The Rabbits Could Sing
The poems included in The Rabbits Could Sing delve farther into territory that Amber Flora Thomas visited in her prize-winning book Eye of Water, showing even more clearly how “the seam has been pulled so far open on the past” that “the dress will never close.” Here, the poem acts not as a body in itself but as a garb drawn around the here and now. Loss, longing, and violation are sustenance to a spirit jarred from its animal flesh and torn apart, unsettling the reader with surprising images that are difficult to forget. The poems in The Rabbits Could Sing invite the reader into a world thick with the lush bounty of summer in the far north, where the present is never far from the shadow of the past.
"1106027817"
The Rabbits Could Sing
The poems included in The Rabbits Could Sing delve farther into territory that Amber Flora Thomas visited in her prize-winning book Eye of Water, showing even more clearly how “the seam has been pulled so far open on the past” that “the dress will never close.” Here, the poem acts not as a body in itself but as a garb drawn around the here and now. Loss, longing, and violation are sustenance to a spirit jarred from its animal flesh and torn apart, unsettling the reader with surprising images that are difficult to forget. The poems in The Rabbits Could Sing invite the reader into a world thick with the lush bounty of summer in the far north, where the present is never far from the shadow of the past.
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Overview
The poems included in The Rabbits Could Sing delve farther into territory that Amber Flora Thomas visited in her prize-winning book Eye of Water, showing even more clearly how “the seam has been pulled so far open on the past” that “the dress will never close.” Here, the poem acts not as a body in itself but as a garb drawn around the here and now. Loss, longing, and violation are sustenance to a spirit jarred from its animal flesh and torn apart, unsettling the reader with surprising images that are difficult to forget. The poems in The Rabbits Could Sing invite the reader into a world thick with the lush bounty of summer in the far north, where the present is never far from the shadow of the past.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781602231597 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2012 |
| Series: | The Alaska Literary Series |
| Pages: | 67 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water: Poems, and her poems have appeared in Callao, Orion Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among other publications.
Read an Excerpt
The Rabbits Could Sing
PoemsBy Amber Flora Thomas
University of Alaska Press
Copyright © 2012 University of Alaska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60223-159-7
Chapter One
In AugustReading the Sunday news, another bomb
has gone off in a Baghdad marketplace,
we have killed twelve grizzlies
in Alaska's Interior—yesterday's caught
in a pigpen finishing a second sow:
a tiny morsel to her 1,400 pounds.
I cradle a red apple in my fist. My dog
rests her head on my thigh. She too
likes a crisp bite of apple; streams of juice
burst between my teeth. No mushy flesh
too long waiting in a grocer's bin.
No air under the skin or white worm
squirming out of a black core.
The thick skin cracks with a cider's maul—
a good, good bite for which there is never enough,
and sweet still to suck the pulp. When I have
gnawed all the way to the core, a seed
pops from a firm cell and lulls in my mouth.
I ruffle my dog's sleek brown ears.
It is a dream I tell myself. I am free, yes,
and reading the news in August
and eating a red apple.
Swarm
A honeybee queen lays the nettle
and the weather in a black cloud that falls
on two white men lifting a rotten tree
toward their truck on the fire road. It's just luck
come up from hiding, a nether world
she sends into the August groan. The men hack
and flail pale limber arms at the air, their clothing,
and their ears. They jig around the truck
in this unexpected season.
I stand alone across the gully and kill
the helpful girl trying to rise up
in me. If they had found me alone
on my afternoon walk in the forest?
Their baseball caps shucked, the red rising
on their arms and faces. The bees go up
and come down, a dizzy swarm. The men
throw themselves into the cab of the truck,
the haze ascending on their dust, until
nothing they could have done was done to me.
To a Reader
I have a silver canoe you might want,
quicksand from my dream last night,
two tickets to Sydney, and a river
a mile wide, the bounty that knows
my crimes and hunts me like a dog.
I have a papier-mâché woman
that says, "Tell you
your fortune?" and offers
the Two of Swords every time.
I have the last fifteen minutes
of my sleep, a highway in my mind's eye
and a hitchhiker thumbing the air.
