Poetry | March 01, 2004
Poetry Feature: Jude Nutter
Jude Nutter
Featuring the poems:
- Horses
- The Rest of Us
- To The Reader
- The Last Supper
Horses
Still, the horses are beautiful and their grace keeps me occupied.
-Linda Hogan
We pass them being wheedled
and cajoled around small corrals, a confetti
of spit across each wide breast and the sweat
between their legs worried up into foam.
Their hooves flash in the dirt like polished bells.
We pass them as they sleep, standing up,
among the dandelions and tasseled grasses
gone to seed. They enter our lives
like fragments of Eden: the place that’s always been
our most difficult, elaborate dream; and once seen-
even from a freeway when you’re doing sixty,
aware of your own peril-it’s an effort of will
to take your eyes from a horse
in a field. Grace is like that. No other animal
occupies its skin so precisely, or walks forward
so carefully, as if pushing through great hauls
of dark water, chest deep in a stiff current.
I don’t believe we are meant to think about death,
even on those evenings
when a thin mist rides on the fields and their hooves
waver beneath them like votive flames. A horse
becomes its own myth and religion: out from the dark
machinery of its body something better,
and more beautiful, is always about to begin;
and if you ever need proof that it’s good
to have a physical body, touching
a horse in this life is the closest you will get to it.
To catch grace off guard: a lone horse
dozing in a field with the long reach of its neck
presented to the world, its thick
bottom lip fallen away from the fence of its teeth
and there, beguiling as god’s empty pocket,
pale skin of the inner mouth. Before you die look
into the eyes of a horse at least once
and discover how each is an immense, empty room
lit by a single candle. The emptiness of waiting.
Because if the gods ever come down to walk among us,
this is where they’ll live. And so when a horse,
seeing nothing about us it can recognize, lowers
its soft, deep mouth to the grass, and when that grass,
appearing wet in the sunlight, rises to greet it,
as if the lips of the dead were puckered skyward
for its kiss, it should be no surprise. How can we not
love an animal that spends so much of its life
with its mouth so close to the dirt. That they take,
with such tenderness, the mints
and the carrots we offer-as if the world
were ours to give-is the miracle; that they let us
slip on the sky-blue halter and lead them
through the cool of the evening.
The Rest of Us
for Roger
I’d always suspected the body was a dwelling,
a house that only children or the truly insane,
unafraid of returning to find doors barred against them,
enter and leave at will, that the rest
of us simply wait beneath the lintel of the threshold,
pondering the fields swept clean and polished
by the wind. And even though there are times
when the brave and the foolish among us step forward
to stand exposed beneath the sulk of sky,
we never go far; we simply look around a bit
before coming back in. Just to say we’ve been there.
But what of you, evicted
from the body by violence, snapped free of the flesh
for seventeen years only to return, lease in hand,
with rumors of heaven, which you remember
the way the rest of us remember childhood-
with great effort, out of sequence, one artifact
at a time: cuckoo spit, cat’s eye, that perfect cleft
in the tip of a pen nib, the small, carved shields
of a pair of cufflinks. The empty mouths of buckles.
The shiny boat of a shoe. And all those years
you spent in a coma add up
to a separate, complete life: a slim boy of seventeen any girl
would love for his mystery and aura of exile. And yet
after all those years, after leaning
with your lips against the locked doors of your life
you can no longer walk but have acquired a new language.
And now when you speak I swear you are speaking
with your mouth against the lid
of a casket. And so, heaven is built: one
thick mouthful at a time. And, yes, I am bitter and resentful:
being mortal is payment enough. There should be no
extra charge to mistake this world for heaven;
but god, you now tell me, is a casual flame
burning about the trunk of each tree and under
the shelf of every leaf, and how
can I not think about Blake, who saw angels
bleating with fire in the trees and then lived his life
with the lord’s bright body caught in his throat
like a hymn. There is no heaven;
only birds and wind. And your mind
flirting with its own absence. And the late-
blooming flowers sending out dark fleets of blossom.
Roger, I think one day you just
woke up and turned over, as we all do, to face the view:
outside, summer trees and the wink of visquene
and paper among the mute, busy mouths of the leaves;
small planes ascending from a distant airfield, scaling
and then slipping inside
the grip of the wind; that a strained
film of brightness was over all things, as if the world
were the hem of a long, pale robe caught
on a branch and pulled taut. That having been away
for so long, you mistook such things. There is no god;
just the limned and tooled body of the wind at play
among the plumes of the lilac; and trust me,
there’s a warmth deep down in the grasses, right
where they enter the soil, and it will line your throat
like a hymn. Come, let me wheel
you out through the streets of the world,
where the rest of us live, where there are no angels;
only girls on every corner baring their beautiful limbs.
