Five Poems
They Were Warned
Often they were warned by light—a nun in Essex, c. 700, who said lamps the size of rooms
who said my hands have turned to suns and another who saw a torch erase
a face in perfect peace and know that the body grows lighter than the sky
behind it that also opens into a plate of day. All these were ways of saying death
is something that comes to you as I might come to you an arm around you thinking not of the gesture as I so often do, slipping but of what I’m about to say
Gravesend
My ended grove my threaded shriek drawn along
by swans straining at the same. Did you fall off the edge
and which? home carved from an egg as if a little
trap door slowly spread through every room ever this ready
the dead are hauling a circus behind them in flames
There Was Nothing
There was nothing in the grave. They cracked it open
and only the newspaper.
The grave came back. He stirred his tea with a finger
and glanced at the news.
There are no graves in Gravesend, which is of course
logical. And overflowed with it—
The relation of water to the dead
in which we washed our hands
in its liminal spaces—bridges,
rivers, shore upon shore and shoreline unfurling
the shadow around a person
was a shroud unwound and the tiny thing flying.
Kent
In the grounds of Bayham Abbey in a garden designed by Repton
a procession of monks just about dusk or just after darkness has fallen
go walking.
Or there was no sadness, but a simple fold in time.
One must be for others a reason to live.
Often, it is said, the presence of a ghost is signaled by illogical cold.
Lord Halifax noted it when investigating “the Laughing Man of Wrotham,” who strode into his brother’s room and murdered him again and again
to the horror of the maid who, a century later, wedged a chair against the door and watched him disappear.
There is no cure
for anything, and that cough you have, Madam, once
there was a fire every Friday the 13th, and once there was a death
that seemed to deserve it, but that was an illusion. Once there was a
death, but that was illusory, too. And all over Kent, someone is still
heading up the stairs, lighting the way with a match.
Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman
Wilkie Collins had a brother accompanied by a tall column of mist
had loved only once the gesture at the throat as she, the mirror of his
love will come back for him, it was a simple story a woman
encountered in a garden a garden, the summer of night the foreign
edge on her speech pulled him in and on we go to her murder, then a woman
will know how wrong she has been and still walk to the station ago
Cole Swensen is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry, most recently Greensward (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) and Ours (University of California Press, 2008), which was supported by a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her 2004 title, Goest, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and other volumes have won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, Sun and Moon's New American Writing Award, and the National Poetry Series. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the 2009 Norton anthology American Hybrid. She's also a translator of contemporary French poetry, prose, and art criticism; her translation of Jean Fremon's The Island of the Dead won the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation, and she has received translation grants from the Association Beaumarchais and French Centre du Livre. The founder and editor of La Presse, a small press dedicated to experimental French poetry translated by English-language poets, she co-directs the annual Reid Hall Translation Seminar in Paris. She was the writer-in-residence at Yale's Beinecke Library in 2007-2008 and has served as a visiting writer at the Pratt Institute, Brown University, Temple University, Grinnell College, and the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and divides her time between Iowa, Washington DC, and Paris.