Coultas Brenda - The tatters

THE TATTERS

WESLEYAN POETRY

the tatters BRENDA COULTAS

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS | MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

2014 Brenda Coultas

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill

Typeset in Parkinson Electra Pro

Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green

Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their

minimum requirement for recycled paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coultas, Brenda.

[Poems. Selections]

The tatters / Brenda Coultas.

pages cm.

ISBN 978-0-8195-7419-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

(Wesleyan Poetry Series)

I. Title.

PS3603.O886A6 2014

811'.6dc23

5 4 3 2 1

Cover artwork: Spiderweb Rose, image by Portia Munson, 2009.

DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF BRAD WILL

Brad Will was a poet, Indymedia journalist, anarchist, and

a friend of mine. He was murdered in Oaxaca, Mexico, on

October 27, 2006, while filming a street battle between the

Oaxaca governor Ulises Ruiz Ortizs thugs and APPO , the

Popular Assembly of the People, during a months-long teachers

strike in which at least eleven were killed. For more information:

www.friendsofbradwill.org.

THE TATTERS

MY TREE

I found a pearl and wore it in my ear

Deep ocean echoes sing like a seashell

A girl promised a purse filled with jewels, if I would be her friend

Purses open secrets as priceless as pills in a jeweled box

Loose pearls, enough to imagine what a great loss that necklace was or was not

I like to see metal turn red and glow and to hear its hiss when it meets the water. Leather bellows, suspended from the ceiling, pump air into the fire. Long-handled tongs and picks forge mostly nails. I open all the old purses. There might be change left in one.

I built you a tree of light to see by

To listen to digital libraries in your palm.

Renamed myself writing this book, renamed myself after building this tree

I burnt candles all night to grow these leaves.

I fed books to the flame, to make a blaze to read by

Mined libraries to power this tower of light

Built sparkling branches

with flaming pages for leaves

dense as the weeping willows cascade of curls

On the mountain ridge my tree stands head and shoulders above the hardwoods. Along the roadway wooden poles, bathed in chemicals, hold up a network of wire

I built a tree, more cell than sweeping pine or black walnut, as natural as pink pine needles or a silver holiday tree. Glittery pine boughs glue-gunned on

No needles on the floor

No forest smell

My gift is glittery and eternal

even in synthetic shreds

dumped on a landlocked city sidewalk

it finds its way to the sea

A MASS FOR BRAD WILL

If I were a quill Id write in bright feathers all about you bursting into flight over the heads of cops

If I were a handsome feather, Id walk to City Hall in full plumage and release all of Manhattans political prisoners

If I were a quill Id give you life on this quiet page

On a four feather day, last one ruffled another grey with black-banded top

Then pinfeathers regroup to make a full on

You might think his body was blown to bits or burned to ashes

Thrown into a favorite body of water
Maybe one of the great lakes

You might think he was made of feathers or of bird weight

No, he was buried whole, perhaps with bullets intact.

Critical mass. Yes, he liked to say it.

Critical mass is a beautiful way to say we gather

to shut down the system

so bicyclists can take over the streets

Critical mass

a way to say we gather

so that it matters

When the bicyclists take over the streets

and bring the city

to a standstill, Brad said that

is critical mass

I asked, What happens when the city is shut down?

He said, Then well dance.

He liked a song about a drop of water. In this song, the drops came together to form a trickle, then a stream, a river, a body of water, the power of the water made us aware that we belonged to the earth, that we would protect her, and by the end of the song, the river was free.

THE MIDDEN

Blue stone quarries

stone of touch

stone marker or the stone left behind

shell middens and clay pipes and passenger pigeons dressed in blues

the stone that gazes heaven side up

the day which is red and pink corners

Burnish the blue stone & quarry the earth dynamite time

Perfection is times work or what makes bluestone blue or what makes a quartz crystal

Halo surroundscore of labyrinthglow departs from an ember

Opposing fire & fetching cool petals

quietly foxed or bat claw unhinged

cut from mussel shell or bone

buttons lie underground

Walking through coals into a city within the fire

entering the ember, encased in a protective suit

to bring out handfuls of what that world inside burning wood is like

Flame in the air, gas fields full of devils spit yellow eye of methane

When the flame is in the air and the night is eye & thigh high paper laid on an ember browns then flames

Walking inside the flame, or an ember of heated talk opening doors poured from the long-necked bucket or dug from a shallow seam

Standing in the doorway of an ember

the door is a passage that my friend leaves ajar

Walking through embers: a marriage with its pleasures of heat and light

and the pain of heat and light

stoking the fire inside

Oil pumps in a corn field

Satans fires

burn off the methane

Freestanding coal shack & packed trailer parks of burning coals overflow the double-wide with its cathedral ceilings, whirlpool tubs, and master suites

The landfill handed me a ball of paper, a washed-out small boulder of print. I cracked it open and read Danny Kaye performing live. And I thought, How long has he been dead?

Like the midden of books and papers stacked by the bed, make of it what you will. I put my rage on top to cultivate later, the midden of paper and print, headlines and ink, mixed pulp from long ago industrial and urban waste will topple and release a flood of ivory and soft grays and blacks

Dust tops the PC, dot matrix printer, and typewriter in a thrift shop

The Apple in the barn is boxy and hard

Cords long gone

Plastic phones turn a palm into light

The inside awash with take-out containersdrivers seat cleared ofcigarette butts, newspapers, plastic forks, spoons, and knives ready to go

The captains logbook was inked heavy with stamps. I ask the long-dead captain, Is it like a wax cylinder or like tree rings or like grooves set in foil? Is it Thomas Edisons talking machine or Bells telephone? Is it an echo chamber of the ocean or a talking drum?

There were the sounds that I couldnt carve, the blood I couldnt catch, dust fell, sprinkling itself over the glass cases of artifacts, over baleen piano keys, carved dice, combs, and mirrors. In his log book I silently entered how the whales eardrums are as large as a childs head (how each is painted with a frisky portrait of a man and a woman.)

I carve an animal into the logbook, cutting through a hundred pages of sea notes, of sightings, of oil harvested and rendered. I cut through accounts of the sperm whales death throes, of harpooners who froze as they closed in on the chase. With my pen, I carve another animal into the book. A tooth out of a tusk. Baleen into corset stays. Press breasts and penises into bone, I make fine canes for gentlemen.