Christine Potter
On A Photo Of Edna St. Vincent Millay Sitting By Her Swimming Pool At Steepletop
Hair draped to one side. Naked—as she insisted guests
be to swim—under a toga-wrapped white towel, one
hand and one foot trembling the dark reflections of tall
bushes and trees. I want to say August. I want to say
cicadas whirring like wind-up toys, the air musky with
summer growing old. I want to say the humid air, want to
say a thunderstorm muttering somewhere off beyond
Great Barrington. She’s sitting on crab grass by the
pool’s stone border, a white stone bench behind her.
In her house, day blows in and out open windows, her
papers rustle—imagine that sound—and curtains
shrug in the breeze. Also wind-borne: a car’s motor.
Coming here? No, turning away. The pale, loose curl
of her body like the pose my mother asked of my fingers
on the piano. The music of a camera’s shutter, its
metallic kiss. The sign hanging in her library: Silence!
Things
My mother volunteered at her church thrift shop.
When she began to forget many things, she stopped
donating and started bringing things home. This
on top of her red and white wedding china, which
I’d stored for her in white plastic cases along with
the other things my father wouldn’t let her give me:
lawn-green Depression glass, brown casseroles,
rolling pins older than her marriage, maybe older
than my grandmother’s marriage. Even after he
died, when Mom lived alone with her helpers, I
couldn’t bear to take much. After they were both
gone, we had to hire people to help us give it all
away. Grief-stunned, I watched as table things, as
kitchen things, as the antique, bought-at-auction
oak dining set, the marble-bottom candle holders
with their rainbow-casting cut crystal tears, all got
sent to Good Will. I did speak up for some things,
took the china, some hobnail glasses, more things
than I want or even have room for, and somehow
still not enough. Maybe the wrong things? I don’t
know what to think. Their household. Paychecks.
Goods. Presents, department stores. The interior
arena of my childhood, a sugar bowl in the shape
of a Tudor cottage, English muffin crumbs left on
the kitchen table. The day I realized my parents
wanted to love me but had no idea how. A cobalt
vase, a white milk glass pitcher. Sun in wavy glass
windows, strings of Christmas lights that twinkled
on and off one bulb at a time, from Italy! But not
the cheap kind, my father always said, never cheap.
I Can’t Lie To You
Why should I trick you with daisies
and pastels? Peace is not a blue flag
applauding a blue sky, not the two or
three hundred encircled arrows I drew
without even thinking about it on my
notebook in 1969. Truth is, we’re all
angry. We woke up afraid. We were
left alone to cry it out. Someone once
raised a loud, deep voice to us. Now
we recruit armies. We’re all looking
for a false dawn: that yellow line of
light at the bottom of our shut-tight
bedroom doors as our parents drink
downstairs. We hear the rising tide
of their laughter, smell the enticing
bonfires of their cigarettes. But they
don’t hear us calling them. And we
pretend we don’t remember. I can’t
lie to you. Peace sits by herself on
the breathing ocean’s other side and
watches the darkness of a ruined city.
She texts neighbors who fled the war,
phone a candle cupped in her fingers.
Then a full moon unravels the clouds.
And Yet
I am thinking about the things that silence me today—
fear of ridicule, fear of being wrong, the great fear
of harming someone with my words. I worry, but the
day rolls over in its sleep, tugging the clouds’ torn
blankets over one shoulder. A weak stripe of Western sun,
a breeze, a frost-blackened sunflower stalk nodding
the dead star of its flower. I am thinking about wars,
of people who plan how they will happen and where—
and I am thinking how every war burns down the
house we all have to live in. And yet someone hurts
badly enough to drive a tank down a city street, or run
into a concert with guns. We have always had weapons,
always. But autumn’s slide into this winter felt like
someone full of dinner fighting to stay awake and watch
TV’s neon lies. I want to say the world is what’s truly
beautiful, and I’m having trouble today. If you hold
your open hands in front of you, fingers slightly curved
as if you were trying to catch something, you might
feel the heft of your life, and it might be holy. Newly
baptized babies almost always reach for the candle the
priest is holding, towards its light—cheap trick or not.
So we all know where the light is; we just can’t agree on
its name. See how the sky has cleared? How can you
ignore sunset through that architecture of empty trees?
Christine Potter’s poetry has been curated by Rattle, Kestrel, Third Wednesday, Thimble, Eclectica, The Midwest Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily—and featured by ABC Radio News. She has work forthcoming in The McNeese Review and One Art. Her young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen, and her third collection of poetry, Unforgetting, by Kelsay Books. She lives in Valley Cottage, NY, in a house with two ghosts, two spoiled cats, and her husband.
