Carolyn Stoloff is a poet and a painter. Her most recent book is You Came To Meet Someone Else. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Nation, Partisan Review, Southern Review and Agni. She has received grants from the National Council on the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and other foundations.

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1.

Hats and caps of the absent and the dead hang like drying herbs from nails in the farmhouse beams. Outside it’s Maine, and May. Yellow forsythia against milk-blue distance. On the other side of the house, a green field holds a battalion at bay: trees, like massed soldiers rooted where the decayed and the living mingle. Lush silence. A chisel, pecking. A long blind finger on the rope stretched between roofed enclosures. The rope, collapsed in a corner of the barn.

2.

Strong male hands explore a living torso. Wooden head on a wall, its doors, stairs, windows. Glimpsed through a kitchen window, a woman’s figure in overalls and wide straw hat digging and turning the soil in a chicken wire enclosure. Two flashing bluebirds string a crazy flight-web between ash and oak flanking the feeder where a sly squirrel hangs from its back feet feasting on stolen seeds. The massed yellow and its shadow, a small bed of daffodils. Wind. Black flies dart through gaps between waving arms.

3.

The blank blue dome. An amorphous white message pouch just now passing to the north over a box of weathered wood with three black windows. A man hurrying back from car to house in answer to insistent ringing. Alewives thrashing, casting gleaming sides over exposed boulders. Corpses, caught in crevices. The maelstrom of wheeling, screaming gulls. A hand dives into a pocket.

4.

Steep dark steps to the city loft. His three pipes in a rack. Stretched canvases with nailed edges in racks. One glaze bleeding into another. A boy’s toy train and a girl’s unicorn. A window to drop a key from. Or the daughter’s unbraided hair. A missing plank on the staircase, crack to fall through. A saucepan handle lifted from its nail. Two heads bend over a chessboard; alternate hands on knight, castle. Brooming webs away with trappers and flies.

5.

A female figure precarious atop a ladder grafting an exotic apple-hand onto a sawed-off arm of the old tree.

6.

The glow, like gaslight, spreads from center. He wants her arm too often now. In his misshapen-hat phase the tortoise holds the hare back. Glow becomes galaxy in an always-night space. Fishing for matches by day. Alewives fighting up the treacherous zigzag fish ladder. Numbers that circled on the clock face in the church tower across the city street escape; hours mix and mingle spinning webs to catch angry black flies.

7.

Upon waking, his struck match surprises pitch black. Wind. Exploring the living limbs beside his. He feels along a brush handle to where bristles harden into chisel edge. The option of hammering stone. Fingerprints explore depressions, textures, corners.

8.

The choice of hat or cap. Embracing the traveling son and all his acquired languages. The slender unicorn moves around the kitchen’s clanking field. For the father an unending gangplank leading to daylight’s submerged vessel.

9.

An odd pearly everlasting. Foam, where ocean smacks granite, observed by a young woman with long blown hair seated on a green slope with her back to us. Near the lighthouse an older woman in a hooded yellow slicker looks back through binoculars at milk-blue distance.