To The Reader
Out here, in darkness, the rain
knocks against the earth, unlocking tiny doors
in the dirt of the garden. You have spent
your whole life so far trying to bear your body
as a blessing. Now you are waiting,
with an empty suitcase, between your father’s
tool shed and the high, rough fence
of the neighbors’ garden, and whatever
it is the rain sets free from the soil, it tastes
like the vacancy of the grave, like the hunger
you discovered as you entered this world—released
from the grip of your mother’s body and passed,
fully condemned, into the slack cage
of your father’s arms: the brand-new loneliness
of the body you were given. This emptiness
is the only thing you have that will always
belong to you. You watch your mother in the thin
bone-light of her kitchen: she is singing,
but you can’t hear it. You watch her red mouth
pulse open like a wound. And then close. She looks
like a butcher in her shiny apron, shaving the skins
from the carrots and potatoes. You want her to abandon
the peels stacked like scrolls on the counter and walk,
weeping, out into the rain in her new slippers;
you want her to crawl, weeping, on her knees
in darkness, turning every stone in the garden, to part
the tall stems of the hollyhocks weeping
and calling your name. You want her to believe
you are lost like one of the dead. just once
would mean everything and be enough. You were born
in darkness, your mother once said, before dawn—
she remembers the milkman whistling up the drive,
the scrape of bottles on the grit of the top step;
that your father was out, at the bottom
of the garden, his torch tossed down in the grass,
digging a hole in which he’d set your placenta
and a sapling that would later grow waxy, long-
throated blossoms no one can name.
Even in summer those flowers will fill
with shadow and not once will the bees ever enter
their slick hallways. Soon you will go inside
and say nothing, and your mother will go on believing
the appetite you have is literal. You came into
this world, she once said, without a single
sound. There’s a prayer we send out,
in darkness, toward darkness. And your heart,
out of habit, keeps on saying it: Mother, it whispers,
mother, mother. Meaning: my jailer and my liberator.
I never worried, your mother will tell you
years from now; I always knew you’d come home
when you were hungry. Meaning: I’m not sure
how to love you now that I have turned
you loose from the prison of my body, into this greater
and less literal darkness.
The Last Supper
It was Mary, felled by grief, on her knees
in the dirt, who mistook a man newly risen
from the dead, the only man she’d ever really loved,
for a gardener: Sir, if you have carried him away,
she cried, tell me where you have laid him, and I
will take him away. So it’s true: what we observe
sometimes betrays us. It was raining, heavily,
slowly, making the leaves of the silver ash
outside my window genuflect and bow down;
and the mirror on the dresser with its slender,
seductive dishonesty reflected
and carried into the room many things
from outside my field of vision: a few boats
approaching the hard, welcome arms
of the harbor, a short run of washing left hanging
in the garden next door, and the rain closing its lips
around the yellow flag and the fuchsia.
I’d always suspected the rain to be full
of such rooms and enclosures. I’d woken up jet-lagged
in the late afternoon in the thin bed I’d slept in
when I was a child; woken feeling sad and lonely
even though I was neither sad
nor lonely—that was just my old self, the past
and its various disguises. I’d been dreaming
about that poet in New York City who walks
through the busiest streets all day, recording,
in a spiral-bound, pocket-sized notebook, nothing
but the observable world. To do so, he said,
keeps him honest, and he is never seduced
by his own ideas. Strange, I’d always thought art
was a series of small deceptions
performed in the service of the truth—a collection
of lies, like a set of knives; that even the vigilant
among us give ourselves away by choosing
certain things over others. Already the rain
and the late afternoon were moving
toward that time of light when the quiet
benevolence that has watched us all day like a parent
turns away, and I knew I should be outside
walking, resisting any intimation of ending,
otherwise I’d feel abandoned all evening, otherwise
I’d fall back into sleep abandoned. But
it was almost dinnertime, and I was held
where I was by the music my mother made
striking her carillon of copper-bottomed saucepans,
by the breathy glide of drawer after drawer opening,
then closing, opening, then closing; by the galloping
of many knives across the marble cutting block.
During dinner my’parents slipped
me what they insisted they could not finish: a thin
sheaf of salad greens, more garnish than meal,
boiled leeks and pork medallions, a few glazed,
sliced carrots, glowing like a handful of change.
Such provisioning, of course, was metaphorical:
it was simply my permission to finish
the journey without them. And what ruined
my heart was not the thinness
of my father’s thighs, or the dark inlay
of veins around my mother’s ankles;
it was not how they forgot things, or remembered
what had not yet happened. It was how little
they ate; it was the way my mother rallied
all day in the kitchen and then arrived at the table
with platters and great dishes that were always
almost empty. It was the way their portions
became lost in the vast, pale arenas of their plates.
If observing the world keeps us honest, what truths
do we glean watching a body we love
going into the ground? The body is both everything
and nothing.
It was the way they’d come to need so much
less of the world. And how this, perhaps, was enough.
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