Meghan Sterling - These Few Seeds

These Few Seeds Also by Meghan Sterling How We Drift (chapbook) 2021 by Meghan Sterling Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Terrapin Books 4 Midvale Avenue West Caldwell, NJ 07006 www.terrapinbooks.com ISBN: 978-1-947896-39-0 ISBN: 978-1-9478964-0-6 (e-book) Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952060 First Edition Cover art: Snowmelt by Betty Schopmeyer oil on wood panel, 24" by 18" www.Bettyschopmeyerart.com This collection would not have been possible
without the support of my husband, Matthew,
and the existence of my daughter, Adeline,
who inspire me daily to love more and be better. Contents One Morning Prayer It is the beginning. It is the beginning when there was you.

It is the beginning when there was you and me and her, before it all just became life, when it was new. Can you remember? We are there now, again, standing at the beginning where we can hold the new of her, the new of who we had just become, our new names. Mother. Father. Taking these names from our ancestors, all the others who were what we are now, taking these names out of the air before we have a chance to try them on. Our new names.

Standing at the edge of water, praying for our daughters safety. It is the beginning when there was you and me and her and the water thats rising oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, all rising on this morning still soft with the night that was just here. Sidekick It was along the beach, always, that great revealer of the secret body, ungainly as marine life. We were dolphins caught in a rip-tide. We were beached jellyfish. We were a pod of seals spread across the sand, shining like puddles with their grease rainbows.

Barefoot, feet a little sticky. Hands also. Snap bracelets, scrunchies. The walking and walking. Through hidden thickets: Indian hawthorn, lantana, rosemary, sea rocket, woody goldenrod, pennywort. The paths littered with flecks of metal, paper, condoms like shrapnel after sex, and we were ancient, wise as wild horses, weaving our way through our habitat when the boys would come and we would bend, we would weaken.

We would break ranks. Flocking to them. Hungry, aware of our bodies being appraised. I learned my art: the blade that slices, that separates skin from bone, the way one path forges another. Say you forgive me. Poison dart tongue.

Face a mask. Machine gun smile. Rat-a-tat-tat. Clumsy joint passed beneath the palmettos. Say you understood the ruse. Be the clothespin. The mother in her white pinafore and hat like a basket of flowers.

Be the wildflower meadow. Creator of the hot air balloon. Psychic. Reader of palms. Superheros sidekick. Walking along the yellow beach, grasp the knife handle plunged deep into the wet sand.

Be surprised when it slides out easily, your mouth a mottled O shining in the rusted blade. Be a killer, sexual adventuress, librarian with buttoned neck and glasses and no panties. Holster the knife, keep walkingtheres a group of boys lounging ahead, boys who love a good story. California is always coming apart somewhere, a fire or a fault in the earth opening itself in love, in ruin, which is to say utterly. This place. Eucalyptus in wide stands filtering light and exhaust, leaves like wings, the ocean eating the side of the whole state, like it can't get enough of those shore pines, shards of cliff jutting out into the Pacific.

After all, California is a poem, Steinbeck said, and like many things, he knew, he saw the truth. This place can break you. Cherry flames ripping up the sides of whole mountains, redwood forests ringed in mist. Camera Lucida We were in love then. Early winter, the alleys like paper scraps of snow. Seeking each venue as if the next reading could deliver salvation.

I wrote on scraps, refusing to show the others, letting those scraps grow damp between fingers, pushing them against the seams of satin pocket liners. In the alleys, we smoked Marlboros, shaking in our acrylic gloves, in coats with too-short arms. We quoted Kafka, pretended we had read everything. You carried a small suitcase with journals, pencils, sharpeners, a protractoryou wore your eccentricity as an accessory. Without money for meals, we ate at bodegas, saved our pennies for museums, for jazz. You stole your books from the Strand.

We went for long walks in Park Slope, looking into windows lit with abundance, dreaming of living better than boxes on the stairwell, found furniture. Everything smelling of last week's cooking. At night, we huddled on the mattress, read passages from Barthes Camera Lucida, shared joints rolled from the cheapest shake. But poverty wore, frayed like our sleeves. You stayed out later, I started reading English novels. Your father offered you a salary to study business, and when spring came, you tossed your suitcase out the window into the muddy alley, your papers soaring like white birds.

Still Life with Snow It fell away, that slant of light that followed us across the North Sea, across a stable yard, hoofmarks sunk into the frozen mud. The way the barn cut the night in two, the hay steaming, the chickens asleep in the roost. I had dreamt us before we ever came to be, clutching the cold like a talisman against the bruising of old dreams, against the inevitable age that would grip us in its fulsome mouth. A dog in the yard mawing its one mean bone. And what sky was left was hollowed moon and piecemeal as a memory of what I thought I could be if only love would find me, traveling the Arctic of my heart, gnawing its white bone. Memory is a Greek island twisted in the red dust, blue anemones, gray olives, green figs, keeled over in Aegean winds.

Here I declared my love of open spaces. Snapshot of hair blown into sculpture after a day of walking. Snapshot of moonlight on the sea, still cold from remembering winter. Snapshot of six nuns in blue habits laughing in the bed of a new pickup truck careening over the rocky trail down to Parikia. Every village a different arrangement of white stone, blue doors and blue sky, sky that swallowed all sound into itself like a church. We were still friends then, before we fell into too much space.

Here, the wind blew salt over the fields of rock and we learned the plants like a new language: dianthus, lantana, kite flower, as we climbed the hill to see the ships come into the harbor. I decided here to love all that I was given, no matter how much it hurt. Adeline In our house, we always have dusty window frames, glass jars of tea, loose scree on the walkway. Lately, too, small evidences of her, sounds of sleep, quiet breathing soft as moss on stone, the dim roar of the monitor, a small sock wedged beneath a door. Agony of any distance. Even in the next room, I dream of her behind my eyes, my belly still holding memory, the sky stripped of cloud, her perfect breath always in earshot, a weathervane, right as rain.

Insistent, a dripping tap, running in a rust line down to a drain. In our house, she is near as my cells, in the woodgrain of floorboards, cradle of smooth gray walls. Man Subdues Terrorist with Narwhal Tusk on London Bridge It's another day, and I am in a mostly clean bathtub enjoying quiet in the lavender-scented water when you knock on the door Did you hear about the terrorist attack on London Bridge?A man subdued the attacker with a narwhal tusk! and chuckling, you leave, letting that fill the room. I lie back. The occasional drip of the tap as the scene unfolds. A crowded afternoon.