Photography: Dominique Thiébaut
Your Six
(for mhmb)
My friend says
“I’ve got your six,”
holding me up
and keeping me safe,
and in his shelter
I become a clock,
turning through the day
always facing noon or night
with his back to mine.
When the big hand is on the 9
and the small hand is
building a fire, we’ll sing
a song together
about what it means
to make a new friend
in your 50’s–time, like
the mountains, rushing
down on us, begging our
patience. When the alarm
goes off, we’ll be done
and ready for the feast
of time gone by and time
to come in from the rain,
dry your hair,
and begin again.
Fall on Norwottuck
Fall rolls over us, and the mountain
wears taffeta red, falling
sultry off her shoulders.
I hike her flanks with the dog.
The underleaves smell of earthy
promise, and the dog’s nose
sees unseen vistas.
We splash in the runnels
that carve stretchmarks down her hips,
imagining that the trees care,
that they watch us pant and trip.
They talk to each other, you know,
through fungus that stretches
like bolts of velvet
beneath the surface;
the quiet makes me whisper
wait dog wait and he stops
ears forward, listening.
I am not designed for this language
like the subsonic rumble of elephants
and for once I am
not important, I am just
two feet with four feet
light on the earth.
4pm Thunderstorm
Another day of humidity
like a mouth,
holding us hostage to floor fans
and air conditioners,
machines of human comfort.
Any small movement is
a grotesque fleshy labor
of skin on sticky skin,
and we wonder
why we live here.
But finally clouds begin
to pile up on themselves,
the sky a rough sketch
of the mountains below.
At the horizon, we see
the edges blur over towns
and people on the other side
of the valley, a rough
thumb-smear that means
over there it is raining.
I saw that smudge long ago
from the back seat
of an American Rambler sedan
crossing the Plains;
I learned then that Here
where I am is not the same
as There–that someone else
might be the iris of the eye.
We are each of us alone.
Those clouds today, though
are headed this way, after all,
and that Rothko-line summer storm
will move over this town,
and all together
our here and there fields
will drink to the Autumn harvest.
Sisters
The Seven Sisters are dancing
in the fire this morning,
sure-footing it
on the ridge of the world.
The sky burns around them.
They want nothing
but to grab the clouds
by their tails
whip them into eddies
of froth, and sing with them
the histories of Scylla
and Charybdis–
who after all were
just girls, near-sisters
loved by the wrong men.
The Sisters treasure the rock,
embrace the hard place,
they waltz on the edge of
the whirlpool with the monster’s
hands in their own.
Their song is a wildness
for stoic Yankee ears.
Below them we
sail into danger
bound to the mast
and begin every day
expecting hard beauty.
Your Whole Life
you have lived in the valley,
even when you didn’t–
even when you pretended a city
steely and grey could be your home.
Even then you imagined
the bodega awnings
into leafy canopies, and the
cascading commuters into
rivers stopped up at stoplights,
jaywalkers leaping like fish.
Maybe you strayed overseas
and loved another landscape,
gave it your soul and tried out
an adolescent romance, but
your heart has always been here,
one foot on Mt. Castor, the other
on Mt. Pollux, the twins calling out
succor and safety to sailors,
granting them passage home
blessing them with a constellation’s
infinite confidence: you will find
your way back.
In the author’s words:
Sara Eddy is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, one about bees and beekeeping (Tell the Bees, A3 Press, 2019), the other about food (Full Mouth, Finishing Line Press, 2020). She is Assistant Director of the writing center at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lives in nearby Amherst with two teenagers, a black cat, a white dog, and three beehives.
About the artist:
Dominique Thiébaut is a native of Paris, France, transplanted to western Massachusetts in the 1980’s. He is an avid photographer and painter who incorporates his photographs in his digital explorations, and has exhibited his work in many venues, including the Hitchcock center for the environment, the Town Hall Art Gallery in Amherst, and the Anchor House of Northampton. He currently lives in Northampton, MA, and is recently retired from the faculty of Smith College.