Pamela Harrison

El Rosario

Gringa baggage, wedged in the front seat
of a bunged-up Trooper, gripping roll-bar
and rearview to keep from sailing through
the windshield like a stone on the road
in the mountains of Honduras, “I go,”

I told the curious at home, “to teach
knitting in Rosario,” but also
to see my lover at his best, doing work
natural to him as breathing, in a village
so dismantled by United Fruit

it has no crafts, sewing or art, nothing
gratuitously pretty except a flower
scratched in the whitewash of a mountain house.
In this place with no light after dark save
the crackle of a campfire—where red beans

dry in the dirt and field corn fills the porch
of each house like the flotsam of a wreck
until the women shell it, twisting cob
against dry cob with calloused hands—where
crippled children pull themselves along

like twisted toys through parasitic earth
and sturdy boys play barefoot in a field
so besmirched with dung, they smell to heaven
when they’re done—where the village water
trickles through manure to a muddy pool—

here, my lover does what he can, tapping
Francisco’s chest, dispensing drugs, stitching
José’s machete wound, salving Carlo’s burn.
He pulls Pilar’s rotten teeth with pliers.
They throb in his palm like bloody stars.

He’s done it long enough to know he changes
little but himself, leaves little in his wake—
an echo of kindness. Patients come and go.
I sit in the shade of the porch knitting
with the women, saving the fraying thread

that knots like uncombed hair on Xenia’s head.
She’s hungry and hangs about the clinic
like the botflies on the cattle's sores. I
fumble on in Spanish, grasping for verbs,
unable to remember words I cannot see.

Today, a little girl came on horseback,
three hours riding through rough, eroded hills.
Blind since birth, she sat in my lap. Staring
toward her mother’s voice, she ran her small hands
over mine while I worked the needles and thread.

She might have learned to knit, except the news
was bad and they must hurry home before
the dark obscured their path. Now what am I to do
with the feel of her fingers, the sight of her
red dress disappearing down the road?

--first appeared in Stereopticon

Winter’s Tale

How disciplined they were
before us, never a cross word,
upholding the mindful gloss of courtesy,
nothing alarming, nothing true,
allowing our ignorant, adolescent lives
to billow out of the confines of that house
into the open contours of our own. Such kindness,
never to halve our hearts by telling tales. Starving,
utterly adult, they gave us their gold.

That last bad year, I’d call home
from college, catching her
in the loneliness of their empty house,
lost in her alcoholic blur, tongue
so thickened, speech so slurred,
I hung up without speaking,
never daring to name the suicide
she’d begun to live. Cold at heart
and letting the silence grow, I
abandoned them.

My brother did the work:
Dad wept to tell him
how ruined he was, and why.
It was my brother, her one beloved,
who talked her back, refusing her
further refusals, coaxing her to speak
the unspoken, rehearsing the sad tale.
Weighing out the grains of weeks and months and years
of Dad’s remorse—while I wrote essays on The Winter's Tale,
my brother forged words and lay them one by one against
the locked vault of her grief until, at last, it gave.
Leontes chastened. Perdita found. Hermione restored.
Oh, the truth is always larger
than the story told.
I have only my part recounted.
Forgive my need to speak at all.
I am the lost child, found;
the lost child, loved,
however lost she felt she was.

--first appeared in The Georgia Review

Thaw

Leaving the path, the sun-bathed bowl
   of meadow and the noisy road
where trucks and cars rush past,
   she steps into the stand of pines

like the deer that sleep beneath its boughs.
   Standing still in the quiet cover,
awakening to the grove’s hidden life,
   she soon hears the invisible stream.

Threading toward it through the thawing,
   slipping, catching a bare branch,
she follows the sound down to a secret pool
   where silver trickles over ice. There,

she lies down on a bed of fallen needles
   and gazes up though the intricate
etchings of bare limbs toward the green-
   needled height. She thinks

maybe she’ll make a little room there
   above the rusted floor, clearing
some space, simplified and chaste.
   For now, it’s enough to rest a while

near the whispering, hearing again
   the world’s pulse freed from loss.

--first appeared in Pastoral

Dreamlife, with Lion

From across the room,
she watches him, how he weighs
the heft of commodious, well-turned bowls.
Supper simmers, fragrant lemon
and thyme. He is at last at home,
the two of them

having traveled great
distances to take their place
together at the meal. But part of her
has not yet arrived. How shall she
say how strange it feels to leave him
then, to wander

farther through the house,
searching for her own? Upstairs
and down, so many rooms alike, ample
and airy, all she has to do
is throw her coat across a bed
and call it hers.

But none is hers, nor
answers her inquiring look
until a last, low door she thinks too small
to give on more than back streets where
milkmen leave bottles on the step
and vagrants pick

through dirty papers
in the gutter. You know the way
of dreams, how some places hold the power
to make you fear? Then imagine a glacier,
its dense insistence,
grinding pressure,

the icy blue calm.
Imagine, too, the lightless
weight at the very bottom of the sea
where creatures strange and graceless feel
their way toward food. Imagine, last,
the room she finds—

bare, unbecoming,
a cell where no one ever
lived, or could, where gravity dims the light:
a kind of tomb. She backs away,
explaining to no one there, “I
must have music,”

learning the truth, then
for herself. That’s all it takes
for roof and walls to fly and pillars rise,
old brick, two stories overhead.
Now bathed in morning’s clarified
light, she observes

a broad, open floor
unfolding ahead and right,
commanding a view of the trees, tiered roofs
and towers of a noble city.
When the first strains of music bell
into that vast,

domed height, the lion
of the house strides, tousled and
yawning from its slumber. And though she turns
toward the kitchen where, even now,
her lover rises to find her,
though she turns, yes,

first from the lion,
for the moment afraid, she
knows that place is hers and she will preside
over the dancing, over all
the dangerous celebrations
yet to come.

Alembic

Days and nights pass beyond my understanding,
keeping secrets I happen on so suddenly

I always feel ashamed not to have known
what others already knew.

When knowledge breaks about my shoulders,
I stand amid the wreckage, mourning

the loss of what had once been beautiful
because familiar in its forms. Then,

a cleansing wind blows invisibly in,
the shapes of things change,

and the chamber reassembles, more mysterious
and enlarged, echoing into unlit rooms.

Maybe you have been there, too. Maybe you
have been a lost dog asleep among the graves.

--first appeared in Stereopticon

Pamela Harrison won the PEN Northern New England Discovery Poet Award in 2002, and Pudding House Press published her GREATEST HITS. Full-length collections, STEREOPTICON and OKIE CHRONICLES, were published by David Robert Books of Cincinnati in 2004 and 2005. Adjunct faculty in English Literature and Creative Writing for the University System of New Hampshire and Dartmouth College, Ms. Harrison has won fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center.