These Acts of Water

Poems By

Nina Bannett

Copyright © 2015 Nina Bannett Copyright © 2015 Cover Design by Mary Ann Biehl

ELJ Publications, LLC ~ New York

ELJ Editions

Esperanza Editions Series

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930310

ISBN 13: 978-1-942004-11-0

for RB and MG

CONTENTS

I. What Child Is This

Curator 3

Rachel St. Michael 4

War Story 5

War Story #2 6

Artist in Residence 7

All-Day Kindergarten 8

Artist in Residence #2 9

Dr. D. 10

I Am Violet 11

Let’s Talk About Jesus 12

Ceremonies 13

Circles 14

What Child Is This 15

II. A Tall City of Sepia Pain

Be Good 19

The Long Winter 20

Settlers 21

Where I Am Going 22

Planetarium 23

Blackbirds 24

Pilloried 25

Plath’s Recipe 26

Revival Meeting 27

Espalier Notes 28

Confidences 29

Tempests 30

Emergency Topography 31

Ambush 32

Nurse Beverly 33

Re-enactments 34

Election Day 35

Like a Saint, Rising 36

Hospice 37

Woman’s Work 38

Requiem 39

My Falcon to Your Swallow 40

Pantheon 41

Dream of the Forsythia Tree 42

A Prayer, A Lamentation 43

III. These Acts of Water

The Pinnacle 47

Getting Far 48

Waiting to Speak 49

Wilderness 50

On the Spot 51

Twisted Dream 52

What I Carry 53

Lost or Changing 54

To Jericho 55

Consent 56

The Giving Moment 57

Nosebleed 58

Nesting Dolls 59

Anchors Away 60

Who Is Annie Sullivan? 61

Mythology’s Undertow 62

Pretender 63

Snapshots of Still Water 64

Impromptu Art Show 66

Fire at Pratt Institute 67

Photo Synthesis 68

Governors Island 69

Underwater 70

Flameproof 71

Breathe This Ring 72

Harvest Time 73

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Plath’s Recipe” appeared in Bellevue Literary Review , Fall 2012. “Revival Meeting” appeared in CALYX: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Summer 2014. “Rachel St. Michael,” “War Story,” “Artist in Residence,” “Tempests,” “Re-enactments,” “Woman’s Work,” “Requiem,” and “Dream of the Forsythia Tree” appeared in Lithium Witness (Finishing Line Press, 2011).

Part 1: What Child is This

3

Curator

Your leaf motifs grow,

tower everywhere

you are not

gone

they tell me,

but in these arts

you remain yourself

unfettered by death.

Putting together a coherent show

by myself

will not be easy.

It is so hard, you told me once,

it is so hard to move a library.

Implicit within these arts,

your sweet voice,

my heartbreak.

4

Rachel St. Michael

We were passing out your business cards,

a woman artist and her daughter,

a madwoman and a four-year old.

We flicked monochromatic cards

inside mail slots,

houses that ringed your mother’s,

but you were Christ’s daughter,

a lamb shorn of outer trappings,

nude, shouting after a city bus.

I have lived a nineteenth-century life,

early exposure to madness,

sentimental love and premature death,

holy crosses and guardian angels.

5

War Story

Surrounded—

my mother and I are flanked on all sides.

This waiting is a serious business,

these trenches,

this series of stiff chairs and couches,

have been placed here by our enemies,

our dentist and his secretary.

Suspended in space,

I am waiting for time to begin and end.

Outside, as we prepare to surrender,

the red brick houses

stand at attention.

What are they thinking?

Right and left: my police car, her ambulance.

Undefeated, my mother screams my name many times.

She will not be vanquished in her psychosis-

convinced that the hospital would be the best place for me, too.

Shattered, I sit in the front seat,

squashed into the squad car radio,

huddled against what I have witnessed.

6

War Story #2

I am in a refugee camp,

against a backdrop of police metal,

Styrofoam and Oreo cookies.

I am a four-year old celebrity.

Sitting and staring is what I do best,

still,

these many years later,

it is what I do best.

Turn my head? Never.

Refusal is an art form.

I cannot be broken into betrayal.

Soda can be poisoned,

Hershey bars manipulated,

reality swayed into unbecoming,

a mother distorted into disappearing.

My young will is like iron,

as I prepare to sit here, forever.

Officers staring sympathetically,

their offerings sitting limply in my tiny hands.

7

Artist in Residence

I reach the right ward by following the pipes,

those primary colors on the wall.

Everyone here is Lewis Carroll,

making animal gifts instead of watercolors:

For me, a blue-grey cat with wispy ears and a yellow tongue,

a dark green turtle, stuffed head bobbing.

