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Cheryl Higgins Poem
A Volume of McClatchy
(on reading "The Ten Commandments" by J.D. McClatchy)
- Cheryl L. Higgins @2001
I picked up your book. No, I ordered your book
special hard-back from the local shop
a neighborhood place where literary types and
Yale professors stop on their lunch
where the proprietor came round from behind
to check his shelves by eye
and called you 'our local boy'.
Our local boy.
I almost looked up when the bell jangled
and the door banged shut.
Six slow steps that stopped on the fifth.
The paper-shred scent of ink and pulp
draws the senses to the walls. Old brick dust
sealed with thick paint sets the books, your books
a censer among them, somewhere.
Do you come to see them? Four copies down to one?
Down to none? In the hands of a new reader, now.
Or a writer.
Now your truths become ours in these poems, your own
veiled soul a sacrament for the masses
a confession of wafer-thin sheets
whispered on the tongue.
Behind the stacks your penance becomes
our own absolution, writers murmuring your absolution
as they read you write themselves
how desperate blood-sport can be made of lives
at the liver's expense, nodding, yes I see
this happens, this is how it should be told.
But then, we catch
on your candor
and comes the dry
choke, the flush of
embarrassment
swallowed, for
aren't these the
self-crucifixions
for secret sins so
like our own
laid open with the
power of blood and
passions
the writing which
readers covet
and we feel the
jealous prick, we
writers as readers
for not confessing
first, and then
contrition, and then
that recurrent
seduction of maybe
becoming so bold our
selves one day
the titillation of
fashioning our own
sins with such truth
oh, no! Then, yes,
and then,
Yes!
For when we write in
half-truths
does not some better
truth lie just
beneath?
And here, you've
given us yours.
The man on the
stairs steps behind
me
to wait in deference
to my purchases
your book tucked
away, already mine,
now.
He leans in to get a
look at the title
thin polite smile;
fellow lover of
words, to care what
I might read
so I tip it back
that he might more
easily see
his face open in
slight surprise and
what might be
approval, but has he
read it? I can't
tell.
He steps to the
counter.
"McClatchy," he
says.
"Have you any copies
left?"
Copyright © Cheryl Higgins | Year Posted 2014
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Cheryl Higgins Poem
Losing the Light
by Cheryl Higgins
UNSUPPORTED CODE - with a quote
from J.D.
McClatchy's
three-part poem
"Three Dreams of
Elizabeth
Bishop" UNSUPPORTED CODE
What sold me on the
architect's clever
evening tour
besides designer
lighting and too
many vodka bitters
wasn't this
relentless dawn
scraping every
skylight in
every room, but
chasing you into
this one
where the moon blued
your foot behind the
big chair
wet, still, from
testing the spa in
your cocktail gown.
When you snatched it
back from the pale
light
it was then I
thought I could live
here with you, all
folded against the
west wall and
listening to me
pretend to lose
interest and read
erotic sonnets aloud
to the moon.
Or was it finding a
corner of Cassiopia
from your pillow
unlike any other
from mine?
Did we live in this
place? With this
unsleepable light,
I’m working
before the paper
even hits the door.
Through the sliders
on the redwood deck,
a glass, still,
of ginwater gathers
gnats and acorns
from the last
one-night stand. My
robe wet on the
rail.
I'm wearing yours.
And why did I want
to hurt you one last
time?
When you left I said
leave it the robe's
mine, but it wasn't
not really or why
did I give up my own
to the
ONS and stalk naked,
moody, after I lost
that
first slurred slip
of your name
to the roaring tub.
Your belt trails me
and my coffee.
The robe's too long
for my tastes.
Alien, familiar, it
slides on my skin
not unlike
your more wakeful
nights in and out of
my dreams.
And I thought I had
something of yours
after all
from the pocket, a
letter to me or a
note
declarant or
confessional, either
would do.
What I found was
some acorn caps
and the architect's
designer card.
