What the Trees Said
(Melisande, Before He Sees Her, Weeping, by the Stream)
Sometimes speaking is not the right answer.
Too many deaths, big ones. And everyone rushing to claim
some scrap, to pull the dead over themselves to wear like a jacket
or sweater or robe—to claim them. How can they talk so fast?
Like people expect it.
How can they talk so soon?
Why not just feel it? For a long time. How can they talk?
No, sometimes speaking is not the right answer.
Still, there’s music. Crawling, curling, out of its iron crisscross cage
in the cocktail evening, crossing the open veranda and spilling
into the verdance of the late-light lawn and the swollen land-locked lakes
and the rush of trees at the base of the hill.
And that sound you hear is not a piano, no, but a sequence of diamonds—
hitting water, returning
from solid to original form
so quickly the notes
in runnels and spray
dissolve into longing and wavering
traces of shadow and reflected boughs—all reverberation
and swaying fingers and torsos
solemnly waltzing, immense
in needle-fetished, loosely armored
and gigantic limbs, this band of gathered
spruce grown rainward into spiraling,
many-handed tower-
beings changing the hand of time and the shape
of the air they move in, above the viridian pool
and the fountain spraying its jewels and the lily
surface of the statuary, weirdly still and dwarfed
below the choir of swaying trees
nodding and bowing and reaching as if this necessary wind
were only the long-expected accomplice—
the long-awaited accompanist—
heaven principle arriving to reveal form
as verb, which is their message:
Listen to the bruised heart
of your mother, whimpering in the distance.
Listen to your own.
Put down the crown. If there ever was a crown.
Place it in the water. Let the tiara turn back into tear
and let the glass re-liquefy, the rhinestones river themselves
into wavery mirror; the held and fastened facets of cut glass
spew into the air like the laughter of a chandelier
turned upside down, in circling arcs of wet light.
Let it all disappear.
Learn this word: Relinquish.
Your hair will feel like water. You’ll feel water
on your cheek.
Your waterhair a waterfall, anything you try to crystallize
will liquefy and fall just as these notes
coming through the windows of the music room, in the distance,
not that far from here, winding through the air beyond the Tudor harlequin patterns
of the panes that might have caged them, growing cool as day gives in to night
and as the ice windows melt into twilight
melting in twilight
and trees with blue leaves—
and as the tourmaline of evening deepens into a liquid obsidian
reflecting night, the nearly still surface will finally ripple
and the reflected arms and faces of the stone and stationary naiads
waking to the dark
will undulate
and move—
and as a cool allure of lunar pallor shivers over the pale pools
reflecting night:
If water can ripple,
gravity can ripple;
time can ripple
and rush.
She wanted to love.
She wanted to die.
She wanted to not remember.
She wanted to dip her hand in the holy fever.
© Sarah Maclay
Sarah Maclay’s newest releases are a chapbook, The H.D. Sequence—A Concordance ( Walton Well Press, 2024) and Nightfall Marginalia (What Books Press), a 2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Poetry, her fifth full-length collection. Her writing, supported by a Yaddo residency and a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship, awarded the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Special Mention, has appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Best American Erotic Poems, Poetry International, where she was Book Review Editor for a decade, and elsewhere. She’s the producer/host of Poetry.LA’s “The Poetry of Night.” Website: https://www.sarahmaclay.com/
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