ANGIE ESTES
SOLSTICE
Towards the end
of her life, my mother kept
saying I’m going to be here
as long as I’m supposed
to be, as long as the days
of June and as long as
Proust said a sentence needs
to be because it contains a
complete thought, and no matter
how complex it may be, the thought
should remain intact because the shape
of the sentence is the shape
of thought: think how
the hummingbird feeds as long
as it needs to, dipping
its tongue to make the nectar tremble,
although not nearly as long as I stayed
behind the Baptist church beneath
honeysuckle when I was ten, pulling
each flower’s pistil back through
its throat to drip one sweet bead
onto my tongue before my parents
drove us up into the mountains
for the all-day meeting and supper
on the ground, which always
seemed to me more like all-day
supper with cakes and pies laid out,
waiting
end-to-end on picnic tables, watermelons
soaking in their galvanized tubs
of ice while the grills kept burning
until even after evening
prayer, everyone still
had mustard on their
folded hands and
faces, the nights so dark
that all the fireflies were one
giant sparkler held up to tick away
the night in their hide-and-seek
here-I-am, over there, here, now
here, as if the shorter
the days become, the longer the sentence
needs to be.
LE PAYS OÙ JE DÉSIRERAIS VIVRE:
terra, cara, terroir: in the open
mouth of the wind, blue-black from all
the kites it has eaten, blown back
like the past, where the family lives
in Alexandre Dumas’ Le chevalier
d’Harmental : 5 rue du Temps-Perdu.
In the about-to-bloom history
of wisteria, twisting while
the soft gray paws of pussy willow
boom suddenly above me, a thunderhead
nods like Mary at the Annunciation,
recalling
how Abraham said the journey is within, from
inside us to inside us, nous même à nous
même. Where else could they be
headed in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia when
the chest of the Virgin Mary flies open
to release the beating doves?
Celtic perigrini wandered
in “thin places,” sites in landscape
where the borders between
this place and some other, past
and present, feel most fragile, begin
to fray the way bison painted on walls
in Grotte de Niaux move in
and out of rock as if it were
a membrane between worlds.
Out back,
the mourning dove bobbing
in the birdbath, one wing unfurled
and hoisted on its mast, doesn’t even think
about sailing home. She’s somewhere
between Pavlov and Pavlova.
COMMENT J’AIMERAIS MOURIR:
in Old English unweder, “unweather,”
weather so extreme that it seems
to have come from another
climate or time, still holding
in my hand a lame, which bakers use
to carve their mark
on bread—not to be
confused with l’âme, the soul—
while blackbirds line up
to form an abacus on the wire
above me, listening
to the Arpeggione Sonata, which Schubert
composed for an almost
extinct instrument, like the moon
we keep singing to anyway—Casta
Diva, pure goddess, shine
on, shine on harvest moon
up in the sky (the most difficult
part of the opera, the soprano
replied, was not crying after
her own death)—and the moon, too,
a trace fossil, a sign left
by the impress of life rather than
life itself, as in the fitting
of a bespoke jacket: all dots
and dashes, Cezanne’s
taches, what’s left of Mont Sainte-
Victoire when he is done painting it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angie Estes is the author of six books of poems, including Enchantée (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize) and Tryst, one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.