POETRY MONDAY: May 1, 2016
Merridawn Duckler
Was there ever a poet with a name more perfect for spring?
If you haven’t heard of Merridawn Duckler before, it’s because you may have been following only one art form. Her poems have appeared and are forthcoming in poetry journals such as Naugatuck River Review, Cirque Journal, Fifth Wednesday and many others. Her recent fiction has been published in Farallon Review and Poetica. Her play in verse was in the Emerging Female Playwright Festival of the Manhattan Shakespeare Project, and other plays have been performed in Arizona, California, Nevada, Washington, Oregon and Alaska. Her text-based, conceptual art is in Blackfish Gallery in Portland, Oregon. She is also a scholar and editor. Her Master in Jewish Studies thesis was on the French-Russian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and she has presented academic papers at the North American Levinas Society. She is an editor at Narrative and the international journal in aesthetics, Eventual Aesthetics. Fellowships and awards for her work include Writer @Work, NEA, Yaddo, Squaw Valley, SLS in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Berta Anolic Visual Arts Fellowship in Israel, Norman Mailer Center, a merit fellowship to the Southampton Poetry Conference, and others.
Perhaps you will have an opportunity to experience some of her other work, especially if you are in Portland, Oregon, where she lives and writes. For today, however, our focus is on her poetry. Here, then, are three poems by Merridawn Duckler.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Funereal
I was late, as many have predicted I would be,
except this wasn’t my funeral but a friend’s father
who I didn’t even know. I crept in apologetically
as an old man sang in the range of a child. There were jokes
as happens these modern days, a stand-up funeral;
and the untouchable sadness of strangers,
somehow more moving than any other kind.
My attention wandered to the grass outside,
a lively, toxic green in the winter sun,
while stranger after stranger spoke. You could tell
the oldest from the baby, the one who felt neglected
from the one who was neglected. A skeletal, pale
teenager with wildly unkempt hair came in late, caught
by a woman who kept turning bitter, quick eyes
to gaze over the audience and see if there were any strangers
like, for example, me. I left off composing eulogies
in my head—such a terrible habit—and stood
when everyone stood. my body thick as a brick of tea.
I wanted to shout to everyone: go out and have sex this minute!
But they had already begun to shovel the dirt with heavy strokes.
The Jews bury their own dead—trust me
no one else is going to do it—so dirt rang on the wood
as on the periphery the maintenance staff stood around,
no more at the funeral than me, a maintenance staff to my friend.
Several women navigated the mud by walking with their arms out
like tightrope walkers and we all formed a line in a tragic dance off.
Since I was there already, I went to your grave,
feeling a great anxiety rise in me like the shadow
of the eagle over the field mice that gets smaller and smaller
but no less dangerous. I wanted to give up
but suddenly there was the grave, white stone in mud.
This is not the time for the shovel but the broom I fussed,
brushing a fading word to lay down a new pinecone and branch of evergreen,
the truth of three years asking: where is your habitation?
You are not here; you are not there; my grief is like a stranger
at the funeral, no one knows where it will wander next.
Wind Spitter
He’d been in school for years but learned nothing
not even how to be in school. Now, a table’s width from me
he looked less like a man than a constellation someone drew lines between,
to convince the sky it held bulls or archers. Well-travelled
was his life; as he spoke he became the color
of each landscape, from the red bluffs of California to silvered
Texas wealthy enclaves. I liked him but didn’t trust him
or I trusted him to cause me numerous regrets. In my mind
I called him Don Quixote, because I often don’t believe names
and there was a wind in him, he could have been dropped from anywhere,
could have sat in an office, fan lazing, in some dusky, western outback, 1806,
and handed the couple the piece of paper that makes all the difference
to their joy and future. Our eyes follow the happy couple,
but we never return to the man, who has already vanished
to walk out on the front porch in this era, noting the color of the sky
through the vapors of a coffee, quick rub to the pink snout
of his cat, then buttons his shirt to drive to my place
on the river, the pine table between us smooth, knowing, connoisseur
but dark rings and eternal spirals where I lift my hand recall
the forest, where it was born and re-born, without pain because without cause.
First Plane to Jerusalem
I rode there on a German airline, an irony not lost to me
but kept to myself because I was going alone.
On the east coast we accrued some black-hats;
of that group there was one the stewardess kept upbraiding,
he was jellyfish pale, black as a graph, nervous, no, not nervous, he’d never
been less so, standing in the aisle, even after our wings
jerked out onto the runaway like a thing in the hands of a child.
Sir, sir if you don’t sit down we’ll have to return to port, said the stew
while we obedient, gazed up at him, as he held on with each lurch,
but firmly, his wild eyes not seeing us, remained upright with difficulty
until his friend talked him down from sprouting wings or something,
taking off alone into the land and I guess I’d half-risen myself
in memory but then sat, grasping the hand guard for the day’s flight
I spent next to a terrible woman, the seas under us, an unknown emotion.