caffeine destiny
spring 2008


















Katie Ford


a r k

We love the stories of flood and the few
told to prepare in advance by their god.
In that story, the saved are
always us, meaning:
whoever holds the book.


s p r i n g w i s h

As from the Earth the light Balloon
Asks nothing but release -
Emily Dickinson
Some mornings there was bread on the air
and transoms opened to let the oaks wake you,
light chains of pollen caught on the dog's sleeping face.
And afternoons of parades, people dressed like ghosts
and cyclones, government officials and giraffes
on stilts, animals of the dry savannah we wished
we stood on. It is a far wish, a spring wish,
and so the people of the parade let go of
balloons they dreamt were their minds,
not the minds they woke to find writhing in the gravel,
but rising tangerine minds, porcelain white, blue
of a sky in which to be absolutely lost.
So much pleasure I remember
when mine slipped from sight
but could be imagined almost perfectly, gone,
warm on the string where I'd held it.



t h e s i n g i n g

One could write
there is amber inside the hibiscus again.

But the dead kept singing
we are here, beneath the houses.

It was not sufficient to put wayward
bodies back into their tombs.
(The distraught song of the dead,
the song of insufficiency).

I walked through the flooded wards
but turned suddenly back:
there was only a sliver of land
where the dead had not drowned
and, sometimes, I was not on it.

I welded myself between the days
of January, February, months
coming, going inside a song:
not a lullaby. Nothing of comfort.

They sang to be known
as I boiled parasites from the bath.
They sang as I lowered into that water.

I wanted a blue night with blue-white rings,
lifts of smoke-light from the centuried houses.
To be on the balcony with Josh,
with Martin and Rose, watching smoke from chimneys,

which is to say I wanted
to see others alive
and count myself among them.

But they sang as I boiled parasites
from the bath. They sang into me
as I lowered into their water.

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition and the forthcoming Colosseum. She has also written a chapbook, Storm (Marick Press). Individual poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and the Seneca Review. She is the poetry editor of the New Orleans Review and has taught at Loyola University, Reed College, and now at Franklin & Marshall College. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Josh Emmons.