Four Poems by Kathryn Kirkpatrick



Untouched

Though I had wished you wizened
in your fifties, without the easy grace 
that plunged me years ago
into a sudden tremble,
you show up in your olive skin,
youthful and at ease, a kiss
for each cheek, and thwart
desire again.

So I suit up my smile.
Lace my laugh tight.
And wonder if my hand will shake
raising hot tea, or if I’ll turn
some common word against itself
syllables awry and limping.

Ten years ago
when I passed you in tight jeans,
your hooded stare alarmed me.
And I am still afraid
of the heady, feral lurch
I feel when our eyes meet.

Now you take my unhinged glasses
frames and deftly on your knee
thread the tiny screw
and tighten it with the tip
of your knife.

And I am enchanted again
by the leap and gale of my desire
by your own kind heart, 
patient and untouched.




Scottish Spring


1
At the B&B in Edinburgh
we woke to scarcity,
each morning our breakfast fare
reduced to what we’d likely eat.
She’d note what we’d left the morning
before, and fine us, our landlady.
First the orange juice gone. 
Then the second slice of bacon.
As if appetites could be measured
and named, desire itself accounted
for, once and for all.

There I dreamed of corpses
and disease, myself with a mortician’s 
ease, wielding the knife.


2
When the plague swept
the narrow walks of the old town,
death became common as stones.
More rare were the tulips
kept by the wealthy in vases
standing like porcelain hands,
palms open, hollow fingered,
with each 100 bulb forced
into delicate yellow bloom.

All around flesh still blackened.


3
On Iona rain nettled our faces.
Your ears went red in the wind.
I walked through the graveyard
until my surname on the stones
appeared once and then again.

But the miracle comes later.
Just back and early off the bus 
I step between two parked cars 
to sort through my overstuffed bag
while an American in a VW
bluer than the sky
mistakes his gas petal for the brake.

A crush of fenders.  Glass in the street.
The two parked cars meet.
And somehow I am

not between them.


4
Not bruised or even shocked
though the car that rolled 
across my foot is so heavy now
it takes four men to heave it.

I retrieve my bag
from beneath the wheel
and find everything saved:
the Celtic broach,
the copper earrings,
the puffin miniature,
only a tiny horn missing
from the highland bull.

As if my whole life
I’d been waiting
for the quick spring,
your arm at my waist
my heart not even racing.

Together now we remember
nothing but instinct and grace.


5
At a bar on Mull
I sit in stunned light
while a man with the face
of my father when young
saunters to a stool.
His smile dazzles the woman
behind the bar as it always
dazzled me.

I do not introduce myself.
I do not ask his name.

Enough now just to be spared,
my life steady and rooted
as the heather covering these hills,
poised for bloom.

If centuries ago
my clan was pushed
to these watery borders
by a bloody feud
long lost, at least they found 
a home among saints and queens.

Piloting boats beyond shoals, 
perhaps they gave their violence 
to the sea.
	    Here with them
I’ll leave my quarrel with the past.

And here too I leave my father
at the bar in friendly banter
with a young woman who knows
enough of him now, I can see,
not to be taken in.




To the Woman Brought Back


You almost died
the white light swimming toward your face,
your body uncurling from its fist
to welcome that surrender.
Your mouth was already the wind.
Your heart was already the egret’s cry.


But something held you here,
fierce as a claw,
studded you to a branch and hollow,
stumbled back your spirit.


Now you wake each morning in fear
as if your next breath
might shut down a star,
censor the rain, 
quiet the calls of doves.


But what if what we call divine
brought you back through the world’s lips
to be tasted tasting joy?
Tell us about the deluge of bliss,
The clouds woven at your feet.




The Mannikin

Headless, he came out of my closet
when I was six.  He wore
a suit and a tie.  He spoke
from a slip in his throat.
And what he said, he said
surely and clearly, even
without a head:
You’d better behave. 

It was a Saturday morning
and my parents were still
asleep.  I had made my bed
a trampoline where I leapt.

Another young girl
silenced, you might say.
But I am not finished yet.

Very soon I wanted a doll
that spoke.  Chatty Kathy.
I pulled the ring in her throat
and she told me her name.
The pleasures of fixed identity.
It was enough for a while.

But Little Miss Echo
had a box in her chest 
where I could record 
my own voice.  She said
the most amazing things:
You may leap on the bed
whenever you like.
You need not wear a shirt.

There is a kind of leaping 
I still do in bed, wearing, in fact,
no shirt.  And men in suits
still tell me I ought to behave.
You see, we go on much as before:
the young girl leaping,
the headless man speaking.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick