Kelly Cherry
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Against Aphasia
1.
The words have flown
sprouted wings and taken off
Your throat is an empty nest
Come back, you want to cry,
but you can’t—
You learn to write.
It’s the only way.
2.
One day birds line up
on a branch of the cedar
to take their turns at the feeder.
You name them chickadee, bunting, wren—
words you can’t say
but still believe in
3.
So you write
and words line up on the ruled page
like birds on a branch
and sing to you
the sparrow his spunk
the robin, matins
the bluebird his happiness
You feel like crowing.
Wintering
The asparagus, the ivy, and the anonymous
summer vines, unleafed, snarled in snow,
lean against the wire dog-pen.
The wind is from River Falls,
and before that, Idaho. My house is lighted
against the dark. On their shelves, books
huddle in their jackets. I have read the books
that tell of difficult journeys and anonymous
desires, of lanterns that have lighted
the way to Arcadia or the North Pole, books that explain snow,
or the way living things grow, or the way lovers fall
in love, each to the other an open
book, as if love were the pen
writing, and their lives a book.
I stand looking out as the snow falls
obsessively. The night is anonymous.
Supper will be snow
baked in the oven I have lighted,
birch bark, roots, and berries, dressed with light,
served on a paper plate with a pen
for a fork—a low-calorie diet, light as a single snow-
flake, not found in cookbooks
but typical of anonymous
readers en route from Wisconsin to Borneo or Victoria Falls.
While I eat, I read and the snow falls
on the tangled vines too light-
weight to stand up to snow. Anonymous
as a nun, I write books, pushing my pen
across paper, or read others’ books,
in a room as quiet as falling snow.
It’s no
secret that one who reads can occasionally fall
to thinking how life in books
is so much more exciting and enlightening
than her real life, in which she’s penned
up, isolate, and anonymous.
The snow falls
lightly as starlight is the sort of thing one reads in books
penned by Anon.
Bio
Kelly Cherry has just published her twentieth full-length book, a story collection titled The Woman Who (Boson Books). In 2009 she published The Retreats of Thought: Poems and Girl in a Library: On Women Writers and the Writing Life.