Dimension by Fabrice Poussin
After Dreaming I Threw Stones at a Bell That Hadn’t Rung for Years
All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.
The ringing woke me, and I walked out
near the fall-shallow creek
where it still works to shine rocks.
As children we picked rock from plowed soil—
the worst work of all. But we played
on growing rock piles that held warmth into evening,
pink thistle and buttercup sprouting the edges.
My sister and I gathered wet pebbles from the creek
behind the barn, held them in our mouths
like candy: chocolate, butterscotch, vanilla…
the gray like Gram’s sugared horehound.
With our hands, we dug carefully
around large creek stones to hear
the suction of removal, watched shallow water fill
the somber imprint of what seemed a kind of life.
A rock wall holds my garden at easy reach.
The mountain behind our house is a great stone bell.
Even the isolate moon I identify
with our family rock history: shiny agate.
Our children collected them from beaches,
their father too… he polished year-long.
Water loves stone. Listen
for modulations of streams singing
over their cobbles, ovations of rain smoothing rock;
the laving of lake onto shore pebbles…
like the sound of a cradle.
In deepening winter, when silence
can only imply what’s kept by stones,
notice how their shapes in white beds
begin to come forth under any ray of sun…
like choir mouths in snow.
North Woods
A thickness of tall pines
shuts light for miles
from the spongy floor of needles and moss.
Around low trunks, the dark is a graded symmetry
where one could be lost and never sense shadow
move or point the way north. Far back,
a grandfather story lumbers out:
shaggy bear that gave up hibernation
to guard a child who still roams the woods
fed by birds, lies down with bears through winter.
A flesh of mushrooms clusters out near where I walk…
Moon Chicks Great-grandfather’s called them,
their sudden white through shadow
like the recurring mystery of his tales,
their claim to places staked in memory.
Eyes adjust to dimness and soon
shapes emerge: knots of bark–mouths
in lichen the color of dill seed
multiplying up north sides of trees.
As I turn back: a gradual lifting–
like that of mist–into light,
and that momentary dream-sense
that won’t distinguish between
departure and return, relief and tremor.
Then the first bright hurt slanting through trunks
before the open road, slight
dilations and shutterings that filter light
through the tight fur of the iris
and all the dark we own.
Summer Of My 80th Year
The saying of it is a lonely thing.
Nights now come dreams you fathom less and less,
peopled with faces from decades back.
Days, with rivers of sun or brewing dark cloud,
seem to be confiding more and more in language
you cannot decipher.
Hunting words for the unsayable—solitary habit
of your living—engenders notions about the old belief
in a separate god for separate human endeavors.
Might there be a god of words or of dream?
The god of harvest once seemed real
over your father’s horse-drawn plow
and small herd of Holsteins, but not at the sight
of feedlots, dark, without pasture…
no green nearby them at all.
And the god of hearth seemed present
with your mother feeding the wood stove,
over her lye-washed sheets like sails in wind,
but not with the grinding of clothes in your dryer.
Today, joints aching, you sit above the great lit aura
of a calm Pacific, feel like water
on the rim of spill: alder leaves in tremor
like flickering lives; steepled pine filtering sunlight
to your skin—an anointing.
Tonight a halo-moon will rise with its borrowed light,
beyond the sanction of what words might carry.
Ancient Egyptians believed words so powerful
they could, if spoken, bring blessing or misfortune.
With my years mostly spent, what might remain
to be said, spilt, or written?
You need, still, to go wandering in high forests,
where humans tend to walk in circles
unless guided by compass or path,
where you learned as a child how lichen
on the one side of trees could point you home.
Memory for names and dates is weak now,
but the fine detail of lichen comes back clearly
from long ago—grains like mustard seed
or colored pollen; and that resin scent
from forest understory joined with your own.
In creek beds stones still speak to stones
and to anyone that will listen; sing on
in memory even through drought.
Invoking words, resolute in pursuit
of what might be lost, you’ve basked
in reflected light… the moon pushing
a constancy of shoreline waves to your feet
and dragging them away.
Now, like snow flakes falling on water,
it all seems simply evanescent…
still on the rim of spill.
Winter Morning: An Aftermath
Frost.
Everything the color of the fog.
Slender branches of weeping cherry
curve, supple in a frozen season.
You drag trailings of drugged sleep
into the cold: the wake of black
tires over a child body,
the mouth of his sister
a cavern, soundless at the curb.
The soft-white orb of a sun
only hints of a world outside this.
You try to imagine the explicit blue
above, the misting of the world
a white illusion. That blue
is a lost dream, the fantasy
you once entered in sleep:
world dissolving,
you rising…deep into azure.
The Evidence Of Dreams
It wasn’t the dream, exactly, but what the body believed,
adrenalin throbbing through the density of living:
remembrance of my mother’s anxious voice
from my own throat, the hungry infant I carried
a composite—eyes wide brown, hair damp at neckline,
trust building the next moments out of what may,
like so much of living, be lost to recall.
My father, dead a year, appeared in his Stetson
straw hat, urging we leave… a new danger
from some imminent event for which we’d come
to this place: not city, not rural—streets curved
around grounds lined with aspen or birch.
Through glass I could see squash vines rampant
over fences and walls, at once smothering,
absolving, abundant. Wind came through trees,
gold leaves ticking against panes like
a bright assured rain, inviting passage…
and something changed in the dream: I turned
to wander alone rooms filled with books and paintings
and beautiful dark things—
ebony carvings, bowls of mahogany, a tree-knot
masked with wisdom in the wrinkles of a grin—
aesthetic aloofness from all the pulsing lives.
Is it that our sleeping selves struggle to catch up
with our waking, or the other way around?
Time looped again: among baskets at my feet
appeared the infant I’d set aside. Sudden guilt
mixed with hope for recompense, and I woke
abruptly as one saved, that wash of both loss and gain
spreading through each cell, as when writing
the stories I think I want to forget
over and over.
About the author:
Dixie Partridge grew up in Wyoming and lived most of her adult life along the Columbia River in Washington state. Her poetry has won national and regional awards, and appeared in many journals and reviews, including Poetry Magazine, The Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, and most recently Kaliedescope, Blueline and Dialogue. Her two published books are Deer in the Haystacks (Ahsahta Press); Watermark, recipient of the Eileen Barnes award. Personal impact of landscape is often at the root of her writing.
In the artist’s words:
Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and dozens of other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, The San Pedro River Review, and more than 300 other publications.