Requiems

news that youth
did not survive
itself
                    becoming
into head-
shots as if
                even dead

could see itself

avenged,

While others

privately
                           so
unexpectedly
                              ghost

their families

sooner than ghosting

        arrives. 

                                    C.Emerson

                                                                                                  October, 2014

The Fiction of Immensities of Time and Space

                           “Strange plan: why this abundance of finality?”

                                                    --Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Passivity Course Notes (129).

Narrowings,

what can never not have happened

caught in nets
of autonomous nerves

doing what they do.

Mornings are cold.
Blankets make a small pocket

for feet.

I stay a little longer,
pocketed and small.

What was the plan?
Something about waiting.

The carpet is thick now,
patterns lost or about to appear.

The weaves loosen at night,

Arabian carpets
higher than mortars,

or prayer rugs
bringing stories for children.

Best not to interpret.
Tugging at threads

could start a whole unravelling.

You want the knots to hold,
tangled for a reason:

to live in awe of the indestructible.

Crumbled buildings  
draw skylines

that even in rubble
hold their place.

Adumbrations speak
the shape of happenings,

catastrophes of birth

and remembrance

cohere

better than abundant endings,
restless nights,

more presence than we can possibly imagine

ceaselessly here
and so long ago.

                                                                                     C.Emerson

                                                                                     September, 2014

 

 

Turning Home

for Amy and Jeb

September 6, 2014 

That story about a boy she knew

when they were young,

writing his name in cursive,

wishes breathed over birthday candles
renumbered year by year, 

like houses we pass on highways

holding life in those rooms,

meals and laughter and song—

there were endings, 

lives that rose and rose,

not the expected or planned

but what came instead,

spoken in the backwards glance

 

where we find the constant, a first self

before variations overlaid the theme

like copies of a lost original

stored in diaries gathering dust. 

Here is the music we danced to,

melodies that linger after the music’s gone,

the way love has lingered

in the silence of time. 

We want essential sounds that still make sense,

to be stories in themselves

the way we’re always telling stories

like old movies 

about a boy who holds her people, her street,

familiar and known—

the way we’re always and always

turning home.

 

                                                                                                     Cheryl Emerson
                                                                                                                            In gratitude
                                                                                                                            for friends like family

Learning the Streets of Buffalo

Cities tied by train tracks
with train whistles
sounding all the same,
hauling the same graffiti,

at dawn I wait to remember

what city I’m in.
At night the weather
is familiar.

Finding the waterfront
and back again,
the General Mills factory
roasting endless Cheerios,

I carry my passport
in case I miss a turn,
cross to Canada
instead.

           

                                         Cheryl Emerson, 7/2014

                                         Buffalo, NY




Sediment

What to leave

for strangers who might want

these once familiar things: 

this gift you opened

at a certain age in December,

 

imagining a future

that will want to hold

which past?

 

An archeological project:

plastic horses,

yearbooks,

papers— 

evidence

that it happened at all,

 

something material

in this open gorge

awaiting landfill 

 

until enough earth smooths the surface

where old trees hold anonymous birds

that still recite

their memorized songs. 

                                                            Cheryl Emerson

                                                                      May, 2014

Winter

The way we talk through storms,
sorting sounds
after the roads have stilled:

woodpecker,

wind chimes,
the black scrape of crows,
tiny songs of the smaller birds—
(I am a tiny song too)

It takes a good snow to slow the noise,

with time and a hot cup in hand.

This one sounds like cow bells,

but the cows are gone,
pastures are houses now.
Maybe the bells stayed behind.

Drops from melting ice

(I am a kind of ice)
My breath in fogs,
seeing it leave,
one breath less
one breath less.

The snow was blue once

well past midnight
and under the moon
I rode bareback,
warm smell of winter fur,
the snow muffled his hooves,
horse breath
my breath

Our path would be covered by dawn.

 

                                                            Cheryl Emerson

                                                            January, 2014

Tanglewood

Because music was never like this
and won’t be again.
Before the first note,
the surprise of it—

you know it as home,

variable as August evenings,

            the mix of winds,
            cut grass and sometimes
            the sea—

Because it ends, as things do,
mixing with night
and gone—

We call them movements,

implying relocation—

what the last note

leaves.

                                     C. Emerson

                                      January, 2014