Fall 2008
Noah's leap
A spark, then smoke: we live.
With no wild animal.
With a luckless cow,
and the red-velvet fish that nobody knows,
nobody seems
to know. The cardinal streak
in the rainbow calls to our human
grief, not
to our animal-grieving for the moon
my beloved
cat rode out on. Her wild tongue stilled
when the pack ripped her.
She had, at least,
that dignity. We had, at least,
the wheat's scream
beyond the blue-velvet curtain of our bus
named Salve Regina. Here,
the unborn child
is referred to as light. When will the light come.
When loved
extravagantly—…ash,
ether—
let this cup pass.
She chose assumption.
It's okay,
you don't have the heart
to tie the pig to the porch. Or make sense
of the pig's limp hands, without sadness,
shaping the silver cloud
into a kite—Noah runs
to get the kite up. Then onto the spinning merry-
go-round to keep it taut.
Raven's Covenant
I wear my clothes into the boat's metal shower
and wash them with tallow soap. Pampas grass
is the great beige
feathering along the river. Beyond it,
glowing green fields. Plants truly
emit their own light at dusk. At dusk—
very beautiful children
wash their clothes on the bank.
The smell of riverwater is earth
rolling over and over.
An Incan stone wall still separates two fields
with its pattern of a flower: center stone,
five petals. Center,
petals around. Drying in the pile
below our hammock, the twinned
ear of corn—that is our luck. And our benificence—
whose cat cries, all night.
Scaffolding and drill bits, buried in white mud
Waking from our hammocks
to a morning rainstorm, you wash
your handkerchief at the eaves of the boat.
I toss my butterfly earrings
to the trove, that brown water… Heartstring,
you're hushing me&mdash because my rage,
it is intact. We can't feel the losses
that will determine our lives. Yet the very quiet rage,
like the gratitude, could it determine?
You say it boo-hoos, no.
Behooves me to win
back the commonplaces that are mine&mdash
the shores of this boat,
a square cornfield, and the Kansas yard
where my birthday tornado touched down.
But if I would, we're washed
from that scale
of our emancipation—from my gold
mountain's impersonality.
Sarah Vap is the author of American Spikenard, winner of the 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize, and Dummy Fire, winner of the 2006 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. She is Poetry Editor at the online journal 42 Opus, and lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.