Memorizing the Laws of Gravity

These two are you,
the label that is you and its referent
like apple and what it stands for,
its consonants and vowels aiming
to cram essence into fact
but miss the tightness of the skin
before surrendering to tooth,
the sweet flesh, the ping in the air
beneath the nose, the punctuation
of seeds as tongue and bite
circumlocute to center.

You are so much more than name
and occupation, marital status, and yearly income,
all words spilled like coffee grounds
on the counter of your days that turns you
into a measly datum excelling in surface
to scrawl across a spreadsheet.

But you, brought up from the root cellar of time
to dwell in that bowlful of harvest we share,
you are a sweetness in manner, a tartness
in sorrow, so full of flavor,
an open-ended richness like the exhalation
of mystery that escapes when you pierce
the skin of an O or an A,
liberating the breathing hidden in a word,
as together we swallow to our core
the hushed longing that lives there
with its seeds of unsayable truth.

-Kitty Yanson

When I was seven, thinking I was pleasing
my mother and God (in that order), I danced
at the communion rail, fingerpainting air,
my kid knees composing primordial poems
against the kneeling bench.

In the parking lot after Mass, she stopped me with a slap:
never embarrass me like that again, she said.
Of course, she was right, and I had been wrong
(which was usually the case),
so I folded my stinging face
into the envelope of my body, posted the pain
with a forever stamp, mailed it to forgotten.

Past seventy now with arthritic joints and neuralgia
in my face, I tell my analyst about that long-ago ballet
for which my mother clapped against my cheek
a hapless applause.

The undelivered letter opens;
story mixes again with unsealed pain, jolting,
like old lavender blended with blood’s steely tinge,
filling the vast space between us, me at home,
my analyst in Zurich, sitting across a virtual table.

Healing rarely comes alone. It needs a hand to hold,
someone to hear the cry that was uncried,
to say the name with love once unsaid with love,
to breathe in my pain, breathe out abiding presence.

Today, as I run my thoughts along the polished scar
that marks the knit of memory and hurt,
my girl voice calls me again to come
before a beaming God who cocks one
eyebrow and asks me ever,
Dance?

-Kitty Yanson

Crows circle grey sky
calling to one another,
fans cheering in a bowl of clouds
the brain-crushing brutality
of winter.

I want to hang a silver chain
in a pine tree branch
to lure them closer
but I’m told it is a legend
that crows love shine.
They aren’t the ones
who steal black stones
gleaming on gravestones
tokens left by grief;
these stones are too large
to be grit for gizzards to ease
a crow’s digestion.

I love stories like this,
but stories told a million times
do not make fact.

But it’s true raccoons work the night
for brightness, collecting old keys,
bottle caps, and bits of foil left over
from yesterday’s takeaway dinner.
They gorge on garbage
then forage through trash for shine.

So here I sit counting iridescent
dust specs on apocryphal feathers,
preferring airborne legends
to the earthbound truths
brought by sifting
the swill of my sins
for what’s hidden
inside the stink,
the silver wisdom
shining.

-Kitty Yanson

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