Poems

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How to Interrogate an Archangel (New England Review) Behind the Byline: Elizabeth Austen

Humans

                      a brief and strange species
                                            —W. S. Merwin

the day begins in disarray you ought you should you must
you must you must you must     the bees will not

be stilled     what stitches mind to body     who cues the unraveling
if it’s true we’re infused with something not found in doorknob bird or bee

why am I confused about all the important things     crows
trampoline the power lines from house to house     they don’t care

who runs the world     I gape at the sky     color of sunflower
color of blood     the world is not as I have believed it to be

I find no vantage      no long view across even the surface
peristalsis propels the worm into darkness     electricity

animates the lamp     the leaf drinks at the top of the tree
I understand none of the beautiful things     the sparrow bathes

in dirt     I don’t know why     the birds do not ask themselves
or each other how are we to live     they do not ask us to love them

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This Morning

                                    Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
                                                                            —Theodore Roethke

It’s time. It’s almost too late.
Did you see the magnolia light its pink fires?
You could be your own, unknown self.
No one is keeping it from you.

The magnolia lights its pink fires
daffodils shed papery sheaths.
No one is keeping you from it—
your church of window, pen and morning.

Daffodils undress, shed papery sheaths—
gestures invisible to the eye.
In the church of window, pen and morning
what unfolds at frequencies we can’t see?

Gestures invisible to naked eye
the garden opens, an untranslatable book
written at a frequency we can’t see.
Not a psalm, exactly, but a segue.

The garden opens, an untranslatable book.
You can be your own unknown self—
not a psalm, but a segue.
It’s time.

Originally published in Pontoon 7: an anthology of Washington State Poets

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Untitled

                          The beginning of wisdom is in getting things
                          by their right name.

—Chinese proverb

Ear. Nose. Eye.
We teach every child
to point and name.

The child goes to school,
learns “he” is the norm,
“she” the grammatical

variant. When the place
between her legs is left
unnamed, what lesson

does the child learn
but that what she discovers there
doesn’t quite exist

(except to be washed, face averted).

Eventually she’ll find
the dessicated,
reticent Latinates—

the language and labels
of diagnosis
and prohibition—

a linguistic burka, rooted
in pudere: be ashamed.
She’ll find the dysphemisms

of juvenile slang—
metaphors of confused fascination—
geographic euphemisms.

(Might as well call it Australia.)

Quarter of a million words
but not one with the raw
authority, the accurate—forgive me—

mouth feel
of the thing itself. So taboo
as to be nameless,

that place all human aching starts.

–Elizabeth Austen

The final line is borrowed from Li-Young Lee’s “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees.”

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You’ll also find my poems online at The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, Bellingham Review , Toadlily Press DMQ Review.