Sally Bliumis Dunn

Poems

Portrait

If not for the faces within his face
he would look like an ordinary man:
black close--cropped hair,
dark eyebrows, tapered cheeks,

reddish lips and beige skin.
But there is a face in each of his eyes,
no eyeball, just a face.
And there is a face in each of his nostrils --

a face in place of his tongue,
a face inside each ear.
These faces within his face
are the bloodless white

of mimes or ghosts.
They are the faces of those
who have named him,
who have shown him to himself.

He cannot speak or see without them
and he hears them in his dreams,
where even the smell of a rose
does not feel quite his own.

~ ~ ~

With the help of strangers

Each time the father kicks the ball
to the sister, the little boy whines,
bends his knees, straightens his legs
repeatedly as though he kept trying to jump,
but his feet won't leave the grass:
the ineffectual ball of his body
bouncing up and down.

The father and slightly older sister
don't seem to notice or mind.
The next time the father passes to her,
the little boy steals the purple ball,
kicks it down the hill.
He runs after it -- a staccato whine
in time with his pounding feet.

The ball rolls to a stranger.
Oblivious to his drama,
she rolls it back to him,
as though he'd done nothing wrong,
and the ball should always be his --
just enough out of family context,
just close enough by

to reinforce the boy's perspective
though somewhere inside he knows,
as he walks back up the hill,
that neither he nor the stranger is right,
but what he feels now is calm,
as he slides into the space between
his father and sister resting
on the blue picnic blanket.

~ ~ ~

Meaning

My mother is eighty--two,
not so steady on her feet;

she falls now and then;
last week, in her driveway;

missed a step she said; she has
more of them now:

moments when she seems
almost absent from herself

and the greedy earth pulls her.
I watch leaves fall

and wonder how
it can be the same word,

a few yellow leaves now,
just outside my window,

caught suddenly in
an updraft, then like

butterflies drifting down.

~ ~ ~

Snow Falling

Look at the snow
as something shattered,
falling -- one idea
broken into all its parts --
its phrases, its words --
each word as it has lived
within your life:
all the places
where it was uttered:
the colors in all
the different rooms,
whether the air was warm,
or it was raining --
all of these places
shattered, falling.
Each word
and its lives within
your life, and in
the entire world
of speech, anyone's
speech -- one idea
as snow
falling.

~ ~ ~

In the Women's Locker Room

Over the tops of the lockers,
I hear a woman

talking, talking.
Just the trail of her sentences,

sentencing,
sentencing her listener

to the silence of a tree.
While she, like an animal

nose to the ground,
follows the trail

of her own words, her scent.
Tense, she is on the prowl:

she is talking about
her body, her body.

She can't decide
if she wants to be

fat with no wrinkles,
or skinny with wrinkles

But for now, she says
she just wants to keep

her muscles in tone:
her muscles intone to her:

"Be somebody;
Be some body."

~ ~ ~

Stillness

In the gap between
it is cold and white --
snow is falling,
sticking to the legs
of the lawn chairs
like thick white socks,
layering the cast iron
arms of the chairs
then it stops;
nothing moves
that has not already moved:
bird tracks in snow,
hoof prints of deer
looping the pines,
and a lingering
coldness inside me --
each cloven hoof print --
the perfect halves,
the gap between
the opposites
inside me --
today, the gap
between.

~ ~ ~

Packing

Black nylon socks
rolled and stuffed into pairs
like roses without their stems

inside the suitcase's silvery gray
which looks like a photograph
taken in black and white,

in the tones
of summer moonlight:
gardenias ghostly gray,

the pink hibiscus white,
the sound of sprinklers panting
like a person running away;

and underwear, white as moths
drawn blindly towards the light.

~ ~ ~

The Return

The soft white square of our bed,
is planted on the dark oak floor,
the still--life you had painted,
the sculptures on the shelf.
I float into the room

and the walls
tan with a pinkish glow,
collapse and crumble into sand.
The room fills up with water;
I am swimming in an ocean

which is still somehow our room.
A stingray ripples by me
and floats above the bed
which is now a bed of oysters,
gray tight--lipped oysters.

~ ~ ~

Driving Across The Bridge

The pavement slides
beneath my wheels like breath.

I am driving across this bridge
imagining the steel girders

above me are your ribs,
and the slow pulse

of the broken yellow line
is your pulse, and the dull

gray of the sky --
the color of the hospital ceiling.

I wonder if what I am seeing
is at all like what you see:

fog on the river, fog on the shore,
the red of a lighthouse fading,

windows, shingles
blending into white --

just the outline of the lighthouse,
the slender border

between it and everything,
all I can see,

just the faintest
outlines in fog.

~ ~ ~

Missing You

sometimes you
tilt your head
when you look
at me, as though
you sensed
some narrow
opening; you
tilt your head
so you can use
both eyes to see
inside me; you're
smiling because we
both understand
that this is
just a gesture.
Sometimes you sway
from side to side
as you walk
slowly to me.
I love that you
don't hurry, seem to
savor the approach;
sometimes you
furrow your brow
and I think
I'm seeing
through you
to an open field
inside you --
grass blades
wave, sing softly
like tongues
in the wind.

