Jamie Parsley
__________________________________________________________________________________________
St. Hildegard’s Day
“You are…a citizen of sacredness.”
—Hildegard of Bingen
After transferring the ashes
from the temporary plastic
to the permanent weight
of cultured marble
I am helpless to know
what to do with the dust-caked
silicone bag,
the polyurethane box
or, for that matter, the upper plate of plastic teeth
he set in water in those last moments
before he lay down on his bed
and descended into that last, long sleep.
I carefully fold the bag
and place the blue container of teeth
into the empty urn—
everything fitting together
as perfectly as parts of
an engine come together.
I walk into the trees
he planted—
placing each flowering twig
into the tilled earth
and nurtured them until they
doubled and tripled and exhaled
beyond their limits,
stretching up toward a sky
that today promises so little.
And there, with his shovel,
I dig into the roots,
piercing the pale veins
that burrow and twist there—
thick as earthworms—
patting hard the earthen walls
as he taught me to do .
Here I put the box
and here it will stay, covered in roots
and dirt the consistency of tobacco.
I hope I will forget this place.
If any memory can be extinguished in my mind
let it be this one.
Let it die as easily he did,
in one long night that
descends and will never again lift
into a dawn we long to come to us
with a brilliance that stuns us into silence.
Listening to Andrew Bird’s
“Not a Robot, But a Ghost”
Whistles—
all the way home.
Again and again
the whistles
and howls and
all the cracked codes
and melting numbers
jumbling and falling
down through
whistles and bells.
Listen to the whistles.
They fall
through the floor.
Through the floor—
where you and I
like encrypted numbers
fall. This is
the hour—
it whistles.
And we
with our pushing pores
read the note pushed
beneath the door.
We know.
We hear the whistle
fall with us, whistling
as it falls
again and again
all the way
home.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Jamie Parsley is the author of eleven books of poems. His first book of poems, Paper Doves, Falling and Other Poems, was published in 1992. He is also the author of The Loneliness of Blizzards, (1995), a verse play, Cloud: a poem in 2 acts, (1997), The Wounded Table, (1999), no stars, no moon, (2004), Ikon, (2005) and Just Once, (2007), This Grass (2009), Fargo, 1957 (2010) and Crow (2012). His latest book, That Word, will be published in March by North Star Press. His poems and fiction have been published in a variety of literary journals in the U.S., Britain, Japan and Canada. He received his MFA from Vermont College. In 2004, he was designated an Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota. His website is www.jamieparsley.com.