Six poems from Paradise is Jagged (Terrapin Books, 2023)

A Young Stag at Dusk

White tail flicking, eating flowers
heaped on a raw grave,

he raises his head to watch us
before he vanishes slowly into the trees.

~

Outside the kitchen window,

my Peace roses ride on arching stems
like moons in a lead-white sky.

—My? All year, earth holds them,
I ignore them.

~

Night thickens among the branches

of gingko, maple, willow oak, cherry,
redbud, and the thicket of bamboo

that surround this wooden house.
Sometimes I am afraid.

~

At three I knelt on the back seat

of my mother’s car and, looking out the window,
said, There’s so much to see

and so little time to see it. Or so I’ve been told.
It’s like that now, watching the leaves.

~

Bread rises in the oven.

May the stag sink back into the forest.
May the petals drop on the grass.

Whoever you are, may you be at peace
in this great silence, where only the birds speak.

Childhood

How soft were her hands, stroking
our hair as she sang to us,
my little sister and me—lullabies
that curved through the silvery trees.

Our father was somewhere
called Korea. He wrote to us
that children in crimson overalls
ran after him for American candy.

Now I know that suffering
sows the earth with salt,
but then I only wondered
how the birds slept, feathers

puffed out around them
in the darkness, what frogs said
with their burbling throats,
where the mysterious rivers ran.

Inhabitation

A year ago midsummer, we visited Magnolia Grove,
you with your newly shaved head, and when
I introduced you, Sister Boi and Sister Peace,
likewise bald, embraced you.
Heat gathers,
every day hotter than the day before.
Something lives in our walls again,
scrabbling behind the bricked up fireplace,
and ants spill out from infinitesimal cracks
in the corners. Apricots rot before they’re ripe.
My days in near seclusion
creep through the hours and surrender to sleep.
Or to twitches, as if I’m a rag doll shaken.

~

I can’t tell you how I miss you.
I keep wanting to phone you,
ask something you would know,
with your flawless memory—
what year our father went to Korea,
when and how our grandparents died.
To ask if you remember all that past—
But one night, as I lay there twitching,
trying to sleep, you came
through the shining membrane
between life and death, so that I saw you,
and I was you, gaunt edifice, cage of bone,
and the clear, diminishing flame
that was still, in that second, my sister.

Catalpa

This tree is older than Columbus. Ten years ago my honors students standing in a ring could barely get their arms around it. I took their picture—hands joined, cheeks against the rough wood. Mostly they loved it, but one guy told my friend who supervised his lab, She made us hug a tree. It was the worst class ever.

When I think of the tree as a sapling, my mind enters a great quiet. Before the Depression, the yellow fever, before the burning of Oxford, before the University Greys left their classrooms for the battlefield and died or were wounded to a man at Pickett’s Charge, and before Princess Hoka of the Chickasaws set out with her people on the Trail of Tears, this tree sank its roots deep and deeper into the ground. Generations moved about beneath its boughs, spoke and loved and died as it grew.

And here it is, still, in the clattering present.

Ten years ago I could walk around it, smell it, stroke the lichen on its bark. If I put my hand into the hollow in its trunk right near the ground, it was always cold, always comforting. No matter how brutal the summer, its dark, mysterious lungs kept serenely breathing.

Now fences surround it, stakes hold up its branches. No longer do art majors loll on the benches and smoke under its big-leaf shade. A sign warns NO CLIMBING: KEEP OFF. Still, every spring, wet tender leaves unfurl on branches jagged as broken bones, and the tree bursts out in a froth of white petals.

And every spring, the preachers line the sidewalk near the tree, and thrust their Bibles as we pass
by Repent and be saved, they say. Turn or burn. I want to tell them, Turn around, turn around, and look at the tree.

Of the Eternal Waters

I don’t care
if you saved a little boy
by grabbing the tail of his shirt
as he was falling off a Ferris wheel
or performed a Heimlich
as Danny choked on chicken
or tucked your feet behind your neck
and balanced on your hands
or if you loved to snuggle
with your blue-eyed roundish mother
or you loved your Army father
but couldn’t make his slide rule work
or you wish you had a parrot
who said timor mortis conturbat me
or you wish you had an Airedale
or you wish you had a kitten
or your son painted your bedroom
it’s like sleeping in a daffodil
or your apple pie’s to die for
or you once ate a pansy
and mustard and potato chips
and applesauce on tuna
or you dream you could wander
on every glorious Wanderweg
in the flower-speckled Alps
or your irises are blooming
or your salvias are blooming
or something ate your basil
or Van Gogh, Magritte, and Brueghel
or one night by the Seine
or one noon in the café
or you love his warm, blunt hands
or fire glints off your opal ring
or you’ve taught here thirty years
or your smile could charm a badger
you can’t wade in this fountain

Jagged Paradise

Zing!
You’re alive, aren’t you?
X-rays show nothing wrong,
why fight against this happiness?
—violets clustering between the bricks on the front walk,
under the pecan tree, spider lilies intricate and scarlet,
Theo the tuxedo cat lapping cream on the porch.

~

Sunlight on the trail this morning warms my love’s neck and his worn
red shirt—it gilds the bulrushes, silvers the feathery grasses.
Quick, look! as we walk, the heron who lives by the little
pond rises heavy-bodied into the trees.
One rudbeckia, one purple zinnia,
not much else grows where the trail branches off into darkness.

~

Moon tonight is full, sailing around the sky, clouds whipping past.
Leaning on my husband, I crook my neck to look up at the sky.
Keep him safe, moon and sky, keep him in your care, my guy in his
jeans and hiking boots, his olive-colored shirt and the belt tongue that keeps curling.
In my squeaky voice I sing him Il y a longtemps que je t’aime.
How old we’re growing together, him with his toenails sharp as knives,
gnarly eyebrows, me with my twisted toes. We love the things we love
for what they are, wrote Frost, and it’s true.

~

Every cicada sings us closer to winter now,
darkness soaks the grasses, pools beneath the trees.
Come here, little one, whoever you may be, the day and night ripen
blood red berries of sumac, dogwood, roses. one word, no hyphen
All the leaves are mottled and stained. Amen. Breathe in, it’s late October.

Online publications:

“Grace Grown Out of Silence,” Interview of Ann Fisher-Wirth by Harvey Hix published in the EcoTheo Collective

“Sumac,” “Mayumi,” “Sister” in The Valparaiso Poetry Review

“Politics” and “Winter Day on the Whirlpool Trails” in Norwegian Writers Climate Campaign (NWCC) (Forfatternesklimaaksjon)

“Yahrzeit,” “At the Wedding,” “Gigan: October” in Diode Poetry Journal