Aunt Grace Wears Beautiful Clothes

Collected Poems by Marie Ponsot

In an interview for Guernica Magazine, the American poet Marie Ponsot insists, “…there is a very serious reason for poetry: it takes us back to our most primitive language cells. Poetry comes first, historically. It’s really primitive. Ten thousand years before you have prose, you have poems, you know.” Indeed for all the modernity of her poems, for all her experimentation, her tussling with established forms, there is something ancient, elemental, even rudimentary, about them. Yet to say so seems somehow a cheapening, not enough, for her poetry has also been described as “preternatural”, quivering—like a bowstring—between the miraculous and mundane. Read some for yourself and see:

Better

After a long wet season the rain’s let up.

The list my life was on was critical;

reproach soaked it and infected my ears.

I hid, deaf and blind, my skin my hospital,

in the inoperable ache of fear.

Today the rain stops. I can hear! Trees drip.

The spatter & whisper as I walk their

breathing avenue. The wind has died back;

edge-catching light elaborates the air.

Form the road car-tunes rush close then slacken.

I climb the green hill. There at last I read

a figured stillness where no nightmares slide.

Green leaves turn inside out to grow. They breach

their barriers. I come, eyes wide, outside.

Drunk & Disorderly, Big Hair

Handmaid to Cybele,

she is a Dactyl, a

tangle-haired, leap-taking

hot Corybantica.

Torch-light & cymbal strikes

scamper along with her.

Kniving & shouting, she

heads up her dancing girls’

streaming sorority, glamorous

over the forested slopes of Mt. Ida

until she hits 60 and

loses it (since she’s supposed

to be losing it, loses it).

Someone takes over

her sickle & signature tune. Son

they leave her & she doesn’t care.

Down to the valley floor

scared she won’t make it, she

slipslides unlit to no rhythm,

not screaming.   But now she can

hear in the distance

some new thing, surprising,

She likes it. She wants it.

What is it? Its echoes originate

sober as heartbeats, her beat,

unexpected, It woos her.

The rhythm’s complex

—like the long to improvise

or, like Aubade inside Lullaby

inside a falling and rising

of planets.  A clouding.  A clearing.

She listens.  It happens

between her own two ears.

Aunt Grace Wears Beautiful Clothes

Asleep, she has no idea she is old.

She’s running uphill, no lightfoot, but quite fast

past the houses and driveways of family friends

toward the higher fields juts breaking into flower

that weren’t there before, when she was awake.

She stops at the tree edge. The sight that yields

is daisies. Careful she enters the pathless field

of daisies daisies hundreds sunning. She takes

her time. She crouches among their stems. Bowered

low, she looks up at their heads, their far sky.

The wind’s soft. The sunclock’s high. It can’t last.

Aunt Grace is coming to lunch, she’s been told.

Good. Maybe bring her a love-me-not daisy or

love-me. Aunt Grace will know what daisies are for.

 

Peter Adam Nash