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Overview
The Resurrection of the Animals explores the trinity of the natural world, the humans adrift in it, and the animals that accompany them. Although each of the five sections centers on a particular theme, motifs of change, loss, cycles, and transformation thread through the collection, weaving the parts into a unified whole. Individual sections focus on: the seasons of the year, and by extension, people’s lives; the power of memory and its limitations; the theory that what is magical often resides within; and, the mysteries of love. The Resurrection of the Animals culminates in the title section, revealing the lessons of kinship with animals and how epiphanies occur in the simplest actions—taking a walk with dogs or catching sight of a bird on the wing. These poems suggest that memory, association, and interaction with the tangible world can revive a part of the self that has slipped below the depths of consciousness.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780870139550 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 208 KB |
About the Author
Anita Skeen is Director of the Center for Poetry at Michigan State University and is a Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, where she also serves as Arts Coordinator.
Read an Excerpt
The Resurrection of the Animals
Poems
By Anita Skeen
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2002 Anita SkeenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-955-0
CHAPTER 1
Taking in the Elements
Coyote Snow
All winter I've waited,
here in Portland,
for these trickster flakes
while every day rain
slops from the water-logged sky
and the temperature never drops
like it does back home
in Michigan, so fast and so hard
the day breaks in half
before your eyes.
Today's flurries lope
and lunge,
drunk on peyote wind.
I swear they almost grin,
white ice flashing.
Some float like down
from a million Snowy Owls
hoo-ing in their old growth woods,
nearly extinct too.
I fear I'm falling
seven floors
as I watch them plunge
and bite the street,
the pines, the concrete pots
and vanish. No text of tracks,
no thin skin hiding veins
of walk and highway.
No canceled school, yet
hope hangs visible as breath.
We're nervous, still.
Coyote snow, snow of the old tales,
kick up your ruckus
while we hunker inside,
wide-eyed as rabbits.
We count your whiskers twitching
at the burrow door.
Your furry paws scatter
the white dust.
Meltdown
It's the first of February and 40 degrees
in Michigan. Snow runs over roads and drives
like a broken egg. Listen: you can hear
the ground swelling with water, the trees
drowning. Roots are trying to come up
for air. Birds sail in on wings of sun.
Something has gone wrong at the core
of winter. Heat rises in the wrong places.
Each morning I wait for the north wind,
for the blizzard that wraps up the town,
the storm that makes the record books.
In the forecast: rain.
If the temperature dropped 20 degrees
there would be 20 feet of snow. My house
would lie like a low dune, the sea line
just beyond, surf frozen in its leap
toward light. There would be no drip
of gutter, no icicles ticking like bombs.
The Pond
Spring's showing off,
this last March day of winter,
flaunting all her promise
across the drowsy hills, flickering
in the redbud for any Doubting Thomas
still cowered indoors.
It's chilly, though, and the wind
prickles my fingers with porcupine quills
as I unloop the steel chain
from the gate, rust streaking my hand
like dried blood, and start down
to the pond. The cows have been, too,
sinking into the red clay, squishing
out craters of water opaque
as an earthy milk. I walk on
the grassy edge of a trail starlit
with bluebells. There's rustling ahead,
brush gossip, and plops into water
as the pond swallows.
The turtles heard me coming
and submerged, no interest in intruders,
no curiosity under their shells.
Farther on, two Canada geese
waddle my way and we pause
on the trail, facing like gunslingers
in the old west. They fire off
a Honk! Honk! before I can raise my camera
to take aim. But they're quick
on the wing, squawk off to the water
saying I'd better not follow.
They splash down among bleached stumps
jutting out, almost like shadows, each
of us this portentous day
caught briefly in the cross hairs
of the other's wandering.
