TWO POEMS by H.R. Webster
An Abundance of Caution
Suddenly the flight attendants were in their parkas.
They put the accentless pilot on the PA to inform us of the emergency.
When we landed the ladder trucks were there to greet us.
The fleet of ambulances shuttled back
to their hangars with silent flashing lights
that were impossible not to read as disappointed.
I took the airtrain to work in the city and stopped to watch a woman
pet the plate glass of the flower shop window. The cat behind the glass
arched against her hand. The boxwood smell was a voice
no one else in the children’s park could hear. I must become comfortable,
I shouted into the telephone, with what I do not understand in order to live.
Like the wolf tree, I was after a piece of the sky.
When I was a child I warded off disaster by remembering
I am not special. Who, I asked myself when the dark quilt
of prairie erupted with the blue lamps of windows TVs and parking lots,
do you think you are? I dislike my job, I often have nothing to do.
Not even the sweetbitter of envelope gum to keep company with,
not even a transom window. The spell no longer functions,
the spell functions in reverse. Who do you think you are to be immune?
Under the condemned bridge they have hung a mesh barrier.
It protects the river and the men on it from lost hammers or loose stones.
I said I love you and held both your hands in both my hands while the plane
descended, rapidly. No one else seemed frightened, they continued
to watch the news. Remember the gorilla behind her plexiglass at the zoo,
curled on her side, sleeping with her back to us?
Stroking her shoulder with her hand, comforting herself, her fingernails
so tidy I could imagine her hand was my own. In the office kitchenette
no one wants to hear about the emergency landing. The safety mesh
full of hammers full of stones like a t-shirt hem lifted to carry wild strawberries.
I admit it, I wish to be understood. I spin like the microwave’s grooved glass plate.
I hum, like the microwave’s bright box, the dreaming gorilla, I hum.
Nameless Ridge
I peel my last orange under the sugar
locusts plush with thorns, press
to the high-tension line’s false summit.
Thumb into the fruit’s luxurious clutch
of bruises. It is easier to walk a mountain with a name,
even a mountain named Nameless. I left a smear
where I passed. The oft-palmed sapling
at the switchback’s elbow and the switchback’s nonsense
script itself, the branch I snapped when I followed
foxfire, mistaking it for my language.
I am certain flying is as tiring as walking.
Still, I’m jealous of the songbirds who thread
the buckthorns’ glossy snarl with precise imagination.
Where their bodies begin and end, nothing more.
I have tired of description, carrying
both myself and what I observe. The desire
to describe become the unwanted wedding guest
in a gaudy dress and the gaudy dress itself, cumbersome
with riotous light. The berries on their thorny vine, their endless
plucked and gimlet eyes. I stumbled as I climbed
because my self was everywhere on the mountain.
Like perfume my feelings walked
ahead of me and behind. With the self and her desires
came the knowledge of the end of the world
and the end of beauty as I have known and named it.
The lake of pines the pruning fingertip
of the tarn in the coming storm. Because I was there,
my mind was, I dropped impossibility’s barbed seeds
all over the earth. Oh mama,
I do not want to live in the sky anymore.
