Memorizing the Laws of Gravity

I dreamed I sat in a darkening room
with many others at long tables
making food from spider webs,
by stacking them with great care
one atop another
until a whiteness emerged,
solid as air, to fill the hollows
in my daily bread.

Eyes dimmed, face covered
with networks of age,
I follow the pathways
of shadow, filigrees of light
that morning spins from night.
With delicate bones
I reticulate sidewalks,
tracing imaginary threads,
one way first, then another,
like tatting lace,
my heart the shuttle
beating time.

I walk this web that will soon
catch death in its embrace.
But in this lean time:
I feast on breath.

-Kitty Yanson

An old woman lectures me about leaves
littering the sidewalk this late in fall.
Leave me alone, I tell her.
I will collect them when time
is left over after the day’s creation
…or the week’s or month’s…
of what I’ve yet to know.
This chore is just too steep
for me today. And I just read
some article or another
that said leaving them is good
for the soil.
But not for the sidewalk,
back she yells.

I know this old woman.
My head is her shoe;
she has so many duties
she doesn’t know what to do:
the concrete exigencies of time
and obligation, washing the dishes,
doing taxes; they scrape against my mind
like rakes against walkways.

So I lace up that old woman tight in her shoe
and kick mine off, sit in a chair,
and my cat Francis, who knows the leaves
I’ve left too long; he watched each one fall
saying in his kitty brain, wow,
I wonder if it will happen again
and it does, and wow,
I wonder if it will happen again
and it does, and did
becoming a great pile
of dead surprises.

He knows I’ve left the leaves too long
and just doesn’t care
as he explores paw by paw
the round perfection of my lap.

-Kitty Yanson

We sit like five points of a star,
until silence thins the veil of God.
Cathy in her steadiness reads
poems and scripture, snatches of essays
and stories teeming in intent and theme.

I am reminded of Indra’s Net,
the mythical fabric hung in the heavens
that stretches in all directions with jewels
at each fiber’s juncture. Each eye is a perfect,
singular gem, each reflects all the others:
infinity to infinity: everything holds everything,
splashed against the sky.

One by one, we speak to carve again
the opaque stones of our hiddenness,
reflecting facets that keen-edged life
has etched, each cut at a critical
angle with just the right amount of slant
for light to shoot forth to needle
a shining network shawl of meaning,
and we huddle into one
another’s words to warm
the chill of an indifferent world.

We are the power
we can see in one another’s lives,
diamonds of the first water,
each holding all, all holding each,
all, both catchers and caught, and
luminous, in the net of all wisdom.

-Kitty Yanson

Fresh snowfall looks diamond-hard,
but it is not.
My front yard now is a wilderness of blank,
but it is not
while the black crow in the snow-paled tree
saws silence with its caw.

Shaking snow from my hat, I recall
that as heat descends from the rising sun,
one by one
singular flakes
melt to feed spring,
becoming the water
they are.

The wrinkles in my face and the aching
in my arms warn that I am old,
but I am not.
I am still
the elemental being
crawling across
the kitchen floor,
clanging pots
and clashing pans
massacring quiet,
a new annunciation:

I am here!

the same being
hearing the ring
of single words
striking cold
white pages

like an Angel Gabriel
spreading his enormous wings
in a clap of thundersnow,
tending to
the solemnity of gist:

Behold!

-Kitty Yanson

Pegeen brings me dinner,
chicken salad wraps and chocolate brownies
and conversation feathered deep with affection.
I sit in my recliner, my shoulder firmly trussed,
my pain firmly entrusted to post-op oxy.
She tells me of the Thanksgiving dinner brought
in aluminum trays by the caring staff
where her father died
(Her girls even now call it
the Tin-Foil Thanksgiving.)
She speaks of telling
her mother that her husband had gone:
the family standing in the room, “Where’s Ed?”
then silence, the others stepping back,
and Peg, by standing still
pushed forward to the podium of mourning,
to speak the deep truth of death. 

I think of how waiters sometime wrap uneaten
dinners in tin foil, shaping them into swans.
But swans, in their reality, make lie our eyes’ repast:
we do not see the urgent churning below,
the power of those thighs in continuous
travail that feeds our dreams of unending ease.

We throw away the cellophane and cardboard.
My shoulder begins again to throb.
“You’ll be ok?” she asks as she gets up to leave.
I nod, as does she, in unsaid thanksgiving,
turning and returning to each other grace
that endures beneath tenebrous waters
as we paddle, serene on the surface,
across the holy sea of loss.

-Kitty Yanson

A father, teaching his son to be less afraid,
on steps, each higher, bade him jump. Again
and again, his father catches him, and trades
the risk for open arms, for love unfeigned.

But he steps aside. The boy then falls, face pale
against the floor. His father tells him: trust
completely none, not even me. This tale
is brutal. Betrayal always is. Unjust

it is but mires us nonetheless: the frost
that early comes, the love unhinged, the knees
that buckle climbing up a curb, the lost
belief that living comes with skeleton keys.

Betrayals seed hard hopes a soul might live:
Mud-buried hearts can bloom when they forgive.

-Kitty Yanson

A young father takes his small daughter’s picture
against a bank of floribunda roses that lines
the labyrinth called Thanksgiving Place.
Portrait done, she grabs handfuls of petals
to form balls of floral snow that promptly
fall apart; they will not stick as she wishes,
falling to the ground, an apricot carpet.

Her father walks away, calling her to follow.
She refuses, grabbing another then another
handful of petals, squeezing, dropping them,
thickening the blanket’s loft, leaving
not an inch of ground uncovered.

I walk this circle as my morning prayer along
its switchback path to my center, turning, and moving
outward from my beginning. I imagine this child
walking the labyrinth of life many years hence.

I want to be her and stamp my foot, ignoring again
my father’s call as he stands just beyond the vanishing
point at the end of my breathing’s path. Stubbornly
planted near a bank of flowers, first, I demand,
first, this rough earth made deep with beauty.

-Kitty Yanson

When Mnemosyne and Zeus got it on,
they made daughters who played
along edges of streams. Muses.
Memory mixed with majesty.
From the clear water currents that bubble up
through layers of leaf mold, through rocks,
through muddy soil and sand, the girls
splashed art and science and a soul’s hunger
for a glimpse of god in its singular self.
Creation rises through the grime
of experience and the rot of time,
like groundwater for richness of soul.

But I wonder now: will the currents that drive
an AI world run electric, the strike of lightning
alone from a sky ungrounded in mud, fortify
an imitation soul? Will it live in its machine mind
ever impatient of contemplation, its pleasure
a conflagration that burns a forest down?

Today, my words outdate before they dry
upon the page. An eagle shrieks and dives
to talon a white perch in a Choptank creek.
It will shred this fish into bleeding ribbons
to feed its young in the wide nest I cannot see
high up in some loblolly pine. This cry is my cry,
as is the beauty of the lightning dive,
as is the bloody feeding of my gape-beaked longing.

-Kitty Yanson