Reading Margaret Laurence,
Thinking of You in Africa
It's April in Michigan and still the snow
comes. Tonight I drive home from class in a blizzard,
flurries attacking my windshield like an invasion
of albino insects. Their soft bodies splatter
against the glass, opening into frozen kaleidoscopes
till the wipers tilt them away. I feel trapped
in the truck cab, darkness everywhere.
In the stories of Margaret Laurence, men chop their way
through the lush underbrush, tall green fronds
surrounding them, heat rising with the day,
heat rising from the page. I long for something
green, some shoot or sprout puncturing
the brown winter thatch, some omen
for possibility. When the crocus in the front yard
unfurled their purple flags over snow,
rabbits chomped them to the bone.
I try to imagine the sweetness of such treats.
And you, in Africa now, bareheaded
and bare-sleeved somewhere in the Serengeti,
tracking something more peculiar than rabbit,
seeing color unlike anything in my upper Midwest.
I watch you crossing my mind's map
on your way to Mali and the elephants,
imagine you in a rattletrap jeep, brushing away
bugs frolicking in the air, whole nations surrounding you.
The light there, I think, must be brilliant,
space opening out in remarkable planes,
darkness, impossible to recall, even at night.
Taking in the Elements
To be lost is only a failure of memory.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Something as simple as the rain,
the surprise of its sweetness,
blackberries and cream,
as the season's first thunderstorm
pummels these hills.
I'm caught in the crossfire of water
and wind, whipped like loose laundry
as I break for the barn. Twenty years gone
from a life lived here:
the rut puddles in the red dirt road,
the crocus at the gate post.
This morning, a flurry of cherry
blossoms where, yesterday, only sky
trimmed the limbs. There's easy talk
at the table, the words in no hurry
to go anywhere. It's smell
that gives us memory back, they say.
This storm restores the April day
I splashed in a yellow slicker,
a quadruped duck, the ink
on my spelling paper fuzzing
into a field of blue dandelions.
So odd, having one foot in each time zone,
because of the nose. But it's also the cows
in their Rorschach suits, showing how,
so matter-of-fact, black abuts white,
not a crack in that Holstein geography,
those contrary countries patterning
into one skin.
Storm on the Mesa
I
From the portal of the wooden bunkhouse
I watch the sky darken. Clouds flower
into great hydrangeas. In the distance
veils of rain drape Pedernal,
displace the haze of forest fires
we've seen burning for weeks.
I think of Mrs. Noah scanning the skies
from her drifting bunkhouse, raft or coffin,
watching clouds like these surround her,
their deadly foliage spreading,
liquidation already underway.
But this is June, in New Mexico, only
half an inch of rain this year.
The sun flattens against our heads.
Prayers for rain go forth from the ranch
like doves.
2
> My friends gather with me to watch.
All around us high red rock, crevice
and ledge, whorl and crest. The prows
of ships, the chimneys of stoves.
Blue black cloud against bright stone.
And then the crack, the jagged
snake speech of light, startling
our talk. Another snap
to the west, another south, the sky's
wiring exposed. A short circuit
in the late afternoon
gives us night.
3
The building speaks with the wind.
Doors murmur in their frames, windows
whistle and hiss. This conversation of plank
and rafter, nail and stud keeps us
still. We fine tune our ears.
Before Babel, all language was wind,
all creatures formed words
with its blustery vowels,
its intangible verbs.
This is a story of comfort,
not fear.
4
Finally, the rain. The mesas
around us dissolve in mist,
the temperature drops, the air
turns metallic and sharp.
I step off the porch
onto the blood-dark dirt, feel
the sting, the pricks
on my skin. Tongues
of lightning, tongues of wind,
the miraculous articulation of rain.
The storm spins a cloak
of moisture, a curtain of gauze,
between us and the heat.
Later, we will climb on our bunks
to sleep, to dream.
Going Home Again
The building's pink, the neon sign blue,
and inside, burgers arrive in cardboard Fords,
chocolate shakes lava-like in flow.
