Sample Poems by Ann Keniston
Matter and Spirit
And then the material world called me back with its awful
specificity of smell, color, taste and I nearly forgot
the realm of the spirit, in which suffering is pure.
In the frescoes of Giotto, the visible nearly obstructs
transcendence and replaces it with ordinary
human pain, so when Jesus finally conquers it,
and rises, in stiff drapery, his feet scarcely point, as if
he were still constrained by the earth, or
expected gravity's triumph at any moment
over upward motion. And so I longed again
for the particular circumstances in which
I first was harmed: the tiny lilies of the valley pressing
the house foundation with their overpowering
odor, the pool where orange fish lived, rising
halfway to the top so the water shimmered,
and the parental bedroom, two figures
under the covers waiting for my touch to release them
into motion. How much simpler to relinquish
my responsibility and leave them furled,
to choose renunciation, in which pain
still throbs, but powerlessly, like cloth so thin you see
right through it. Wouldn't anyone prefer to dwell
beyond the last outpost of the represented world,
where the perfect triangle, circle, square are suspended
from the pulsing whiteness that is all there is there?
Even then, eyes pressed shut against
whatever landscape I was trying to deny,
I was talking to myself, which is how I venerate
the trivial, half recovered, half imagined world.
1961
I started to starve in September's
first weeks, and by the time
I descended to earth, I was so small
I caused my mother scarcely
any physical pain, my body
slipping out of hers the way a coin
vanishes through a pocket's seam
and becomes invisible, except
I was made visible, and lay
in the clear small cage around which
doctors hovered, trying to determine
whether I was damaged, or how, and my mother
vowed never to reveal to me this first
way she'd failed me, and all that fall,
the heavy new volumes
of Dickinson's Complete Poems were piled
onto bookstore shelves in every city
in America, and lay there
silently, a cushion of empty space
surrounding each poem, until a reader lifted one
and, holding open the book in some cramped
public corner, read for the first time
“My life closed twice,”
“My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—“
Booze
But I must venerate it too,
how it takes so many forms
like a god, who makes his body
impermanent so as to take
pleasure more easily, as Zeus
became lithe, almost feminine,
to tempt and then coerce
the maiden who he knew
beforehand swooned
at the touch of feathers
giving way to swansdown,
and after he had had her,
he invented another bodily disguise.
I've seen it wait, half visible,
sometimes for months, for years,
until every alternative has failed.
In this, as everything it touches,
its intelligence is unblemished by
deceit, since the transparent
glassful, like a glass of water,
elixir of life, or an empty glass
is incapable of distortion but merely
forces the acknowledgment
of what has till then
been unarticulated. How delicately
it alternates compassion
with ferocity, never collapsing
the way a daughter might
but inspiring, like an accomplished lover,
however brutal, a kind of awe.
And how reverently it touches
the foulest places, and lodges itself
there, progressing so slowly
she scarcely notices she's lost
first appetite, then thirst
for water, that she's become
accident-prone, so
when at last she sees
her obligation to
what it's made of her,
she feels unloosed, released.
Our Alliance
My sister and I must have loved each other,
at least, when our mother found the two of us
equally to blame, equally innocent
and therefore ceased to distinguish us.
I think it happened the night we told her
our father was remarrying and
she broke a glass on the ceiling
and called our father up to list the ways
he'd hurt her while we witnessed it.
Or we were upstairs in my sister's bed
or mine and heard only a few
words of her conversation with him, or maybe
she whispered into the phone and we heard
only hissing. We must have been afraid of her,
but at least we were us, my sister and I
two copies of the same girl, for once
not rivals, not liars. All those years
we kept devising new ways to hurt each other, except
for the few times we hardly remember because
they were the worst times, when
we shared something, although
it was only pain, like lifting a heavy suitcase,
each of us supporting a little less than its full weight.