Wood
It was the thought of his entering
their infant’s room that drove her.
She remembered his face the first time
she saw him. Now, half gone from whiskey,
eyes hooded like a hawk’s,
he said he’d kill the children when he woke.
The neighbors heard it,
the screams. They heard.
His workman’s hand,
his gnarled hand dangled down.
The knife lay by the bed.
She slipped from the covers
while he slept, placed her feet
on the floorboards just so.
The dogs barked outside, snapdragons,
flowered tongues, and all the wired
faces of the past strung up. The ax
hung on the porch, woodpile nearby,
each log plotted, uneasily entwined.
The children’s tears were rain,
tears were watering the parched hills.
The wild moon foamed at the mouth.
The wild moon crept softly at her feet.
The arms that grabbed the ax
were not her own,
that hugged it to her heart
while he slept were not hers,
the cold blade sinking in his skin.
She grew up in the country splitting wood.
She knew just how much it took
to bring a limb down.
First published in
the Connecticut Review. Also, published in the
anthology, Women Write Resistance: Poets against Gender
Violence, edited by Laura Madeline Wiseman; and in the
chapbook, The Hudson Line, by Margo Taft Stever.
Night Rising
To be willing to sit here like this,
with nothing, nothing on my mind.
To be willing to waste this time,
day after day, as if my life
meant nothing to me.
Muggy, measured air of late summer
leaden with cicadas, the circus
of insects, the symphony
of their short time left.
To hear the birds weigh down
the apple tree, to watch dahlias
brown out in September, the infested
fallen blossoms on the weed-choked lawns--
so many would give up everything,
everything for what I have--these worms,
split and drying on the paved avenues,
yards and yards of worms, millions
and millions, too many to count.
Think of the 50,000
earthworms in an average backyard,
their moist underbellies,
every night rising,
curling over the lips of
their individual holes.
Think of their vast chasm of tunnels.
They riddle the ground with their castings.
It's always the leaves I come back to,
because I stare outside,
and it's always the leaves pressed near windows,
ghosts trying to get back in,
it's always the leaves I see.
When I lie down at night
above the bitter opening of sleep,
the sad pines, the sad crooked pines,
and the birds, listen, hear them,
as if their song were made in heaven,
something almost somnolent,
something almost cold in the darkness,
coming out of the green door,
coming out like this, out of
nowhere.
First published in The Seattle Review. Also, published
in Reading the Night Sky, by Margo Taft Stever, and
Frozen
Spring, by Margo Taft Stever.
© Copyright, 2014,
Margo Taft Stever. |