Borowicz - Proof

Karina Borowicz Codhill Press New Paltz, New York Codhill books are published by David Appelbaum for Codhill Press Copyright 2014 Karina Borowicz All rights reserved First Edition Grateful acknowledgments are due to the editors of the following publications where some of these poems first appeared: AGNI : Dog Adrift: Poland, January 2010, My People; anderbo.com : Bad Honey; Arts & Letters : Snake; Barnstorm : Guardian; Barnwood : Paintbrush; The Caf Review : Window Watching at Midnight; Columbia Poetry Review : In Memory, Marina Tsvetaeva Home Museum; Connotation Press : An Online Artifact : Planet Kepler 22B, Sunbeam Bread; Contrary : Carving, Tools; Crab Creek Review : migr; DMQ Review : The Invisible; Etchings : Perseids; The Evansville Review : Statue; Faultline : Swimming Out; Fourteen Hills : The Hailstones Bit; The Fourth River : Blue Heart; Hanging Loose : Armadillo, Cuckoo Clock; Harpur Palate : Sanctuary; Hunger Mountain : Charo, Tiny Tim; Make: A Chicago Literary Magazine : Folk; The Midwest Quarterly : Idea of Poppies; MiPOesias : Iggy Pop on The Dinah Shore Show , My Salt, The Horses Neck; New Ohio Review: Midnight Train; Nimrod International Journal : Edges; Poet Lore : Saw; Poetry Northwest : Frozen Boot; Qarrtsiluni : Fist, Rubber; REAL : Regarding Arts and Letters : Bookshop Biblio Globus , Reading Madame Bovary ; RHINO : Fourth of July; Ruminate Magazine : Down Here; The Southern Review : Miniature, Moose, Proof, Reading Anna Karenina , Rose Marie on The Dick Van Dyke Show ; The Sows Ear Poetry Review : Blake; Upstreet : Emilys Dress; Valparaiso Review : Genie the Imprisoned Child; Water~Stone Review : Bone Flute, Brush and Ink Herd of Horses Book and cover design by Alicia Fox www.aliciafoxdesign.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Borowicz, Karina. [Poems. Selections] Proof / Karina Borowicz. First Edition. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-930337-75-2 (alk. paper) I. Title. PS3602.O767A6 2014 811'.6dc23 2014011965 For Ben and Milda

Their howls and yips travel the half-mile over the black field and into the house. The invisible is calling. Those wild lives so seldom considered are carrying on without us, who like to believe that our eyes have grasped it all.

But what about the matted fur, the bared teeth? What about the chase that has already begun? The deer slipping between trees in the moonless woods. That darkness. Who among us has seen even a common thing, an owl, with our own eyes?

They say theyve found another earth out there, greening like the shaded side of a boulder. I dont know which direction of the night sky to face. But that planets there somewhere, anywhere, despite me. Despite everything thats turning here with me.

The sleeping winter colony of ants, the radio towers red star spilling the light of invisible mandolins, the inner earth, our real Milky Way, that glitters with the minerals of ancestors, the cave walls at Lascaux, where a herd of red horses still circles in the darkness.

Here is a man who has run his hand along the neck of a horse watched the streaming mane gallop away learned a poem of hoof beats copied it down in bold fluid strokes on the unrolled sheet of rice paper and with the horses he suffers as his brush moves the bit burning his mouth the slicing whip against his thigh the nails pounding up through his bare feet this is how he comes to love freedom can you forgive my mans heart he cries as he drives the horsehair brush filled with ink over the blinding tundra of paper At the Dickinson Homestead A replica, no body ever moved in this closed a bone button over a wrist made the thousand ungrand gestures of a lifes unfolding where is that something real to lift by the shoulders and fold again carefully fabric dingy with a bodys passage seams still tight with hand-stitched dashes Again the circle of green light. My neighbor is sewing. With the two natures of a moth, his hands hover there, one futility the other wing hope. And the fabric is bunched up, from here its not clear what until a shirt dangles its arm. Other nights its something else, a square of cloth, a sock.

The work smaller and smaller till it appears nothings there, but the needle still moves or what might be a needle, and what might be thread is pulled, up and out.

He comes to understand the spirit abiding in each scrap of wood that passes through his hands. Every child is born he says knowing the language of trees for so long our unformed ear is pressed to the wall of eternity. With his hands he smoothes the wood from which a face is beginning to emerge. Tools rest at his feet the blackened little knife, a bent nail. Hammer and hacksaw, vise and screwdriver have the hard gaze and slow heartbeat of reptiles.

I am visiting the hardware store with my father. In a wooden drawer stained by dirty fingers a sea of nails rolls back and forth. The bare light bulb burning in the middle of the ceiling cuts deep shadows in the mens faces, silent men that smell of sawdust and kerosene, boiled cabbage and cigarettes. When I furtively pick up a crested little tool its claws bite my palm. The neighborhoods only color TV glows neon in the dark room behind the register.

A boy is learning to cut wood in the sun the saws shadow is the jaw of an animal tearing the pine plank sawdust collects in the creases of his untied shoes. A boy is learning to cut wood in the sun the saws shadow is the jaw of an animal tearing the pine plank sawdust collects in the creases of his untied shoes.

When he stops for a moment to size up the line hes pulling through the soft white wood on the other side of the trees a dog strains against its chain and cries out.

The air is thick with minutes. With years. Barehanded we cant catch them, so weve armed ourselves with clocks. When my father opens the hut-shaped box, the stream of time freezes. He oils the gears and sets the pendulum swinging.

Ghosts swim again like fishes. It may announce the hour, but theres so much more that little birds hiding. I saw a hawk this morning chased by crows, something squirming in its grasp.

Passing the tire factory on the way to school Id move through pockets of haunted air, the sudden warmth of unseen hands would part across my face, wrist bones of smoke twisting away. This is my fate, Id think, only half hating it, how my life was caught up in machinery Id heard yet never seen, that constant comforting whir behind painted-over windows. I dont recall ever asking for any of this: being born, having to live an upstanding American life, all of a sudden getting old, coming to fear the very oblivion I would have preferred in the first place. I dont recall ever asking for any of this: being born, having to live an upstanding American life, all of a sudden getting old, coming to fear the very oblivion I would have preferred in the first place.

As a child, I was carried by a beast of sadness, at the least likely moments Id feel it bristle my skin, for instance eating pizza at the mall, and the feeling would take my breath away. My greasy fingers had become suddenly so small and strange, Gladys Knight and the Pips lit the jukebox with Midnight Train and I was dying of this painful humanness, yet dreading the white noise of heaven.