Kimberly Martz
SALTATION
At five o’clock in the morning, a moan rises from the street
into my apartment and I can’t help it, I go out, search for a face
among the dumpsters. In the distance, a dissonant music,
the dregs of some late party. When I find him, silence
hangs so heavily on him, I think he’s dead, but then a muffled Coffee?
and a hand reaching out from the shadows,palm bared as though to say I exist in peace. He stays hidden in shadow,
but when I ask why he’s lying behind a car in the street,
his voice, rough as the long-unshaven lines of his face,
pours out in starts and stops, an odd human music
lifted from his Cuban aunt, Brazilian grandfather who died in silence
in an alley in Santos, his mother who brewed coffeestronger than the men she kept about. When I hand him a cup of coffee,
he cries, and I think how strange it is what people will tell in the shadow
of a dumpster, wonder why anyone would lie down in the street.
Maybe they cart me off, too. His face
twists as though he’s chewing on laughter, but I can’t make this music
with him in the slow unraveling silenceof the dawn. Death usually makes for uncomfortable silences
between friends, much less strangers. Over coffee,
I tell him how often I have loved shadow,
and he tells of his travels through the streets
of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. The world’s dark face
opens its great blind eye to a city pale with cold and little musicat this early hour, save for what spoons and old cans make. Music
in my blood, he croons into the now bird-bedecked silence
rimmed with our breath and the steam from the coffee.
I know that I can step away from shadow
at any moment, leave the narrow street
so many walk alone, like him, this man whose faceso close to mine smells of whiskey and sorrow. You got the face
of an angel, he cries, so you must know music.
I let him sing the strains of his blood, though voices call for silence
now, too early still for anything more than the pop and hiss of coffee,
the dance of bodies whose shadows
gleam and bounce on the pocked surface of the streetwhere we stand, face to face, thinking how to leave the streets
and their shadows behind. What dull gifts – coffee
and silence – we give to those who’d make of the world a jangling music.
CHILD'S PLAY
Before the morning bell
and prayer, we waited for the nuns
to turn away their blue habits,
other children to carry their play
onto the blacktop, your mother
to wave her last goodbye.
Holding each other’s hands,
we gathered you in a circle,
demanded you show us the scar
on your chest where the nuns said
God scooped out your heart
and left a line like broken teeth
behind. You stood still as air,
and we danced around you until
you unbuttoned, bit by bit,
your meager shame, and raised
the dirty undershirt to uncover
the crooked smile stitched
into the skin. Then, from your hair,
someone snatched a leaf, spat
Ugly ugly thing, and other girls began
to sing it too. You were not ashamed
of your body’s absent breasts,
your milk-pale eyes that tracked
each word we flung like stones
against the thin suture of your silence.
And when one girl shouted
You’re horrible, began to cry,
you bowed your head, and still said nothing.All day we whispered after you
in the halls, hid your gym shoes,
laughed when you slid and fell at recess
in your used Mary-Janes,
ignored the glares of the nuns
wept openly in fear of what
we did not know – how you, small
and bent, could twist your pain
into a grin, while ours grew bitter
and dark as bruises.I don’t remember your name now,
or where you moved to later that year.
I don’t know if, at another school,
they made you bear what secrets
they were loathe to own.
I go back again and again
to that circle, try to break it
in my memory, pull you free
of all our lavish isolations,
watch horror deepen
in the faces of my girlfriends,
unlinking their hands until
a great gash opens between us.
I stand with you, and feel alone,
unafraid. I see what gray
and shriveled things words are,
poor bodies we cling to, and wish
away, like hearts we hate,
damaged and unwhole,
that keep beating.
MATERIAL
There is childhood. Training wheels
you weren't allowed to remove; an armful
of pears left to rot in a bucket; the rusted
edge of a paring knife hidden away when
it was seen too close to the blue of a vein.
A soft hum in your ear, the tenacious
whirring of tires on asphalt — too,a blurred portrait of father and son,
red-faced and mute, in the front yard
early one morning, hands crumpled
about the cuff of a shirt, fists white-
knuckled, as when they'd yank kittens
from the old well. Too many, anyhow.
If there were too many kittens, were there
too many children? And the shadowthat followed a brother's body down
the graveled length of that driveway —
there is still nothing at the end of it.
Nothing but the road, which everyone
travels. The county resurfaces it, but
all the old potholes are marked,
the cracked-lip edge of the shoulder
expected. Don’t put us down, they tell me.As though a page could render them
permanent, could fix them in one moment
the way a camera restrains its subject — bodies
frozen, faces contorted around suggestion.
Traffic faint in the backdrop.
TRAVELING WEST
As soon as I left, I wanted to arrive. As soon as I arrived, I wanted to leave.
I.
The constant lure of home is a stone
you might find
anywhere, a shellyou pry from the sand again and again.
Strata of memory –
white dashes,
a yellow stripe –keep us fixed
to the center of the road.
II.
I have no way of knowing
if the pictures are true:
if, say,it’s shadow that bends their eyes
to sorrow, merely a matter
of taking them down
from the wall.Don’t we all hang ourselves against
the beveled edge of what history
we’ll admit to sharing?It’s why I spent hours tucked inside
the slats of a viewfinder, why
for years you were two figures,
slightly blurred.
III.
At each border we stop, photograph
welcome signs,
press our palms to the airas though we might cull from each state
its essence: steel-gray Mississippi twilight,
distended blue belly of Texas, furrowed
brow of the Pacific: each snap
of the lens a piece of the mapwe follow. We learn how the body, left
sitting too long, aches for what’s left behind, refuses
to give up its backward glance in the mirror,certain there’s something missing.
IV.
In the end the map
is not the territory. We drift
from turn-off
to turn-off, admitwe’re glad to be lost – shuffling
between the clear precision
of the odometer and the ragged pull
of the tide, each wavea dissipating gesture. Caught in the slow motion
of arrivals, the proximity
of departure, we struggle inland
like the man in the kayak, whodespite the drift and pull of the tide,
keeps making for what he spies
in the distance, the line, the horizon
that marks where he begins.
SCAR
My father pulls the diamondback from the oak hull, stretches it
to full length and laughs. The rattle
is pudgy, flesh-toned, like my brother’s bruised arm.When he drives the pitchfork through the angular head,
lifts the snake, suddenly, into the air, it’s
a long slack ribbon, a gold muscular thread. Still,the lush tapestry of its skin comes off like so much
dross, as though this shedding, too, were part
of its natural pattern – how it must have siftedthe oak’s husk, drawn light like a needle in its passing,
stitched a patch of air not unlike the dipping,
swaying arc of my father’s knife, the slow carvingof flesh from casing, venom and blood staining his gloves.
Strange, how the suture he tacks to the wall
resembles the fresh scar hemming my brother’s jaw:scalloped edge of diamonds glinting in and out with the gutter
of the television: the same rough seam ripped open
again and again by his beveled fist.
Kimberly Martz received her B.A. in English from Auburn University, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. Currently, she is working on her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. She has had poems published in Poet Lore, The Southern Poetry Review, and Urban Spaghetti.
Kimberly Martz was nominated for Poets Under 30 by Natasha Trethewey.
Poetry copyright 2004 by by Kimberly Martz.