We'd called from a
pay phone that
night.
I said we'd
forgotten the price.
You said I never
asked.
What we forgot, I
heard a voice
behind me say, was
everything else.
Love will leave us
alone if we let it.
Say the price.
Out on the road,
love winds away in
the dark.
The moon strobes it
through the trees,
the night
follows its own
unlit way.
Copyright © Cheryl Higgins | Year Posted 2014
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Cheryl Higgins Poem
LONESOME
SOUND
Old man said he could hear that whistle blow a hundred miles
and they could write a song about that.
Said he could tell how many cars a train freighted
just by how sad was its wail.
Old man said, trains usually sounded out at crossings or towns
or coming upon another train. Said
No. 149 out of St. Louis left
the towns a hundred miles back.
Had no call to think about
meeting another train'til Lander.
Or maybe Crawford.
Old man said, keening cross the plains like that
only thing took it to heart was
coyotes and jack rabbits. Mayhap
a snake or two, sunning hisself on the rails.
Said, last run she made, leaned on her whistle
from the Missouri straight through to the Rockies.
Never let up, just hollered cross the land
like the world come undone.
Like something lost
couldn't never be right again.
I said how that train was probly thinking
of the long empty plains ahead.
Of fenceposts ticking by
and cattle scabbing up the buffalo grass.
Thinking of passing unseen and unheard
the grassed-over soddies hunched at springs
once piped now trickling through old stock ponds.
Of empty match-box homesteads
timber-bleached and bowed before the
vast order of sun and sky.
Of tilted windmills wheeling, listless
as a fly wing-plucked and turning, turning
round on bleary heat-cracked panes
what look myopic upon the prairie
the grass, the sky, the land to come.
Old man looked at the middle distance. Said
don't know but she wailed for the thought
of her last pull through the pass at Lander stockyards.
Or for what she maybe wouldn't find
coming out t'other side.
Copyright © Cheryl Higgins | Year Posted 2015
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Cheryl Higgins Poem
Tanka 2
After so long I’m
unprepared for chance meetings
having rehearsed them
I gave up months ago on
what you’ve likely avoided
I must look too much
like all your other exes
shifting my legs and
turning too eagerly, my
smile too delighted. Yours brief.
I almost send you
a round when a woman leans
into your pocket
You watch me in the mirror
between the bottles of gin
@2004 Cheryl Higgins
Copyright © Cheryl Higgins | Year Posted 2014
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Cheryl Higgins Poem
Summer Coming
Oh, I love the
summer coming!
This must be when
the oldsters said
”A new and better
land, lets go!
Lets see some place
where
all things grow and
take their space
before our very eyes
and leave
room for the
children too. And
quick!
Before its almost
gone!”
And off they went
with hasty wagons
piled with hasty
rigs and lots of
traps for
wolves and cats and
bear and guns for
wovles and cats and
bear
and mothers grabbing
bulbs and
old-country seeds
and wrenching from
the ground
new startled shoots
and startled
children
towing startled
calves and all else
startable
off to where
the summer coming
opened the land for
their new coming.
@2004 Cheryl Higgins
Copyright © Cheryl Higgins | Year Posted 2014
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Cheryl Higgins Poem
Ask it
by C. L. Higgins
Ask if you have my
heart one last time
and I might say yes
in a manner of
speaking.
Love’s fatal flaw is
having to hear it
said aloud.
Having to make words
form around
impulse and
bloodheat
and the next chance
encounter.
The next
dewars-and-water-logged
latenight hot tub
where words slip off
tongues easily
as the glass of ice
from the edge of the
tub.
Words damp between
the sheets, words
splashed on shower
tiles and
condensed on oak
bedside tables,
words
like stumbled-over
dreams
in the early morning
hours.
Ask one more time if
I remember saying
the words you took
how many months to
get from me
my eyes closed, the
bed
dry as any other
dawn.
Copyright © Cheryl Higgins | Year Posted 2014
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