The waitresses wear pink, starched
white collars and neat cuffs, hair wild
as tumbleweeds. Above our booth,
between two Corvette hubcaps,
a poster of 1957 Chevies, which both
Fred and Mickey drove, and behind us,
pastel DeSotos from the same decade.
Whatever happened to DeSotos?
I ask Fred as Run Around Sue
spins out into the room and Gayle
says about the mound of onion rings,
These are as good as I wished them to be.
The black and white checked floor,
duck-tailed Elvis on an album cover
above the door, bored teenage couples
sprawled in the corner booth:
the Sweet Shoppe of my high school
days, the Shoney's I remember
on Saturday night. It is Saturday night,
the four of us parked at Don's Diner
on our way to play miniature golf.
It's not the fifties anymore;
we're in our fifties, on vacation,
already a bit unstuck in time.
These days Gayle plays pinball
on her IBM, not the ping and rattle
contraption just inside the entryway
We're graduates of four small schools
Concord, Muskingum, Earlham, Wabash
laughing about our freshman beanies
and school songs, growing younger
with each quarter someone half our age
shoves into the magic slot
in the juke box.
August
Only two days away, August approaches
the house like news of the plague.
I feel its dark wings already
preparing to fold me
in their treacherous feathers,
all the while protesting they are bright
with heat, that they fly
the flags of summer vacation,
of endless leisure days,
that they ferry us
on soft gull wings across the lake,
resplendent with tilting sails.
But, I know August.
When August slams into town
with its suspicious laughter
and sleight-of-hand, I see that hand
unlatch its side show trunk, ease up the lid
on a coffin where days of sunrise
walks along the shore lie bled
of color, road maps for later excursions
waste away, starved and thin.
August says,
Hey, I'm just a tourist in this town,
tossing his trash from Burger King
on my lawn, not to worry.
August kicks open the schoolhouse door,
drags us in, hostage for another year,
leaves me with hunger not even the autumn
harvest can relieve.
Glen Huron, Late September
Napping with the old dog on the cabin deck,
I'm aware, off in the distance,
a chain saw rips through sunlight,
revving up, then withdrawing
like my brain snagging
on the same hardwood question.
On the wooded hill, I hear apples
drop one by one, tasty
and fat, and the last tomatoes glow
red like coals through thistle
and goldenrod.
It's a slow poke of a day
this day.
I find that time is not the clock
I once thought, days ticked out,
chopped off and dropped into
history's pot, but a pond
where the water rises
and falls, rain and drought,
where brilliant fish pass
in hypnotic but disruptive waves
and frogs plop to the bottom,
webbed feet rupturing the muck,
dispatching puffs up through the clear
liquid, a murky Rorschach or aquarian
mushroom cloud.
The wind mounts an argument
against my back. Cedars and pines shake
their feathery heads in points
of fine distinction.
I listen, but have nothing
to say
I feel old and forked
as the last carrot wrenched
from the earth, my fingers numb
with tingly sleep. My toes
try hard to snap off from their mother
limb, to crawl out on their own
like curious, naked babes,
tadpoles wriggling toward their first swim.
In the kitchen, someone concocts a soup
from beets, carrots, onions,
tomatoes and leafy summer growth.
The smell of herbs settles in the air.
A cabinet door slams.
Water sings
Becoming Haiku
How, in October, the world reduces
itself to a few syllables:
red leaf a slick spark,
frost sharp day. I come walking
early with the dog
straining at her leash,
nose poking at crystal grass.
But nothing shatters.
The morning sits still
as a room with a secret
where I find myself
shedding everything
but my bones and skin, this coat
the shape keeping me
intact: like the red
leaf, I break off from the branch,
become singular
and begin
my inward curl.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Resurrection of the Animals by Anita Skeen. Copyright © 2002 Anita Skeen. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Taking in the Elements,
What Memory Makes It,
And How the Light Came Up Behind Us,
The Store of Things,
The Resurrection of the Animals,
Anita Skeen,