by Claire Wahmanholm
:
future: to become another thing:
to feel the air ring
with songless, sudden
weight: water will soften
every saltless land:
inside the silk gland,
the spider’s unspun gossamer
sits liquidly like early summer:
church bells anneal into time:
bird bones melt beneath the lime
trees: skin moves toward itself
across a sore: half
a night away, a war
is renamed into another war:
half of my cells become
yours: your name
becomes a better universe:
Poem That Cries Wolf
Like all the other poems, it is full of dead children.
Terror-gripped, they have been dropped by the nape on my stoop.
I am relieved to carry them back inside the lines
of my house—I, who have done the gripping, who have been
the wolf. I who am the boy crying for witnesses
against my own rabid imagination. My mind
is a snarl of corners around which death is always
waiting: a wilderness so burgeoning, so over-
run, I cannot see for the lung-pink oleander
sheltering each sharp thing. So the poem is an orchard,
or a house—something gridded into rooms or rows, where
only one version of every possible event
in the universe grows. The death of a child happens
safely here, beneath a dim sun-less light, or within
these thinly papered walls. It is pulled down from the clouds
of possibility as if through a lightning rod.
The groundwater carries it cleanly away beneath
the roots of the orchard. I rebuild this dummy house
every night. I close the windows against the tangle
of the actual world, where lightning can strike over
and over without boredom or belief and nothing
is saved. To admit I play this game is to turn on
all the lights and leave the door unlocked. Come in, come in,
I have declared myself a believer in magic,
have dared to imagine my children are safe. Outside,
the real moon casts oleander shadows on the wolf,
the wolves, whose blood is my blood, who have been waiting for
the light to strike their eyes, for the door to open wide
enough to finally be unclosable. It happens
now. It has already happened. No one is coming.
Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Redmouth (Tinderbox Editions 2019), Wilder (Milkweed Editions 2018), Night Vision (New Michigan Press 2017), and the forthcoming Meltwater (Milkweed Editions 2023). Her poems have most recently appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Descant, Copper Nickel, Image, and the Academy of American Poets. A 2020-2021 McKnight Fellow, she lives and teaches in the Twin Cities. Find her online at clairewahmanholm.com.