Spells. Annie Finch

      Two close centuries of stone and cloth and paper

      chalked your cheeks and carved your hands to broken.

      You are not a monument any more, now—

      more like a forest

      moving shadows under simple trees, dark rivulets

      mottling snow fading in this warm gray winter,

      melting the centuries you didn’t know, Henry Longfellow—

      wait—I can hear you—

      a low and earnest voice, wind in fir trees, burning

      through this room, where you wrote your saddest poem,

      through this house, where the farm and family built you.

      Your sister Ann’s portrait

      stumbles, eyes black as night behind a candle.

      The marble urn in your red brick yard has fallen,

      knocked down in the emptiness of the fountain.

      Cries of the seagulls

      reach through walls to find you again, pour down

      the carrying knowledge that grew your branching gardens—

      and tell me which old words, which new wings, will carry

      you from this courtyard.

      THE NAMING

      Lopez, Jurgens, Lozowsky, O’Connor, Lomax

      (Shoes, and spirals, dust, and the falling flowers)

      Díaz, Dingle, Galletti, DiPasquale,

      Katsimatides

      Wounds widen the remembering earth.

      Closed eyes see beyond the flames.

      Grief opens hands to feel the wind.

      Heart beats like ocean and hears the names:

      DiStefano, Eisenberg, Chung, Green, Dolan,

      (Women running suddenly in their high heels)

      Penny, York, Duarte, Elferis, Sliwak,

      Yamamadala,

      Closed eyes see beyond the flames.

      Grief opens hands to feel the wind.

      Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.

      Wounds widen the remembering earth:

      Weinstein, Villanueva, West, Sadaque,

      (Spirals, dust and spiraling dust and hours)

      Bowman, Burns, Kawauchi, Buchanan, Reilly,

      Reese, Ognibene,

      Grief opens hands to feel the wind.

      Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.

      Wounds widen the remembering earth.

      Closed eyes see beyond the flames.

      Kushitani, Ueltzhoffer, Wong, Ferrugio,

      (Breathed in only in or beyond the naming),

      Inghilterra, Tzemis, Liangthanasam,

      Coladonato—

      Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.

      Wounds widen the remembering earth.

      Closed eyes see beyond the flames.

      Grief opens hands to feel the wind.

      Sanchez, Talbot, Afflito, Siskopoulos

      (Every question with a long sob of naming)

      Tarantino, Zempoaltecatl, Thorpe, Koo,

      Stergiopoulos,

      Zion, Zinzi, Song, Shahid, Santiago,

      Ortiz, Pabon, Ou, O’Neill, Newton-Carter,

      Miller, Mohammed,

      Zakhary, Campbell,

      Deming, DiFranco,

      Chowdhury, Blackwell,

      Zucker, McDowell,

      Goldstein, Basmajian . . .

      Wounds widen the remembering earth.

      Closed eyes see beyond the flames.

      Grief opens hands to feel the wind.

      Heart beats like ocean and hears the names.

      FROST’S GRAVE

      I think of your quiet grave now and again

      When innocence has rolled me out of sleep

      Close to my husband’s side, to lean again

      Against his breathing human side, to keep

      Myself breathed in his liquid human breath.

      I think of your nurturing grave so often. Death

      Has made you a place I like to imagine going:

      Opening the gate to your grave, entering in,

      Reaping your silence where a small tree, growing

      Generous in the forgiveness of your sin,

      Leans over your stone, the grass, your bones, the grass,

      The grass. The grass. I like to imagine frost there, hung

      Like frost on a beach in November, when the sun

      Rises on winter, just as it rose on spring,

      On the humid decision to grow, past everything.

      TAROT: THE MAGICIAN CARD

      Rain wets the wand, wind moves a sword,

      lightning lights crystal where the thundering cup

      forms me a channel and takes on a word,

      pouring the pentacle I gather up.

      Time carves the storm in the palm of my hand,

      till it fills with shapes that send me down

      through my river-body. Do I stand

      at a table the waiting planet surrounds?

      Through my own fingers, eyes, and palm,

      and through other worlds, huge or small,

      one fury spins and turns me calm;

      I breathe and watch it land and fall,

      holding what I hardly know or see,

      filled with the storm that makes, makes me.

      KEYS

       Phi Beta Kappa poem, Yale University, 2011

      Like an island, a key makes a door. In the surge

      Of its mineral clarity, seas come unbound.

      Though an arch curves together, the keystone will stay

      Braced in gravity, locked by immensity, wound

      To a temple in air by the spiraling play

      That could tumble much heavier forces. What’s found

      Past the musical notes that cascade and converge

      In a key, past the tock the tick carries away

      When it’s wound by a key? There are patterns that merge

      Meanings, silent until we code them open,

      Clued to us by the random