Ascribing Origin

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. —Carl Jung

How many times have I heard myself

chalk up my keep-the-peace proclivity,

my pen-to-paper instinct,

to Dad and Mom respectively;

assign origin of both gifts and hardships

to Eldes and Johnsons?

My two-year-old son has already started.

My coat is from Mama.

My guitar is from Dada.

My book is from Grandpa Randy.

My shoes are from Grandma Robyn…

I wonder. Is this the beginning?

Benign precursor of more charged attributions

down the road? And might I have passed down

the tendency to ascribe origin in the first place

to a son who says often, staring up at his ceiling,

The shadows are in the light?

--Kristen Elde

Personality

For my son

You were two and a half

and had been in the Toddler Room just over a year.

You’d come to thrive there, after some tentative early months

as you felt your way around a new space, new adults,

other toddlers, some of them far less reserved than you,

running pell-mell, climbing the walls and yapping like puppies,

sometimes biting, not out of malice, of course,

but because it can feel pretty amazing to really clamp down.

Eventually you took your place among the ranks

of one- and two-year-olds, your niche one of observation and consideration,

weighing the worth before bringing paintbrush to paper,

plastic dinos to life, your body to the top of the slide

or to meet the embrace of little Josie, Ann, Owen.

Once committed, you were all in, sly smiles and goofball gestures

often accompanying. You came into your own in that room, Finn,

as your caregiver Lee would reflect with your dad and me.

But it was your time to advance to the next level—

upstairs in the Shooting Star Room was where your M–F would soon unfold.

As your mom, I felt the familiar tension between pride and sadness,

though the pull of the latter was stronger.

Your sweet Lee shared with us the school’s protocol:

she would take you up to your new room for ever longer periods

over the course of two weeks, staying with you at first—

easing the transition, comforting if needed.

The accounts came in: you were doing just fine, quick to take a seat

at this table of new cohorts. And our experience at home with you mirrored:

no changes in sleep, appetite, mood.

The last phase of the transition gave you a choice:

after a full morning upstairs, you could either return downstairs

to nap with the old crew, or remain with the new gang through siesta.

On picking you up that evening, we heard the ruling:

you hadn’t looked back, your new place already established.

--Kristen Elde

Reality Women's Clothing

I have a playful little poem up on YDP today--honored!

Hill Behind Finn’s House, Val Verde, January

How to get around it isn’t clear.
A thicket hedged across the road,

a high curve mass
of tumbleweeds.

Wind draws their tendrils tight.
How to get around them.

To the left, uphill,
to the right, the place

we used to be, where
tumbleweeds won’t tumble.

Earth and sky and thorny combs
that card them to each other.

You’re loose from your root,
hair caught in a knot at your nape.

Touch a tumbleweed, it springs back.
Tossed upon its thickest wisp,

a length of sisal twine
worked stiff,

a fishnet glove
the air can wear.

How it blows
between you.

The wind that names
the tumbleweed, names its purpose,

calls it by the way it moves.
I didn’t know you had a cactus

now tattooed across your back.
I haven’t seen you naked in so long.

--Iris Cushing

Alexandr Blok

One snowy night I was smiled upon by Russian gods
          & found myself at dinner opposite

The Moscow scholars a married couple—he only
          the world’s authority on Pasternak

& she the final word on her beloved Alexandr Blok
          & as we talked the evening gathered 

Along the length of the white table & I could only keep
          drinking the conversation in so deeply

I felt myself reaching back into the dark century & at last
          I got up to leave in my black cashmere

Overcoat I’d found hanging on the back rack of a Venice
          thrift store & became just another shadow

About to slide wordlessly into the night & yes it’s true
          it was snowing just in upstate New York
        
Not Moscow or St. Petersburg nor in any ancient page 
          yet to anyone who saw me walking

I imagined myself as the most lyrical shadow alive

--David St. John, 1949

Accidental Blues Voice

My ex-lover received it at seventeen
skiing the steep slope at Wintergreen called

Devil’s Elbow. The early snowmelt along the Blue
Ridge had slipped the white limb of a birch

through the crust, jutted that camouflaged tip
into the center of the trail. He hit it, full speed,

flipped over his ski poles. One of them split
his vocal cords with its aluminum point. He sprawled

in the snow, his pink throat skewered like Saint
Sebastian or the raw quiver of his Greek father’s

peppered lamb kebobs. The doctors didn’t let him speak
for a year and when he finally tried his choirboy

voice had gravel in it. His tenor had a bloody
birch limb in it, had a knife in it, had a whole lower

octave clotted in it, had a wound and a wound’s
cracked whisper in it. The first time I heard him 

sing in his blues band, five years after the accident,
I told him his smoked rasp sounded

exactly like Tom Waits. Like my grandfather
sixty years since the iron lung. I couldn’t believe

a growl like that crawled up from the lips
of a former Catholic schoolboy. But as he shut off

the halogen overhead—leaving only the ultraviolet
of his bedside’s black light—he stroked my cheek,

crooned, Goodnight, Irene. His teeth and his throat’s
three-inch scar glowed a green neon.

--Anna Journey

Anthem

We were all in love
but didn’t know it.
We were all in love
continually. Bless
our little hearts,
smoking and drinking
and wrecking things.
Bless our shameless shame.
We were loud, invincible.
We were tough as rails.
We stole street signs
and knocked over bins.
Ripped the boards
off boarded-up stuff.
Slept in towers
filled with pigeon shit
and fluff. We kicked
beer bottles down
cobbled lanes.
Tires and chains.
Chains and wheels
and skin. The world
was always ending
and we the inventors
of everything.

--Melissa Stein