Lisa Steinman

NIGHT WORK

Tonight, I'm standing in a landscape where
the wind tosses the trees; the sky mumbles
constantly; visions unfold; waterfalls—

domestic and wild at once—say hard things
brilliantly. The world is verbose, flickers
of thought around every corner that hint

of another landscape where nothing speaks.
I read about diamond cutters. Diamonds
in the rough are metaphors for what comes

when we call beauty. Or light. Or money.
How can you tell what's real? Yet do you doubt
we're really here? That here is one hand; here,

another? The sky does have a glitter,
light promising snow, again. Poems walk by:
He said. She said. But it's too cold to tell

the whole story. The seed catalogues give
no assurance of gardens. They offer
contests. I pick the green convertible, but

the voice of desire has no hand in this.
The diamond cutters make off with their jewels.
I think, Damn it. Who says they will come back.

I do see the world is saying nothing
quite clearly. It is cold. And I can hear
the sound that wind makes when there are no leaves.

(from Carslaw's Sequences, U. Tampa Press, 2003)

CRANKINESS

The garden variety trips you up, tips you
out of bed on the wrong side like a boat

capsizing. You can see it's all wrong.
Even bird song rubs you the wrong way.

You try to rub back: clatter of dish
& pots on sink. Coffee grinds away,

all edge, like a storm brewing. All bills
are past due, no harbor in sight. The yew's

bony fingers claw across the roof. Things
will never be right. Hibernation calls

its siren song, You founder on the rocks
trying to reach back to the dreams you once had.

AVOIDANCE—

otherwise known as lying fallow—
like second-growth forest, a form
of return. A going-to-ground. A belief
nothing may be better than something.

Car alarms clear their throats in the bank
parking lot like thieves, as the new year
scuttles in: a field mouse. Avoiding

the subject, here, nothing flourishes.
It's all slash-and-burn. It's clear-cut—

the healing, as precious as the wound.

Lisa Steinman teaches at Reed College and is the author of three volumes of poetry—Lost Poems, All That Comes To Light, and A Book Of Other Days—as well as a chapbook, Ordinary Songs. A new collection, Carslaw’s Sequences, has just been published by the University of Tampa Press. Steinman co-edits the poetry magazine Hubbub.

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