because poems are simple, even when life isn't—plus, they don't care what's for dinner
for Ann Voskamp
Why do we not
leave home.
Is it really for fear
of what lies
beyond, or rather
for fear that the
roof will abscond
with the doors
and the shutters
we’ve always known.
And who would they
blame if it happened
just so, if the whole
curtained place simply
picked up its stakes,
disappeared on the wind
in our absence. What
are we really afraid
of, why do we not
leave home.
—L.L. Barkat, from InsideOut: Poems, International Arts Movement
To me it is just
a cave—a bouldered space
held dark against this mountain.
To you, it opens
dreams of dragons, pink and green
as the dragon-scale shoes
I bought for you just yesterday,
knowing it would be too soon before
you came upon this place, only to find it had become
just a cave, an empty bouldered space.
—L.L. Barkat, from Love, Etc., T. S. Poetry Press
I should tell you
about my hands, small
and experienced.
The other night,
when my youngest daughter
said, as I tucked her into bed,
Tell me something. Tell me anything,
I turned off the light and whispered this:
when I cut the beets tonight,
the red water went all into
the lines on my hands—
so many lines.
—L.L. Barkat, from Love, Etc., T. S. Poetry Press
1
What if
2
What if the only way
she could write again
required a white cup
3
And the cup,
would she pour herself
into it? Or, rather, bring it to her lips.
4
What if
5
What if she held the cup very close,
by its delicate white handle,
and whispered into the hollow.
6
Something like—
I was five, and he said
pick mulberries with me;
I could show you the tree
on which they weep and sway.
And her mother held her chin
and said, tell him no…
it would spoil your hand-sewn dress.
—L.L. Barkat, from The Novelist, T. S. Poetry Press
What’s that?
I say, and turn to see you watching me.
Go back, you whisper, coming close,
lifting my hem a little higher.
Okay…
They were young.
She was French and Indian (through Canada),
but they say she looked like Cleopatra.
It was night,
and she and he drove closer to the stars,
somewhere in the Helderbergs
(there is a castle in those hills, I hear,
built by a philosopher, potter, poet).
The sky, I think, was black and red,
too much, as it were, and then
he raised her hem—
for the universe knew, it knew:
you would have need of me.
—L.L. Barkat, from The Novelist, T. S. Poetry Press
You see, it is more complicated
than that. I said it was the untutored search
for lambent, astral, welter, and the river of stars.
But my mother would not know
the meaning of lambent, welter, astral—
though the river of stars
is a place she walked me, pointing
on the darkest nights, when I suppose
she wanted to escape her memories
and show me something of the world,
the kind of something only she
could show me.
What did she know of astral predictions,
when she simply walked the nights to forget
the welts of time
and the long-gone days her father’s boots
met her mother’s face in the lambent
living room, where kerosene lamps
could not light her hiding place
beneath the sideboard (why was the sideboard
in the living room?)
You see the complication now.
And how a passel of big talk
tells her this: what do you know
of the world? You never even learned
to chop an onion, through its many
moistened skins. You couldn’t keep
my father, Ivy man of words…
when all you knew was the river,
and the stars.
—L.L. Barkat, from The Novelist, T. S. Poetry Press
Children off to bed, chatter secrets.
I descend red oak stairs, reach for downy coat,
walk out beneath the moon.
Sled in hand, I pick my way to secret place,
settle plastic red, breathe deep to unwind tight-sprung
day, lie down and look towards the pine.
Branched arms are softness, feathered cradle
calling. Trunk is hips, come to say, sit;
gone is the needle-sharp talk of day.
Nearby, grandmother-curved bush looks
to lap in silence, remembers how it was with young ones,
remembers how grace used to drift in with the night.
—L.L. Barkat, from God in the Yard