Sample Poems by Carmen Germain
Writing a Sympathy Card to My Cousin’s Wife
Deer season and the first snow
of Thanksgiving. My cousin,
handsome and fifteen,
his rifle pointing down the field.
And I am waiting for him to do
something, shoot or lower
the barrel and turn around,
but he stands there
as though he sees
into a mystery I can’t know,
girl cousin and young, a pest
who follows the boys on their
hunts, keeping her distance.
He doesn’t shoot. He doesn’t
turn home either, and I watch
him bound into blue pine shadows,
winter light wavering everywhere.
I know the blood of deer, color
of my father’s wool, my brothers’,
my uncles’. November sky at dusk.
I wait. Wind cracks the house,
and my mother scours a turkey,
which is desolate, like a naked
baby you wash in the sink.
And all that week a deer cures
in the white pine, tied by rope.
Our leaping dogs nip the delicate
and brittle feet that hang knocking
against the winter bark. I bend
the foot joint, feel motion fleeing.
Elisa, Thinking of Winter
–after John Steinbeck
All night I dream
“Quick puffs of colored smoke”
but awake I forget this blooming
close to earth, this thinking
I am beautiful when I am dying.
Red and yellow and purple,
as big as dinner plates
where I bring my hunger,
Chrysanthemums know my hands
and welcome them, like children.
And I told a man not my husband
about my arms and spine,
bone and muscle strong enough
to crack the planet,
to tumble all living things
back into light.
A man not my husband
who lives rhythms of night and moon.
But he is gone, that man:
and I have betrayed
only myself.
But while feasting is all around,
I look at my husband, and he lives
thin.
Scrapes his chair
and goes to prod
slow-faced Herefords
that do not know
they are living.
Hauls hay to horses,
rides fences,
counts pullets.
Tramps each blade of grass
against a small, gray stone.
But he is a good man,
and I grow old,
all my strength brutal
in its summer bloom,
in lacy women’s things
that scratch my belly
and breasts
when we go to town
for another dinner
where he will sit thin
even after wine, his mind
snow-filled, thinking
of tractors leaking oil.
And when he wants sex,
he’s thin and lean
and works on me like a man on horseback
galloping up the steepest tilt of pasture
needing the valley on the other side,
serene under its burden of fog.
Hoarfrost is the woman
who learns to live alone.
She spreads hands over fields
and does not want anyone.
Yellow summer grass
knows this sorrow
sleeping under ice.
It too wears the bitter lace,
dreams of the mouths
of a thousand feeding things.
Trajectory
The night you brought the gun home
and put it on the table between
red-braided place mats,
it nested in its hard plastic case,
a wedding ring in molded foam.
I’d grown up with guns,
deer season, my father’s war,
but this was different.
you told me of those hikers
killed on the Appalachian Trail,
how the man fell into step with them
on a switch back, all alone
except for the birds, so sudden
you couldn’t hear air sing.
And I thought of our neighbor
across the road, his rages,
pointing a shotgun
into our woods, shooting
a Deep South of pain,
the kind that breathes fire,
the kind that yanks up close.
Sometimes I hike
a trail when you are gone.
Trees, instead of closing off
light, step apart. Anything
that wants to, can.
February 1913
1.
In the photograph,
my grandmother grips
the farmhouse pump,
black hair soft and unplaited.
Frozen trees crack the horizon,
mute white fields.
My grandfather stands away,
shoulders stiff.
He is cold. He is thinking
of deer.
2.
Her hands stink of milk.
At daybreak and dusk
stanchions shudder
with the bawling from calf pens.
She strokes swollen cows,
leans her body into great hips,
pulls teats toward steaming pails.
Darkness and huge bellies
steady her.
3.
The child dead,
she drains her breasts.
How hard to be like the moth,
who cannot know grief,
whose dry heart’s an ornament.