Elizabeth Bartlett

“ The wish reflects a view
almost transparent. Past and distance blaze,
caught in a foreground of light, then shift.
The darkness grays, thickens. One tastes
salt rain on the wind that blows through the mist. ”

“ Separated by long years and the visibility poor,
her mood reflects the weather, darkening within.
Dishes, diapers, sighs, and pills ... roof by roof,
she hears the monotone of wheels recite the gloomy
catechism, and prays for a different kind of virgin
miracle.
Nervously, she rubs her good luck stone,
then wraps her thoughts in cellophane as a heroine
of film and fashion, glad to forget home, school,
and all the lost-girl tales they tell of Hollywood,
She listens, nods, and smokes. ”

“ Though breath was all I owned
to force my heart to climb,
though words were all the stones
I had to seal my mind,
you will know why, in time.
THE TEST
He who would climb the heights of tone
and scale the peaks beyond the listening ear
must first walk over water
and learn to stand on air, alone.
He who would swim the waves of light
and dive past shores into a sunless glow
must first merge with his shadow
and melt through solid glass, like night.
Where eyes are fins and sound is leap,
the rhythmic force performs its own ballet ”

“ Along the coast a lone train
tolls the night, slowing its race
to a throttled brake
as a hand plows the mist
to draw a moving bridge
across the mainland's tip.
O magnetic eye that signals
when human daylight fails
and all's invisible ”

“ Yes, yes, the words of the wise,
but I do not eat their bread
or cover my lips to swear
by the debts of the guilty,
for I can not see the light
that moves men to take pity
and neither can I forget.
When harvest is past, the ties
with summer are ended. ”

“ Already our eyes are widened
by the miles that split us here
as we turn at the bend
and pause. Dark reefs appear.
Together we mark the distance
between words and waves, the wind
swinging our cables. Chance
moves forward—we, behind. ”

“ We are fed by desire
and consumed like the fire
on our tongues, in our hearts;
a flame forever unappeased
by our words, symbols, deeds
or monuments; the phoenix, man himself,
recreated from his own ashes
out of hungering dreams and parched.
We live with hunger always,
that fearfilling, painpinching cave
wherein we hide like hunted stags,
lips dry, but tasting heroically
of miracles... Who has not seen
visionary lions fall to dust
and, scornful of the world's ambition,
left the hunters truth in rags? ”

“ Now retired and let out to pasture, he
does not mind the clouds, the rain that fogs the highway—
his eyes are patched with blue.
Hands leathered and roped,
knees astraddle, boots shined, he is seated beside
as neat a filly as any in the herd he used to lope
in season.
With stallion gallantry, with sweets, he holds
the miles to coffee stops and anecdotes ... till memory
spurs his old man's hopes ... and the night stampedes. ”

“ Lost by, he stared unseeing at the words poured
through his eyes as though, shuttered against exposure,
the negative in his mind could be immured
in its acid and yet bring some meaning forth.
For a hurt away and far as a man might walk
on a friendly day to a neighbor's door, lay
Nielsen's farm, a credit to God had He made
it with His hands, but none to the man whose straw
grew luckside up as though his plow left a spore
of gold in every furrow. ”

“ If we could collect the whole
evidence grain by grain,
the words, numbers, symbols
that shaped the color and sound
of mountains
If we could record the dreams,
the chain of centuries from dusk
to dawn, those testings of beliefs
that broke the link and shook sparks
from the sun
If we could model its twin
as a lasting monument,
a brain with all our findings,
long after men, their myths,
wonders, gifts
SELF-EVIDENT
Some birds there are that do not like a cage,
that want the whole world free to come and go
as seasons do, despite drought, heat or snow ”

“ All the breadlong day she moved about the house
and nibbled at its crust, until she saw Carl
walking griefwards with his shadow to the barn,
whereless in his step and heedless of the cows,
and she wondered how he could be so thoughtbound.
What sad, whyful thing could make a man so lost
within his world that he had no fisthold on
it to demand a moreness for his account? ”

“ The sails gave way to engines, the spars to wings,
the continental coasts to cosmic shores,
and still we see no end to journeying.
Although our rocket shrinks, we keep our course.
We watch, we sleep, our dream a toylike thing
that wakes and wonders—-whose will, which force? ”

“ Cracked like their hands and cups, who knew when its seams
would give? In the fearwhile, the question unasked
kept their lips still, as though words tempted a risk
beyond their strength to mend should the seams be loosed.
The meal done, she freed the table from its chore
and brought him the county's weekly paper, their
footnotes to other people's answers and prayers,
then bent to her needlework, seeking accord. ”

“ Now that I have finished with maggots and shed
their dust with some misgiving,
I am glad for the words not said,
for being spared the hungers other men have bred,
in my old age needing
but a tranquil bed. ”

“ She does not mind his boasts,
only too aware how the ashes cling to his coat.
(1 x 1) n
I can accept
the being born
and the dying,
in doubt, alone.
I do not reject
or, seeing, scorn
anyone's crying
about the unknown.
And yet. And yet.
How the being alone
in the living
makes me mourn. ”

“ Perplexed by reason
reality itself dissolves in the sun
while the question
remains above and beyond all consideration
of doubt and fog
a bubble suspended in the hands of God.
THE UNDERSTANDING What is it you want? he asked.
Looking at him. As though she thought he had something to say and could find the words to say it. The words no one else had yet found or said. ”

“ As such, the connection
is important, if not profound,
because, without it,
we would no-doubt flit
as in a vacuum,
like birds,
not needing the support of words,
rising, in-fact, above them.
I protest the conclusion,
despite the evidence
that I am a valid one,
by necessity, if not consequence,
for while I argue and pursue
What I think is true,
in self-defense,
God does not suppose—
He knows—
and that makes the difference.
INSTINCT AND REASON
They would have us believe
that to defy authority
is to punish nature. ”

“ We die hungry even while hyenas howl.
VOLUNTARY, EXILE
The day to day commitment to failure
that judgment daily argues against me
condemns me to despair. I am guilty
of more than silence. At times words fail your
wisest men and then, intentionally. ”

“ I may
know the how and why of it
CITY GAME: MARBLES
Like gods competing for the universe,
they shoot the planets between their fingers
with trigger thumbs that scale the speed of light
to intervals of space-colliding time. ”

“ Thanks are also due to the Beloit Poetry Journal, Chelsea Review, Commentary, The Critic, Dalhousie Review, ETC., Fiddlehead, Harper's, Harper's Bazaar, Literary Review, New Mexico Quarterly, New York Times, Odyssey, Poetry Dial, Queen's Quarterly, Quixote, San Francisco Review, Saturday Review, Tamarack Review, Yale Literary Magazine. ”

“ IT TAKES PRACTICE NOT TO DIE
Elizabeth Bartlett
It Takes Practice Not to Die was originally published in 1964 by Van Riper and Thompson in Santa Barbara, California. The book is now out-of-print and the publisher no longer exists. ”