I have surgeries and doctors and
three hundred vials of fool's gold, and I
can go no farther south.
Watch me collide with the 1970s again
and bad B-movies, interrogating
a Jell-O substance bubbling out of
the sink drain. I have exiled
photographs of bruised children
and a predisposition for praise.
I have picked you a gallon of cranberries,
tart to taste. When the past slips over
the field like a red dress, I lie down
in the tundra on this mountain pass
and belong to the sky again.
The Chipped Bowl
A woman carries a basket into a field.
She represents someone's eternity
in blue-and-white China. It's fall there
and two geese travel toward a pond.
She does not know her destination
has become an abyss into your day—
American headlines on the newspaper,
a cat lazing in a sunny rectangle by the stove.
The story of where she would arrive
broken away, its lip weathered brown. She will not
go to a hut with a thatched roof, or to a willow
and idyll beneath its drowsy branches.
She will always be on the verge of her life
with her carved bone buttons, her bonnet.
She will never know if there is burlap
or velvet. How long will she carry her basket
into the absence beyond the field?
You have grown accustomed
to the shattered image of her tranquil
ascent into your day, and the falseness
of her story, no matter how you end it.
You eat of this longing.
Take Off the Yellow Slicker
The wasp's body brings the cracking all up my leg.
My shoe holds the danger to the floor
until I am sure. I am no flower, "no wilting lily,"
as someone said years ago. Weapons surround my house:
idiot traps with poisonous meats into which they fly
and cannot escape. Good soldiers of a summer daze.
The window screens only partially filter the raid.
The cracking goes all up my leg, a small shiver
when I draw back. The shell recoils into the integrity of sleep,
fetal and wet on the linoleum; it is easy to let the battle in.
Three Windows
It is to make her merely literary. To write:
"Her hand grips the mattress where the sheet
has sprung from its corner." To give the girl a job
while thinking is a torrential welling, and she ricochets
farther into that dark. I've had enough of her
lilting, enough carrying her, speechless and torn, in
and out of my decades. I say: "She sits up,
pulls her dress over her head, and buckles
her sandals." The writer works with the bare room,
with beer bottles lined up below a window, and pigeons
that flit and press their sleep to the ledge outside.
The writer hears a garbage truck in the alley,
a car barely through a red light.
I say: "The girl pushes a barrette in her brown hair.
She walks to the door, the brass knob fitting coolly
against her palm as she twists its bulbous head."
I work her literary edges and say: "She felt a reed
bend along her throat and this fat brown tongue
spoke an airy lament to the morning." The writer
goes back to refine the pigeons' sleep, knocks over
a green bottle, and pulls the city open in morning traffic.
"The girl walks to the elevator and pushes the arrow 'down.'
She digs in her purse for a number, a comb." I say: "Her soul
from flight, her swallowing, and her not remembering
the night hours, so they will loosen over her
for years." The writer remembers the newspaper
folded on the nightstand and an ashtray with
eight cigarette butts smashed into the brown glass
bottom. The pigeons coo on the ledge outside.
Later, she remembers the naked girl inside the room,
not yet the writer and writing, though prolific,
leaving red roses everywhere she had lain.
Migraine Confessional
I've been seeing cubist all day,
the human shape a hazard,
assuming too much light.
Your lips a piece. Your tongue
an instrument of static.
I hear expulsions. I can't speak.
My temples hold sound verbatim:
ocean, ocean and sea grass,
wind rush.
Sun heat in my lap. Point of light
or point of dark—the fault eddies
between my eyes. Seeing won't let up:
a white bird thrashing. I've got to
name the ghost something other than
tide. I am pulled into breakage
and out of a wave a woman whirls
in a red dress, fluid shimmy
holding her temples.
When You Rise You Do Not Drown
He is laughing: his laughter
when a hummingbird pauses, buzzing
at the sweat on his forehead.
I am waking underwater.
I come back to shore, gasping,
nasal passages burning from water
the wrong way in. He catches me again,
a red-backed crab scurrying onto the beach,
and I sail through cold and green
until I have fists full of sand.
Sometimes there are no birds in a field.
