Sample Poems by Liza Wieland
The Dinner Table
This is how we grew up at the dinner table:
reciting the news, over chicken and almonds,
who’s done what today, in spite of the cold,
the heat, the fog, you name it, the daily prison,
school or work. Isn’t this meal always at the heart
of memory, its false order: spoons, forks, knives?
Later we’ll slide them under our pillows, these knives,
to dream on, to dig ourselves out. Before we clear the table,
Mother takes my hands, saying you’re so thin, so cold,
and I say, I know , who cares, crushing an almond,
wanting to be that powder, freed from its prison
of bone. But not yet. Mother says, take heart—
though maybe what I hear is, don’t break, heart—
as she watches us brandish these knives
at each other, eyes narrowing, almond-
shaped, hissing liar, fool, brother, across the table,
praying to false gods and chicken gone cold,
praying for rain, the sky its usual poison
of pollen and ash. We’re each other’s prisoners
forever, brothers and sisters, that is the heart
of the matter. Mother picks up an almond,
asks over the barren field of table
what it is that we do with all these knives.
We stir the fire. We get away. Our voices linger, cold.
She looks old. Unseasonably cold
for spring, she says, a trick, her art,
though she learned it from us, at this table:
to change the subject, rearrange the knives,
while longing encloses us with the precision
of I want, I want, like the scent of almonds,
sharp, shapeless, cloying. She dreams of almond
blossoms, pure white, her eyes closed against cold
food on the plates, the real blossom of heart’s
blood where over and over we’ve plunged these knives
in each other’s breasts. So there you have it: the daily misprision
of family life, all guilty, all silent, caught at the table.
It’s easily scarred, this table made of almond
wood. It will burn well, though, cold at the heart,
its whorls like little prisons, splinters sharp as knives.
Mrs. Dickinson
(Emily Norcross Dickinson, mother of the poet)
I have been here all along,
though my daughter might not know it
and might have made me spectral,
a comic ghost, scaring myself,
but it is really for her that I am frightened,
she who is more whisper than girl’s body,
a sensation in the house, a hot spirit.
Flesh of my flesh and yet—
like looking into a well
and seeing myself, but distant,
darker, with the strange halo
water gives when the sun’s behind it.
To understand her, I had to be like her:
to be shadowless, or all shadow, I don’t know—
to see her fully, I had to be mystifying,
as she wanted, be a sightless knot
of electric and unspeakable desires,
and so I think I know what she does
upstairs, quietly seeing out the years
and the departing birds and waiting—
I think it has to do with love
and saying words so many times
they come back different,
reborn almost into their first wisdom.
I think she must be praying
prayers no God will have.
Some evenings, the silence is terrible,
beating from her room,
but I can’t break it.
In my head, questions clatter
like the tongues of held bells,
fall like stones inside my chest,
choking me while I lie here
listening for the skreek of her chair,
the gasping pulse of her thoughts,
her breath filling the lungs of the house.
At midnight, asleep, she’s nearer,
yet I dream of finding her far from home,
of taking her small self in my arms
and folding up its fluttery wings,
kissing the hard beak of her face
and making her a girl again
saying, “Emily, Mother’s here.
You know your mother, don’t you?”
But her great dark eyes glow,
burn me, burn through me
down to the atom of our one name
and in the combustible force
of my love and my longing,
we both twist shut out mouths
and I just disappear.
Iphigenia
Imagine her sitting alone at the prow,
reading James and wondering how
she could get at the thing so quickly,
understand lovers—she who had never
had one—their inability to choose, to sever.
Yet knowing this, she still feels so at sea
and closes the book, thinking morality
scares them because no one knows what it means.
These days all feel like Sundays; she unbends
her legs from the bow’s cruel pew without praying,
notices for the first time the decaying
of the mast, how the still air holds the boat,
the fury of nothing happening, the note
of dead silence, her father, clearing his throat.
The Polygamist’s Daughter
That’s what he said: three women gave birth to you,
and you’ll acquire mothers for every holiday.
Some drift in with the paychecks
on Friday nights, hair blown over their eyes,
laughing, leaning on my father,
on his shoulder like golden epaulets.
Others come in dark skirts and dusty shoes;
tired by the long walk from the Salt Lake road,
they ask for a drink of water and never leave.
From these, my father takes books with black covers
to burn beyond the west fence,
late at night when the children can’t tell
the rising flames from those who watch.
On Sunday nights, my father reads to us.
He begins, this is a true story,
and then a look like the sky before snowfall
spreads over his face, trembling
around his mouth, emptiness filling itself.
The stories are about his mother
he calls her Esther, Ruth, Rebecca;
he remembers her in a blue dress,
walking ahead of him one summer evening
when she seemed so like a still pool,
so like an ending he was about to reach.
And some days, everywhere he looks, she is there,
walking away, carrying a child,
just ahead of him,
a blue dream in the twilight.
An August evening hoards its coolness
in birds, in the tops of trees.
I lie awake in the bed my father made for me,
I look out from the bed of my father’s bones
and watch the moon, liquid on my traveling dress.
Tomorrow when he goes to work,
I am leaving here forever;
tonight the mothers drift into the room,
pressing me close. In the dark
they are all the same woman,
each whispering from far beneath
her veil of night-colored hair,
telling me of the great loveless world,
that I will move through it
repeating a name that is not my own,
telling my strange story over and over,
and each time, I’ll hear my father whisper
what a lovely voice you have,
I have never heard the like of it before,
how I should feign deafness when he says
Come closer, girl, speak to me again.
And then walk away, just try to.
To My Father, Fishing
Today, you’ll be watching one of us,
your daughters, and you’ll sense it,
the tension, the invisible wound
where the line enters the water.
You’ll listen for the perfect pitch
of a cast hanging in the air,
feel it as if this were your own skin
and someone was sinking a hook deep,
far into you, the fly spinning,
working its way through your flesh
like pain you’ve been waiting for,
a trick of light and water maybe,
shadows swimming in the lungs’ branches,
your watery veins, arteries wet and dark.
Every fisherman says this—
you become part of the river you’re in,
its current, its unexpected atmosphere
becomes the flesh on your bones,
flaying your thighs to thin weeds,
hardening your feet to stones.
When we were four and nine and twelve,
we fished at the lake and later you slept
while we went farther, without you
looking for water to walk on, a river,
narrow, so we could get to dry land
if need be. And need was
to be the river’s one wish for itself—
escape—take its prowling life and go,
as if there were nothing left on earth
to love, to move like the heavens do,
casting a long arc from east to west,
a curve, thin and high, invisible
until it’s a bright disk, sinking,
flashing like an eye in the dark,
the swift element we find ourselves in
now, call it what you will:
a river, earth, night, your old age.
Beside the lake, it’s years later,
we’ve cast ourselves into your dreams
still glistening with river water, flashing
the light of feathers, scales, those blue eyes
that opened one bright morning and took aim
to cast a hook deep and true into your heart.
It’s there now—the flesh grown crooked over,
but shiny, sleek, a boon for swimming—
and impossible to live without, so
you feel each breath and mile upstream.
You think of that hook inside,
hook and eye now, holding you together,
its lovely curve as sharp, as chance
as seeing your daughters, now women, each
look backward over her own shoulder,
at the airport, at the altar, a glance
making you ache and want to ache.
Watch for me, you think we’ll say,
And we say it, each: watch out for me.
I’m gone away.