Sample Poems by Laurie Blauner
The Coincidence of Trees
A form of ordinary astonishment. I want to curl
the hairdo of leaves in my fingers and call home
to say I’ve found the right one. But the landscape simmers big
with compromise: the large, orange expletives of sunset
rust into the obedience of grass; and purposeless, white clouds
curdle into the determination of hills combing the evening
for constellations. All is not what it seems.
That hand is rough with bark. And
the body resembles a body of work akin to my own.
My husband’s face loses itself in mine each night,
fingers collaborating. This reconciliation
in the odd angle of branches, grass bruised
by the reasoning of our footstep, the dizzy moon,
veins in my hands touching roots as familiar as friends.
The red kiss I leave like a carved initial against the stiff heart.
Clouds of Bones
accumulated around the small thickening fruit of organs
before you were born. Mother was the moon outlining,
encasing the blooming tree of your body whose branches
held up the refractable sky. I warned you, little sister,
that history repeats itself. I taught you how night
tossed objects up its dark sleeve only to have these tricks appear
at the appointed hour of morning. The stutter of daylight
couldn’t be kept out of our room by the heaviest
curtains. You can’t stop intentions, even the best ones.
Think of all the children that were lost between us.
Now mother creates her own world, a romantic clot
of stars dead center in her small evening. Me?
I often dream that I am out of my body, visiting
a cumulous chandelier or the mica-specked corner
of my childhood room, from within my body. But
you have learned your lessons too well, the clouds
of your bones became burdensome against the earth,
the moon reached out and took all you had to offer,
and you know the consequences of beginning the new,
inexplicable days like a blue, shiny place you just stepped out of.
Vacancy
A place pushed and pulled by planets. Ocean arrested by
a stone-colored sky and beach creased into the folds
of the mosaic blues of the sea. A lone palm tree was left
to invent the details of a family vacation. Blood moves
in mysterious ways. Sooner or later the water
follows the roadways of the body. In the horizon
of serious waves the child saw his parents, the tipping
of the striped umbrella into night, origami stars.
Darkness was a kite visiting mother and father,
the apology of the well lit house, the cessation
of the prayer of insects. This was the last time
the familiar objects in his bedroom thought of
what they could become, a giant alligator, a butcher’s knife,
a man who could replace his father. Days
ripened into circumstance, family photographs, the orange sky
glimpsed from sunglasses, dreams opening accounts.
The mirror forgets. The fruit of heat awaiting daylight,
the cool body of night, the father that would soon leave.
Room for One More
The peculiar air of morning. The attention
of door to hinge. All I asked about
was the seat. The graffiti of your voice
left messages along my spine. I watched
as windows read the passing light.
Buildings turned over one another like pages.
Sidewalks, disappearing elbows, tried to
pause while curtains stared at me
for a moment. I could feel someone
grow bigger under my heart. That tapping
along the shell of me. The way my arms
were no longer mine. You told me
clouds resembled spoons that day, our legs
accidentally touching. I thought our lives
opened up within us, occupying all the space.
I held you as though I’d never see you
again, someone beneath my face. Perhaps
the streets were shuddering and dangerous
like birds. The feet of tiny men ran
down my knees, water. Perhaps my limbs
remembered a time when women could row
themselves out of their bodies with syllables.
Abstractions of Cows
A bad farmboy’s dreams. February—
snow showing its angles of cruelty.
The principle of whiteness
penetrates stubborn lives.
Odd how the landscape describes his house, a square
lost in the folds of earth,
and he can only think of Katrina in a row at school
drawing pictures of cows. Everyone laughed
except him. Against the blank paper, black lines,
a herd in a flat boat
sailing across farmland. Today the radio says weather
is reticent to leave, an uninvited guest.
The man’s voice drifts over the boy’s furniture,
a story of absurdity:
a good farmer finding the road home by closing his eyes
and stepping out into the pure whiteness.