Kim Garcia
THREE POEMS
Meditation on a Gorky Painting Titled by Breton
How does my mother’s apron unfold in my life?
Please repeat the question. I have buried my ears in her lap.
In 1947 Arshile Gorky hung himself from the ribs
of his studio. Not to be confused with the heating pipes
he rerouted to warm his room in the Village or the loft
he might have had for a Soho song, if he’d been thinking
ahead, instead of behind to the mother he painted like an icon
hand over pale hand until the fingers were gloves of light
a transfiguration which repeated loss, an impossible hunger
for touch from the woman who starved on the way to Boston,
beaten hollow by the Turks, and still emptying herself—a dulcimer
of devotion into the son she would send to die in a new world,
where Gorky would swim out into the Charles to drown
after losing his job at the Arsenal factories, drawing on the roof,
only to turn and turn again, in the ugly Charles, thick with boot
black from Brockton, from Lowell’s mills, and ask himself
to repeat the question—What about painting? Or, oh glittering eye,
how does my unfolding apron my mother’s life? A thousand times.
Another Thing Invisible to the Eye
Paper wasp’s nest, dark hollows coming to a point, another finger, and already
the woods are sopping up their own familiar dusk, gray funk of stone, of water
gathering under the needles, night eyes opening, crawling out of ground dark
into starlight, the soft speckled vision of misfiring cones, the eye itself reaching
straining towards the answers even the humblest thing, overlooked by the sun,
might give the colder light. The stars are steady, more sure than any sun.
Not quite unrequited, this. Single shaft of silver caught in the jelly of sense,
already becoming invisible, already missed, no longer, like this I, essential.
Take me to the river of things once loved and drown me there
never the same way twice.
You Mentioned the Future, AFter Lovemaking
So I started a file – papery and far off,
the way stars feel when you’re lying
in a tent,
in an empty field
a brush of gray nylon the only music.
The planets wasting themselves away, lozenges
disappearing on the night’s tongue.
Somewhere a mother is
Singing softly to her empty arms.
There are fewer tears now.
From every orifice an exhortation—
a sermon in brief
about being past care and feeding.
Sing me softly to sleep.
The bars are all closing,
Our desires are read from an endless
scrolling banner by a stranger
we call friend.
Kim Garcia’s recent work includes The Brighter House, winner of the 2015 White Pine Press Poetry Prize, and DRONE, winner of the 2015 Backwaters Prize, as well as Tales of the Sisters, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review’s chapbook prize. Garcia teaches creative writing at Boston College.