~ ~ ~

Ice

There are long icicles
lit from within
floating in the night
like frozen flames.
No, smoother, more
like snake fangs --
mouth open, gullet dark.
Am I swallowed?
No, drawn in
by the clean tick
of a cold--blooded heart:
beneath the pale
diamond--shaped windows
of its scales,
I wrap myself,
in its pale blue veins,
sleep in its wet cocoon,
to emerge on the grassy
bank of a pond,
to see my reflection
appear unchanged,
to know it is cold,
grass grayed in the frost,
to know it is cold
and that I feel no
discomfort in my new
snake heart.

~ ~ ~

Invocation

The way you sway
as you walk to me,

or froth the milk each morning,
the ordinary always

becoming something else
like an atmosphere

changing.
Let there only be a sweet

lingering in the air
that pulls us from moment

to moment; and far off
in the distance,

the old pain in starkest
contrast.

Let my body never
memorize your body;

let our constant vanishing be
the window we look through

and each of our steps vanish
the one that came before.

~ ~ ~

Waves

To see water
pull itself

into perfect arcs,
as if to mimic

the crescent moon,
the way the shape

of my daughter's eyes
make her undeniably

mine -- there's nothing
she need say or do

to show her origins.
She can remain

in silence. To see
water lift away

as though
it kept wanting

to be held
in the empty

hands of air.

~ ~ ~

Heart

She has painted her lips
hibiscus pink.
The upper lip dips
perfectly in the center

like a Valentine heart.
It makes sense to me --
that the lips,
the open

ah of the mouth
is shaped more like a heart
than the actual human heart.
I remember the first time I saw it --

veined, and shiny
as the ooze of a snail --
if this were what
we had been taught to draw

how differently we might have
learned to love.

~ ~ ~

Wedding Dress

I don’t want to put my wedding
dress away. I look at its silk

embroidered bodice, and see
the wet green lawn, our guests,

my daughter in the bedroom mirror,
weaving the last flower into my hair.

I look at my cream-colored dress
as a window, still left open,

ceremony in the woods, reception
on the lawn –-- is all it will ever have.

Imagine, “always” and “forever”
in our closet hanging.

~ ~ ~

Their Names

Like a rain I feel but cannot see,
the names of the dead, falling.

Silences I hear between
first names, middle, last

are slivers of empty air between
lines of rain. I want

to be in these tiny silences
that cannot hold their deaths

but join them to all silence –
rests in a piece of music,

the quiet beneath a rock,
the feather on a crow,

beak closed, wings
perfectly still.

~ ~ ~

Stone

The surface tension of the water --–
what is light enough

to float there, glide –-- the water bug,
yes, but not the dragonfly.

Delicate floating, this a poem
for you and for all that falls

below the surface of chest, thigh, sheets.

Lying on our bed,
the streetlamp’s orange light;

the lovely length of my husband
flickering beside me.

The past falling through
our bodies like a stone.

~ ~ ~

Leaving for College

Stacks of sweaters on your bedroom floor;
I think it is the neatness of it all –

whose absence am I feeling, yours or mine?
But does it matter – isn’t it always

the heart’s incessant calling
to what is already gone:

the sudden recognition of absence
and the heart’s terrible insistence:

the poor slow heart, just busy gathering
all the sadnesses it has ever known,

in its plain and simple language:
what is the same; what is different,

regardless of time or place:
whether I was two and afraid to go to sleep,

ten above my father’s grave, or just now
as you are leaving.

~ ~ ~

Forthcoming in Still Here

Herring Gulls

They are born mottled,
brown and white,

and evolve towards a uniform
gray sky of wings,

foam white bodies
thin tapering peninsulas

of yellow beak –
four years for their plumage

to settle like a landscape,
as though a mist

had been slowly lifting.

At the beach, a woman
tosses a light rain
of bread crumbs into the air;
herring gulls cry and cluster around her.
Near where I sit reading,
a gull, limping slightly,
moves towards me on the sand.
I could be a rock or shell.

And I love that bird for stepping
so close that I see, a thin black line
around the injured leg
like a ring that marries the bird
to its own vulnerability.
And I wish for something,
a crust, some crumbs
to keep the bird near me.

Their wings arced slightly
down as they glide,

they are visual articulations
of the wind’s invisible

paths in the air,
the way words articulate

the mind –
their black-tipped wings,

white tails,
legs folded neatly

underneath them as they fly.
And then there are

their jarring cries
like cloth suddenly torn

and torn again, to shreds.

~ ~ ~

Coquina Shells

No bigger than a pinky nail,
tiny, translucent clams:
mauves, oranges, blues,

they wash up on the beach
connected at the hinge,
like so many butterflies, fallen.

The ones that lie unhinged, alone
remind me of the rain,
of light rain dimpling a tidal pool,

each drop falls, and then
the fine concentric lines
are like coquina shells –

my tiny survivors.

~ ~ ~

Guinea Pig

When the small hill
of the mother’s body stayed still,
I knew she’d died.

Fanny sat in the woodchips beside her.
When I returned with a ziplock bag,

she lay right on top of her, making
a soft, almost inaudible sound –

her mourning strangely the same

as any other I’ve known –
the same perfect limpness
of one body thrown over another
like a hopeless cloth,

and the sound of deepest sorrow,
muffled as though it came
from the center of a gigantic stone.

I couldn’t bring myself to move her.
All afternoon she lay
on the sudden silence of
her mother’s heart

and on the slower news
of the body, which still
offered a fading warmth.

Email: poems@sallybliumisdunn.com