Outside the common lounge,

away from the other patients,

she offers me a skein of yarn,

casts on,

waits for me to come to this hook.

If I learn crochet here I will be chained too,

tied to dulled smokers,

their thoughts vested in thorazine.

8

All-Day Kindergarten

I shift from mourning to afternoon.

From the outdoor misery of steady rain,

I watch my little classmates,

Their wait for revolving wheels,

other mothers,

their diurnal returns.

My new red boots glisten, grassy.

I am led inside, shorn,

handed off from one shepherdess to another.

My head nestles up to its blanket,

napping to the Nutcracker Suite.

I am with the celesta, interlude of solitude.

Within my landscape of sweets,

dancers twirl in punishing circles,

their toes explode, far away from their homes.

9

Artist in Residence #2

Seven feet, high separation.

A thin divider of unfinished wood,

threaded with a metal eyelet and inner hook.

You are in communion with your materials,

your garden cadmium red, like dahlias.

The Moonlight Sonata floods your phonograph,

your fingers tending soft strands, delicate Natsumi paper.

Forests of young colors cloister you from me.

I find myself wandering your perimeter between pilgrimages.

10

Doctor D.

He was your call waiting,

your manic fiancé,

beckoning you to God’s Unity Center.

He favored monotones,

his brown china dog standing in the corner,

waiting with us for your time.

He built on to his own house,

receiving you, flush by car,

driven, sullen, cross-roaded into the Roslyn hills.

He was your mercy, righteousness,

a shepherd with unstable hourly company,

swaying from tricyclic hymns,

staying with the breach.

11

I am Violet

The announcement is made,

the jubilation of a weekend morning.

Your childhood parakeet, Violet, is now your child,

much beloved,

reincarnated, cited by God.

In the face of such surety I am bound,

rapt with havoc,

lost in the violet wilderness that soothes only you.

My wings are set in amber.

I sit, hovering on your left shoulder,

overlooking a vale of confusion.

12

Let’s Talk About Jesus

I can’t.

My childhood could not grasp His hand,

your conversion reaching through the locked ward,

voices debuting on Queens streets.

His pastures turn to plenty.

Little Women appears under our new, artificial tree.

I read only the pages where Amy drafts her will.

Demanding my family’s religion,

classmates press me for clarity.

I lose myself with hesitations.

This is the opposite of faith.

13

Ceremonies

We are the symbol of our slow ripening future,

dressed in red, flowing scarves,

graduates, in unison singing “Memory” from Cats.

To the audience, families, we are still one

primary school, joyful in our onstage harmony.

My mother stares, downcast and hollow.

I am troubled by moonlight even though it is bright, sunny.

My father angles for good light for photos.

We are each Doric and Ionic columns.

To the audience, we appear as one family,

classically posed within the show’s dithyrambic trappings.

We reunite with our new car that afternoon,

a Reliant of such poise that we should all rejoice

after six long months of winter crisis.

My father drives the car away from its large stage,

not a sound from the roadway.

14

Circles

There has been slim preparation.

The tear in space-time created by so little,

snatched so much.

At the wheel, maternal panic fevers you.

As we spot the span, I see the cosmos.

This, then, is the world’s edge, wondrous,

precipice-torn, astronautic.

The U turn you execute is valiant,

the widest stretch of desperation moves you,

as pedals harmonize with your feet and arms.

A carousel of captive time cascades through our afternoon.

We are fireflies inside our jar.

15

What Child is This

Smearing me with your green sleeves,

you cast me off as part of a deeply manic struggle.

“Am I your mother?”

My delayed reaction, my own disembodiment.

At least we are home, you cloaked in a wide meadow of childlike desire.

Such a discourteous question,

“Am I your mother?”

For I have loved you so long, so well.

My full cup of fear hovers,

brims over your bright brown eyes,

runs into your housecoat, its field tiny green and blue blooms.

Churning, your bright eyes,

more than clouds.

Christ’s child, not Mommy, beckons me for my response.

Am I your mother?

This is my brink,

the new womb I can create with a “no” or “yes”.

Part 2: A Tall City of Sepia Pain

19

Be Good

Your worries still course through me.

The flow of your fear reaches my knees,

locks them in place,

sticks to my toes,

leaving me with bad feet,

the ones I thought no slippers should hold.

We might, one day, be homeless.

I would go with my father.

You would rot, in some armory,

in a psychiatric ward,

electrified.

My eyes cannot close through these moments,

their bulbs of bright doom dazzling my eyes,

as I keep reading between the lines,

these links of chain.