Sample Poems by Mary Kay Rummel
Cairns
Inverness, Scotland
1
The loch is slate air, peat smoke and mist.
We find in the field among cows and sheep
the stone age graves flanked by standing stones.
No one really knows who the Picts were
or what’s in these graves appeasing their gods.
2
I set up the tripod and camera
comforted by its whir and dream myself back.
At first only the sound of sheep bells distracts
a bleat, a moo, the feeling of being among
until a couple and their two children
arrive, talking as they find the ancient
doorways, stone beds, barn and byre.
Both scientists, they know the whys
of stone. What I hear is hidden between.
The parents’ eyes are flint.
3
The stones tell only different ways of seeing:
say all is relationship, everything counts
in blank fields, hovering on the edge of sense.
Possibilities make their own light,
scraps of touch, touching
behind them, a hand wavers.
4
Echoes spin round me, wind-riven.
When you sink into such a place
death could come upon you the way
it came to the old Scottish woman
who was resting on a rock in her field.
Death made her part of the field
of the run-on sentence of snow,
the afterthought whispers of flake.
5
Underneath my life is a life
I have chosen not to live.
Adumbrare on water, in air
between stone and flesh
between fragment and completion
between trace and memory
distance so great it is not.
An Old Melody
Highland man steps slow
round the stone circle
round the Loch
slow and quiet
dark so near
the song he plays
lifting my hair.
It rises and rises
over the bare hills
tearing at my heart
the piper marching there
with the tune leaping up
the moor and echoing
a memory of
monastery bells
buried beneath the sea.
Frahnk warns a heron
on the wild distressed shore
the long necked women wail.
Pilgrim
1
In his studio the artist
painted shell after shell,
a series, red of persimmons
and rubies purple limned.
He painted a shell like
the stage Botticelli made
for Venus, a begging bowl
shell that pilgrims
wear around their necks
to Santiago de Compostela.
One glittery like the paua
shell that landed at my feet
on the wild south beach,
shell become ear listening to sea.
Then he began painting ears
layered white mushrooms
lined in red and black
bulbous, they got larger
until they left the canvas.
He sculpted an ear
and attached it to a birch
in the orange part beneath
the peeling bark.
The ear hanging there
seemed part of the birch
listening to itself.
2
A woman went deep
into the arctic looking
for silence to see what it was
and heard herself in her
empty ears. In a land where fells
rise like waves from rock
she heard the sound one hears
at night in a quiet room:
a soft persistent whoosh
beneath the owl’s wings
inside your ears or brain,
something or nothing at all.
Why, she wondered, was she still so lonely
Burgundy Trillium
The head hangs too heavy for its stalk
three petals curled back into redlined leaves
reveal the acidic furred, acidic yellow
center
the stem springs from three lower leaves
a storyteller’s dream
*
a woman walking picked one:
she pulled one petal and a child appeared with a question
she pulled another and a young woman appeared, an answer
pulled the last and an old woman came just in time
not related to tripalium, the Roman torture tool
that gave birth to travail and from that travel—
no, that’s another story
trillium, related to trio, the clovered trinity
to trill, warbling and wind gashed
and to the wine red of unicorn tapestries
*
a trinity of women there
one sews
one looks in a mirror
one puts away her jewels
all the same woman
Making Form
On looking for “Les Très Riches Heures
du Duc
de Berry”
At Cluny, though she searched for a great copy,
the Hours were dull as if the blood
used to paint them (the way barns were painted
with milk and blood of cows) had dried
burgundy burnt down, greens mulched.
There were no Hours
beneath the Hours
trees but not shadows
water but no cities beneath
no long brushes of deep violet
women were never trees
the owl, no owl.
She’d rather live with memory
ruddy as the real, the rose
that died blooming inside her.
She touches the lake, fingers licking
its black pelt, sees dried berries,
ragged asters those velvet ribbons,
knows the signs of coming cold, imagines
men bending over the vines, women
putting wine on the table, remembers
till her thoughts grow spare, a man and a woman
standing naked in a room filled by light so pure
it thins the shadows on their bodies.
Translations
Lovers look into water never thinking of Polycrates
who threw a ring into a river for good luck
and the god sent it back in the mouth of a fish.
*
A Parisian illuminator painted
Boccaccio’s tale but confused
the Italian anello with agnello
and made a fish with a lamb
in its mouth appear as the Persians
hung Polycrates.
Was it a failure of translation then,
or a failure of meaning?
Either way, Polycrates was killed.
Did he betray himself, believing
in symbols that didn’t work?
Take the letters carved
on a stone tablet that I touched
in that small museum at Epidaurus.
The spiral Mycenaean script could be
a record of business or judgment or irony
the story of a murder by twins, how one
was punished and one went free.
Maybe I touched six goats with bells
or two donkeys nuzzling.
The spiral script could be a love poem,
words that come close to what they mean, could
say love smells of oregano, is an owl in the night, says
love gives six gold coins, a bolt of filtered cloth,
is luck, is lapis, basil, a fish with a lamb in its mouth.
Learning in Normandy
Avranches, France
In a small town in Normandy I visit an old monastery
with winding stone steps, glass cases of manuscripts
kept in damp dark. Then, I walk out
into light, to a square bursting with life.
It is first communion Sunday for girls posing
in long lace, for boys shining in white suits,
for mothers with camera smiles, fathers with
minds on the coming dinner and wine.
In a place where everything moves upward
or down to the flat tide bed, I listen to a language
I know little of, glimpse what I’ve lost, what
I never had. Their lives like mine, I read
their hungers, their guilts, their overdrafts.
Their Sundays don’t hurt. I know their happiness
the way sometimes in a museum the iconic eyes
of some saint look into mine and irony lifts
from my brain. What’s left is recognition.
I walk downhill with it,
able to name some of the parts but not the whole,
inside me, what I know.