The fish must cut the surface to flee the net.
The tire caught by a rope and tied
to the highest branch in an oak
swings.
Before God and cornbread,
until I love every last pea: his laughter.
He says a lion shakes the sun out
and it will be summer always.
The surface pours off my gaze
and I chomp at the air, that copious room
inside my chest filling with thunder.
I am swimming.
Serenade
The doe sings when you have her by the ears,
like a bow drawn over violin strings wrong.
Mother splits celery stalks and onions
into crisp chunks for the stew.
In the morning you found the doe eating her litter,
snacking on fine pink ears and hairless bodies
trampled against the cage wire. Bad rabbit.
She sings like the broken violin in her belly
can still give her Vivaldi for her only aria.
Her song eats hillsides and roads, churns in the ears of neighbors,
slipping over rattlesnake sounds coming from weeds.
No more wheezing breath or rattling the cage doors,
when you find a way into her body.
You are a magician
and she breaks out of her skin for you. Is this a good ending?
Mother drops the okra and garlic in the pot.
We taste the promise coming forward to bid her passage:
a necessary eternity of feasts.
Woman on Shore
The current talks around her legs; her white skirt
held above her knees, sailing the distortion.
She sees herself ripple from muse to doll,
not a sensible human shape, whirling with each new force,
so all is known across and separate, too.
Beneath the surface the current hangs up,
changes its course. A fishing line
tangled on some rocks at her feet
gathers algae with its baited yellow hook;
minnows scatter to her ankles.
The river unfolds and sends motion away from shore.
Someone on the beach calls to her and she turns and smiles,
a few hairs clinging to her lips. And then
a dog leaps after a stick crushing water like it is
merely air trained in resistance. He runs on nothing
but the hurt to taste wood again.
Penny's Gallon
We settle on the porch to discuss the rumor.
She has had five husbands and all of them
dead; the last one, ashes buried in a gallon-size
mayonnaise jar beneath an oak in the yard.
We stare at the oak's broad trunk. We stare at the day
ending, flies converse in her arm hair. She says
she digs him up sometimes "to be sure." His dust
held apart from the rich earth, not so heavy
that the genie couldn't leap from his bottle.
She offers me bourbon and a turkey & swiss
on whole wheat. She says you have to need it bad,
and strokes down her wrist, blue veins.
I don't want to miss my train, though
her poodle won't let me go and hops in my lap,
tinkles a little when I say, "Good boy."
Who eats a gallon of mayonnaise in a year,
let alone ten years? How long would it take
to finish such a glob, how many sandwiches
and salads? My stomach twists. I can't get away
from death. It's about to spell my name
on the chipped white porch.
"I'll miss my train," I say.
"I'll see you next time," I say.
And there are the deep sad lines in her smile
some men have loved themselves against.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Rabbits Could Sing by Amber Flora Thomas Copyright © 2012 by University of Alaska Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Alaska Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsI
In August
Swarm
To a Reader
The Chipped Bowl
Take Off the Yellow Slicker
Three Windows
Migraine Confessional
When You Rise You Do Not Drown
Serenade
Woman on Shore
Penny’s Gallon
Summer Mold
II
Listen
Conversation with the Sculptor
Self-Portrait in the Tide
Come in from the Sky
Black Dog
Killing the Rabbit: Ars Poetica
Thinking in Front of a Mirror
Era of a Happy Heart
Biology Lesson
Here
More Light Because Her Shadow Shook
In the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Membrane
After
Braid
III
Dear Reader
Then You Fled the Room
Heart with Interior View
Two Horses
Hood
The Killed Rabbit
Inside the Pleiades
Spider
Bull Frog
Unattended
Sometimes Oranges
Regarding Mercy
IV
Prayer Found in Water Pouring Down a Bus Window
Ultrasound Aubade
Cavity in the Rubenesque Façade
April Spill-Off
Parenting the Void
Magician
Bird Leaving a Branch
Meditation on Four West
From Her Lips to God’s Ears
Sunbathing
Girl in the Woods
Hare in My Garden
Pelvis with the Distance
The Get Away
Biographical Note
From the B&N Reads Blog
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