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Classic and Contemporary Poetry | |||
The body is then sent into an open field and vanishes from this world with the smoke of cremation, leaving only the white ashes. -- "Hakkotsu No Sho" Borne on the tongue of that first thin milk, white ashes sifted through fingers pinching fields into crust. Kitchen mathematics and the pleasure of pie tins diverted an accordion fan of paper, kick pleat swirl of a skirt. White ashes clouded the radio, snow and more snow, ghost step of a tune traced the linoleum, faint as wallpaper, faint as a dressmaker's mark. Neat was the house, the rooms Tended well by the broom, the mop, the hands that plowed flour under acres of bread, tidy loaves trim as the beds upstairs. White ashes feathered weightless as the dream before the first snowfall, a glimmering lifting the body out of the one that sleeps. White ashes hovered, bountiful air surrounding. The temperature, silver and falling, gauged the icicle's tear hauling the moon and the stars Snow and more snow turning the bread, the tins, the basket, the turning of beds, the turning always away and toward the door. Outside a brother hollered "I'm home!" White ashes flew off the boots that drifted past dusk, blizzards across the chalkboard heaped the work of hours onto spoons. Too soon! Outside a brother hollered, knocking snow off his boots, knocking his name at the door. "I'm home!" A geography of ice lit the screen, a map pulled down like a window shade. The classroom collapsed into black. Outside snow and more snow and the white glare before the countdown, the numbers spooling through the heat of projection, frame by frame, out of focus as the ill-fated expedition in an old newsreel. A dismal documentary, Reports due back on Monday. White ashes freckled the coats, the collars, the sleeves of children falling into hedges of snow. Wingless insects, lichen and moss lost in theory, the continental drift and the myth of frozen oceans. The explorers, however, remained forever fur-laden, forever turning and waving, turning toward the snow. Outside a brother hollered "Snow!" Neat was the house, the rooms and the beds, the mathematics of pie tins fluctuating once temperatures soared, golden and rising, cherries jellying into dimestore lipstick, the body rising to stun a glacier, bring the explorers home. The pie tins, mirrored like Mexican Silver, bracelets linked and charmed, all the trinkets hammered to outlast us -- the pie tins, talced and primed for sweetness -- a young girl's face sudden in the first incoherent white kiss of blossoms burning the orchard with lace, moth clouds and laundry, fields of white shirts, standard and starched, issued at birth, an army of brothers marched through. Copyright © Cathy Song. http://www.wlu.edu/~shenando | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...HEALALL by WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS THE RESOLVE by ALEXANDER BROME ON THE SUN COMING OUT IN THE AFTERNOON by HENRY DAVID THOREAU ON LINCOLN'S BIRTHDAY by JOHN KENDRICK BANGS A KISS - BY MISTAKE by JOEL BENTON |
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