Open During Construction

restaurants, condo towers, single lane detours
locals can’t afford after Airbnb
traffic in nervous contractions
and all of us late for appointments.

the Women’s Clinic website warning: “Bless Our Mess!”
smells of sawdust latex ultrasound
thick booted workers paint spattered hammers
eyes fixed on the carpet, awkward where women in various stages
                                                                                                             wait.

Waiting was long and muffled.
I readreadread,
sorting sounds, subdued,
something urgent in the next room
sotto voce like a hotel TV

                                                 (“no story possible, just the voices”)

box of complimentary pads beside the bed, a poorly placed mirror,
rectangle windows high up only squirrels or birds could see
what? and who would they tell?
specimen cut of winter branches sample slides
suggest the whole tree, winter, white…

… wondering how the old fellow fared last night, in 10-degree chill?
said on the bus he’d rather die than go to the shelter,
said he’d been to prison & the army & he “wan’t goin’ no shelter,”
he said, walked away, gets dark early this time of year…

the nurse is younger than my daughter
repeats the litany questions
tries to laugh knowingly.

the phlebotomist is au courant draws blood whispers while the tube fills:
That there’s the toilet paper roller, other side o’the wall. Like nails on a chalkboard
hearin that all day. And them men, they’re nearly done thank god.
Last week one of ‘em was caught peekin in on an exam.
The other men, they brung him outside and … (sssh!) “took care of it”, you know.
He was reassigned.

the book in hand, Erín Moure, Furious, “The Acts 14. ‘It is impossible to
conceptualize …’” (98).

October

“Everything’s there
As part of the comical study
Of how to love time.”
                               – Lisa Robertson, “Earth in Lucretius”


At last! I found where the ice cream truck lives
at a small cottage house on Sweet Home Road
where the Emperor sleeps after chores until dawn
with mechanical music stuffed in his head.

I’ll post a picture if you don’t believe me.
That’s the name of the road, for real!

I heard him out late and followed
past dusk, past the Shwarma stand,
and the Free Parking lot all blocked off,
the Episcopal Church with flags half-mast

(remembering . . .
Las Vegas? Galicia?
Mogadishu? Myanmar? . . .)

“Stranglers of peace don’t eat ice cream.”

(The Emperor won’t let them –
I just know that he won’t.)

No children were chasing the truck last night,
no running around streets past dark.
But I can do as I please, at my age, by stealth
I followed the Emperor of Ice Cream.

Why was he out in October?
Ice cream is a summer month.
It always has been, as everyone knows.
But I learned he was just going home.

It was too dark to see, when he stepped off the truck,
too bad, but I waved nonetheless
for all of those years down all of those streets
where the coins in our pockets were somehow
       enough.


                                                                                   Cheryl Emerson
                                                                                   October, 2017

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

Solitude

I would like to be lonely now,

to wonder what it all meant; 

to sift the hoard, slowly.

You do these things alone 

on days that are gray or blue,

under trees that are bare 

or still raining their leaves—

if you catch one 

still in the air,

a leaf that would never touch ground 

‘til the questions are answered

and the pages are full. 

                                         Cheryl Emerson

11/9/2013



Carl Sandburg's chair,
Flat Rock, North Carolina

Like This

A day that reminds you of what you dreamed,

that life would be like this:

leaves on a path under bicycle wheels. 

I remember being young,

when the wooly bear would tell you

precisely how long the winter would be. 

You memorized the clouds

like a song you hoped 

would rise in your mind at dawn,

for the part of you that’s given to sound:

all you thought before everything else, 

the sense of stillness when you stared at the sky,

that life would be like this,

if you could last just long enough. 

                                                Cheryl Emerson

                                                11/2/2013

 

Connemara

Night Rain

The falling day still falling,

I cannot say what moment  

the sight of you

set upon memory of you,  

surrendering the afterlight

when all moments rain 

where the earth would be,

what the clouds held of you. 

Time is the falling water. 

                  Cheryl Emerson

                            9/15