Andrea Moorhead
Delaware Avenue Baptist Church
Crackers and juice. White plate with a blue rim. It’s early in the day. They’re singing in the next room. We can’t join them, we’re too young. The benches are tall, smooth, mahogany. Two or three of us, perhaps four. Ritz crackers and orange juice, maybe a paper towel for our hands, lips. It’s best to be clean while we sit here and listen wait doze. We’re only kids. Music rising, falling. Shadows flickering on the wall. The windows are large, overlook the avenue. It’s always sunny here in the morning, I think, and the crackers are soft and orange, the juice acidic and cold. I’ll stay here all day, even when the music has stopped, and we’re supposed to leave. The benches are tall and I’ll snuggle down so no one will see me. Churches are blue-cool at night, the shadows calm and long. Only the streetlight now, filtering in through the window. It’s not warm like sunlight, but it enchants in its own special way.
Uneasiness at Dusk
What is flickering outside the window? No noise, nothing disturbed. A shadow, face, sweeping light. Nothing out back, nothing to the east or to the west. Phantom candles. Music in the trees, in between the bare branches. All the leaves already and the ground frozen. My eyes are watching the panes. Creasing the shadows, splitting the plain glass into quadrants. No noise, nothing disturbed. A face in the shadows, lights swaying among the branches. All the leaves already and the ground frozen. It could snow later tonight, when I’m sleeping, when I’m dreaming, when the flickering finally stops.
Of Unknown Origin
The first day of a retreat. The illusion of time, of space. Conversation blends into the air. Nothing around now. Just the wind, the rain. Absence of words. They’re like charcoal, they smudge easily. A sack of charcoal. It isn’t like coal, it doesn’t shine. Maybe it could, but no one ever looks at it like that. A darkness without source. Lines on paper, smudges on skin. I’ve put the papers away, not so much to hide anything or to protect the surface, but just to put them away, out of sight. I can recall the strokes. Some are smears along the edges, some are hard lines that fracture. Others create a second surface, darker, less easily discerned. I’ve eaten charcoal in small amounts. It’s healthy. Granules of peat or coconut shell, I never did know the source. It came in a tin, like licorice pastilles. Not the same taste, however. My grandmother preferred the pastilles. Pungent, curious taste. But this is the first day of a retreat. A return to silence. The illusion of space, of time. Night sky, day sky, the enormity of the moon. No one looks at the sun. It seems all around. Penetrating, diaphanous. It all depends on your mood, the day, the hour, the predictions of storm, the predominance of drought. Someone called drought poetry hammered into the sun. Nothing escapes from that conflict. Not even the eyes of darkness. But I transgress, regress, flip the coin to rekindle the words. Like charcoal shedding its light in a sack. No one thinks to take it out, put it inside before it storms. Lay the fire, set the burner, make haste. The windows are iridescent now. Like my mind, my tongue, the source entirely unknown.
It could have been beautiful. Deep blue, almost cobalt. Something intruded, caused the shift. An overlay of pastel where it was not needed. It’s too delicate for the season. I need a cabin with only two windows. The rising and the setting sun. The north wind pushing against the back façade. From the west, storms, whose deepening furor I do not need to contemplate. But the rising and the setting, before I can begin the day, end the day, slip into the trance of activity, the allure of dream. Each window a small square, several feet off the ground. During the night nothing can look in, during the day, only the birds flying by. I’ve lost faith in benign cataclysms. Rolling rocks, falling branches. They’ll take the wall out, crush the steps, shatter the window. I’ll sleep against the north wall, listen to the night howling, rolled in a woolen blanket. But the light enters when the moon is full, and the storms have receded. I’ll need some time to absorb the pattern, or decide if there is one. This is the first day of a retreat. Silence. Comprehension without description. There is neither loss nor memory. Something’s moving along the woodpile. Dark and furry. I’ll stay inside a while, let the day rise.
Other Disasters
If you had carried the crown higher and if the ground had not been frozen, and if the rain raged around us, then fires would have taken the diamonds emeralds, and flowers would have grown the length of palms, and wells would have overflowed with intoxicating smells, and if you had gone with me that night, would we have seen the black sheen of the void, the singularly positioned stripe of concord, the moon cradle tipping towards the stars, or a phantom thought careening into the ditch, worrying about crowns and ice and rain while the world burns through the night and continents shift position, burying their dead without relief.
Massawippi
Between us snow and snow around as wind always and again, this forever disturbance of the heart, knowing ice and sun together, the swiftness beyond any recollection, a seam stitched in blue-grey and opaque, the land winding itself tightly around, and the lake remains at the center of consciousness, still rippling the black-dark and solemn, I have never seen the day rising as softly quietly, the lake beneath and always, and between us snow and forever and around when the wind cuts off and mountains move against the sky, we have walked all night long to arrive and the dawn coming still and the black luster around, when we pause at the river and the shadow lengthen, walking as snow around and the ice building against the bridge reflects something unknown, the crow’s glossy wing, the seeded land above the hills, a crest golden and precious when hemlock and tamarack, you have never gathered berries on that slope, smoke rising, the lake still and snow around us and between when the west wind grows and the night is all and all still and snow as the final light within.
Andrea Moorhead, born in Buffalo, New York, is the publisher of the prestigious international magazine, Osiris. Her most recent book is The Carver's Dream (Red Dragon Fly Press). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Abraxas, Great River Review, The Bitter Oleander, Phoenix, Poetry Salzburg Review, and elsewhere.