About Green Field: Rose Black's superb new collection of poems, Green Field, is a sobering volume of recollections, reflections and meditations upon a life's ravaged hopes, the echoes of a personal past, and the raw realities of our present. Like fables and dreams gone dark in the lens, these poems instruct us in the complex measures we need to employ in determining what values still remain--and endure--in our lives. --David St. John
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
SOME OF ROSE BLACK'S RECENT POEMS
Climbing
because we dared each other
to climb
higher
and higher
because
the branches became less certain
less likely to hold
swirled around us
wild and green
and because those great heights
made us heady
we stepped into sky
not at all
clear
where we
were going
or why
Vietnam
On the
fourth of July, you cover my eyes with your hand.
What's this? you ask, as you
slide a piece of wet green pepper
into my
mouth. I begin to nibble. Stop! you are screaming.
Down the stairs, into the courtyard. You are a tiny
speck
on the
other side of a canyon. Between us, showers of
shooting
sparks, flaming tails, red and orange fire. Stop! Stop!
But the
people in the courtyard don't see or hear you. I run
down, try to grab the shell of you without you.
Between us,
somewhere
I can't go. The rockets boom. People laugh.
Their children laugh. Later, they will join the big
parade, the big
celebration.
Later,
in your bedroom, you yank curtains closed.
I put you to bed, pull the covers up, watch you curl
toward the
wall. The room is gray and begins to shiver.
I wish I could say I kept trying to touch you, reach
you, that
I kept
trying. Because, Go away, you said, it was
the last time
I ever saw you. Every fourth of July I don't, no,
can't,
go back to
where you went. But I go back to you, and us.
Salad of endive, tomato, green pepper; you so close,
then gone;
small white box on the table, a surprise.
Stop! Please stop! who left, what
happened.
Go
You must be willing to lose
the first fifty games, you say.
You are Jo zu, the
higher hand,
rank of seventh degree,
yet you choose me. My handicap:
nine black stones. I place them,
symmetrically, on the pale ash board,
on the hoshi, the star-points.
That day, we hunted for Go stones
on the hot, sand shore. Small, round,
white or black. Perfect. You found
the first stone, and touched my lips.
It is a game played to the death, you explain.
You bow. Then, cross legged
in your samurai hakama, you suspend
between two fingers stones of smooth
white, loud-click them on the board,
thwack, force battle, thwart.
I am ready. I mirror your posture.
My shiny jet-black warriors click,
rally, fight. Fortify themselves
in impregnable positions.
We do not speak, except,
Atari, the warning, softly,
before each capture.
Our eyes are always on the board.
One by one, we lay our stones down.
Broken sword, flying snow.
I LIVE IN THE STONE
inside the
stone
is a stone yard
where my lover
carves black
granite mountains
I carve the
low tide
and new moon
in the mud we
find milk
and green pennies
in the tar of
the roof
wild radish, white stars
in the
wind-stripped soil
visible roots
in the garden
bare shadows
brown lizards
inside the
stone yard
inside the stone
STONES, A PRELUDE
We
must raise the stones
from the dead.
We
place the stones
upright. They attach
earth to sky. They
attach
all that is human
to all that is not,
half human, half not.
We
arrange the stones.
Many
stones, one.
No stone like
another,
yet all belong.
Torn
from the earth,
they
are scarred,
yet whole.
They
receive the farthest
reaches
of sky and beyond.
Everything here,
inside them.
The
stones stand
guard.
Their purpose
fixed. They carry
ancestors. They
summon
all that is lost. The
lost
return.
We
stand in the center.
From the breath of
stones
we make a cosmos.
Not Unlikely
We keep many things locked up here.
One gate, heavy wood, almost
impossible to open.
Another, chain link, topped with three strands of barbed
wire,
opens and closes at our command.
It's not unlikely we meet Sam. After all, we sell stone
for carving,
and Sam is a sculptor from Nome.
Unlikely, though, that we let anyone in after hours.
But Sam, he easily laughs and glides
his way through all our locks and fences.
There's Sam, I say to my husband, when the bell on our
gate rings
just after we close. We never
hesitate to let Sam in.
After all, my husband says, he is our
only customer.
No, I say, it's because we love him.
And he is our best only customer.
Soapstone and alabaster. Sam carves black and white
orcas, and salmon, translucent orange
with green faces. Green or white
bears, claws out of ivory walrus tusks, or black baleen.
It's not unlikely that someone like Sam would find us
and pass through our gate.
Not unlikely we'd learn that walrus
tastes like chicken, whale-meat like salty black olives.
Silver Spring
When the rains come in early spring, water seeps up through the basement floor, murky and foul. It creeps into corners, flows under the washing machine, under the old gas stove, across the mud sill into the plant room, and under the crooked door that leads outside.
The old woman hobbles down to the basement with a long-handled mop. She mops the floor, wrings the water into buckets, then pours it all down the cast iron sink.
She cannot keep up. Soon the water is to her ankles. Outside, the water swells into little rivers. At its lowest point, the yard itself begins to fill, and a pond appears, then slowly spreads across the grass.
Underneath it all, the silver spring, for which her neighborhood is named, will continue to wind its way under everyone's floors and basements, rising and falling like the breath of the earth and its oceans.
Her neighbors try to divert the unwanted water this way and that, away from themselves. The old woman rests her mop against the wall, opens her arms, says, Come.
SCREEN SAVER
An Arctic sea. Far away mountains, jagged and peaked.
A low sun just beginning. Maybe it is ending. Thin, pale.
In the distance, there might be an island.
Close up, on the shore, huge chunks of ice.
Around them the hardest of rocks ― granite, feldspar,
quartz. Shades of white and gray.
The sun is just rising, or it is just setting. It could be the end
of night. Or the beginning. Deep between mountains —
crevasses, ravines. In the distance, there could be an island.
I don't want to tell you my reasons for this choice. Why I didn't
choose the field of daffodils, bright yellow, their smooth
leaves and stems. All facing toward light.
In the distance, a finger of black. It's either land or where
the ice is melting. I don't want to think about ice melting,
or notice how the spur of black has a certain shine and thickness.
I don't want to smell the sweet oily stench of what lies under ground,
and I don't want to think about those who will come here.
I move through this landscape by dogsled, by boat.
In places like this, ice breaks up, ice melts. The seasons will
change. A fresh blanket of ice will grow over the land, over the sea
again, and again. Though, maybe not.