Emergence —Julie Hanson
They let their wings down
when the song waned small
and far, and when the wind
died, too, they found
their feet beneath them
and walked in the literal world.
Hands proved not to be
the vestiges they’d been thought,
but downright useful
for fidgeting, pruning,
counting out change,
dental hygiene, for starting
and stopping the spin
of a globe or fastening
from behind oneself
the tiny hook and eye.
All sorts of close-up
detail work took hold,
and, after a time,
predictably enough,
failing vision, impatience,
blasphemy, constipation,
and the ubiquitous
ache in the wrist.
They slid their instruments
beneath their beds.
Independent monitors
synchronized
and slowed way down.
Their heart grew cold.
The last line and the first are from a fragment from Sappho, #42 as numbered in Anne Carson’s translation. Their order of appearance here is reversed.
Trail
idea Maybe it was the arrival of the secular breeze, the emergence,
in other words, of weather in Eden
that gave them the idea to clothe themselves.
Not a wicked wind, not a just wind. Just wind.
dream Everything had been cleared away: the gravel pile, the railings and sheet metal,
the flower stalls, their blooms and grasses,
and other businesses where once we’d expected to find what we needed
arranged very near to what we’d discover we wanted:
extension cords and Chinese handcuffs,
assorted cheeses, brooms, jars of black olives in brine.
There were the emptied racks remaining, a stack of bins.
real I stepped off the trail and reached for a horsetail at the stage of its sporing.
I love this plant, and when I called out to you, I felt the vibration through the stem.
And when I was quiet then, the movement continued in the stem.
I let go, and presume that it stopped.
Monday
I woke up listening. A sound was tunneling
through the air. Familiar and quaint—
industrial—it tumbled the outskirts,
curving past Bertram, then Otis Road,
blaring at markers, boulders, at gravel
or pavement at un-gated crossings,
spreading wide over parallel lines
of rail-bed grasses, over leftover lots
with Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans,
and then the cleaner fields, the corn—
commandeered and obedient—
and it played through the structure of Cargill
and alongside the long sides of trucks
lined up to the left. And as it reached
the southernmost side of my city,
the nearby birds of my own yard had begun
to voice their intentions. I heard
and was each time surprised by
the space between notes, and by the space
between a cluster of notes and its next
occurrence. I knew enough not to turn over,
not to begin the day making coffee.
It seemed I’d been granted an aptitude
for deep passivity. I lay there,
picturing the species-non-specific
countenance of the last one to warble,
the head cocked in thought or reception
the way that birds do, nearly continually,
every few seconds. And some of the sound
had pooled, and new dots of sound
pocked the surface.
This could be a day like no other, I thought.
This could be a day like each one to follow,
and I imagined then a pleasant,
uneventful, string of such days,
indistinct and permeable,
like a vacation remembered after twenty years
as little more than tall reeds
and the sound of water lapping
something made of wood.
Knowing this in advance as we do,
why then is one tempted, on the day of departure,
on that final morning,
the day to slide the suitcase out from under the cot,
to turn to one’s companion,
and unexpectedly say it, Look,
you go on ahead. I’ll let you know later
what developed and how close it came
to perfection.
"Trail" and "Monday" are from the forthcoming book The Audible and the Evident by Julie Hanson, © 2020. Reprinted by permission of the Ohio University Press.
David Axelrod
Devon Balwit
Amber Cecile Brodie
Erika Brumett
Trent Busch
Greg Casale
Hayan Charara
Todd Davis
James Dott
Julie Hanson
Michael Hardin
Jeffrey Herrick
Michael Hettich
Ginger Ko
Katie Kurtz
Kathleen A. Lawrence
Bruce McRae
Willy Palomo
Matthew Rotando
Myrna Stone
Carolyn Williams-Noren
Topaz Winters
Ray Young Bear
