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Three Poems by Laurie Klein
This Woman, Rounded Like Rock in a Hiss of Waves
I could take her home, should because,
north edge whetted against stone, this wind
feels surgical. I haven’t been well, though
and inspect instead my jacket, vest and shirt
for raveled seams. Sutures, that’s what I need or
the guts to embrace the infamous orphaned rib
that makes us sisters: one hurt drawn
from an uncommon wound.
I have cut myself
out of lives like hers, mistaking the antiseptic for holiness.
The Church can be hard place to bleed: On this rock,
its founder said. I’ve stacked my share of candied
prayers, like cairns in a wasteland. And yes,
I’ve walked with so-called healers who, on finding
once-opened hearts scarred and calcified, turned
righteous with knives,
with the all-purpose whip-stitch.
Calm as the long eye of this wind, she nods goodbye as if
all threads sing in the Spirit’s hands, as if pardon will
keep calling my name. I shrug, hearing osprey,
gulls, a red-tailed hawk. She cranes her neck,
and mine aches, watching her watch those pinions
homing, those lifted beaks. Stiff, unforgiven am I
unless all cries still rend the heavens.
Homecoming
Decades after childhood’s crime
a fist of wind cuffs my ear,
root cellar-dank. Underfoot,
un-shoveled ice, like memory,
retains each sorry step. Strange,
how air feels colder after
the snow stops. I’ve come
to lay the willow’s ghost, that fallen
friend whose trunk I stripped until
resin ran through raveled seams,
a slow hemorrhage staining grass,
rain-wet. So young, I’d hated
spineless boughs for failing me, late
one rattlepane night when lightning
shunted, root to crown. Now,
scouting stump, I’ve lost
my way and, pausing, lean against a tree,
look up, then look again --
come spring, wands of green
I won’t be here to see
will weep. I can’t help it,
new-shriven, I grin, recalling Job,
whose lost world rolled back whole
from God’s pocket.
Awaiting the Second Eye
Okiagari Koboshi
Literally: If you fall down seven times, get up eight.
Half-blind, they’re propped on nightstands or mantels --
those red Daruma Dolls. There must be others who,
like you, left behind this Japanese
appeal to luck. With ceremonial prayers
on New Year’s Day, or maybe before being
deployed, inking a thumb they smudged
its bland face with an eye, unrepeatable. Whorls
and ridges darkened the socket -- one
only. If they return, the other is daubed in,
like two lamps in a window. I’ve seen other pairs
reunited, safely en route to their temples to sing,
dance, torch that doll with friends.
Laurie Klein’s chapbook, Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh, won the 2004 Owl Creek Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Letters, Potomac Review, Many Mountains Moving, Commonweal, Mars Hill Review, Midwest Quarterly, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She is a consulting editor at Rock & Sling: A Journal of Literature, Art, and Faith.
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