Let me tell you, the sky
was always falling
until I could name
what did fall: Snow, soft feathers
from a giant’s bed ticking
that glistened under porch lights,
melted in my hair. Sleet sometimes,
or hailstones, petals of rain
that imprisoned me inside,
behind a window. Wormy apples, plums
fermenting in the warm September air.
Then came autumn with all its fallings:
acorns in their nubbly caps,
hickory nuts in hard casings, dry leaves
whirling, scudding
the sidewalk—I began to tuck
my head under my wing, worry
that the sky wouldn’t hold.
Names beget names, always more
that could fall: Stars, meteors. Cradles
harboring babies. In grade school drills,
I learned how to huddle
in a cinderblock hallway, head
between my knees, the smell
of my damp wool uniform wrenched
into the smell of fear.
I wasn’t given words
for the lurch
in my gut whenever I heard
droning overhead. All I knew, ducking
for any kind of shelter: it had something
to do with airplanes, with world without
end amen.
THE THIN AIR OF OUR INTENTIONS
If my brother still remembers
having to bathe in the same washtub
with a bar of Lava that, rough
as it was, couldn’t scrub away
the image of the furred bodies
Grandma’s hands held underwater
one by one until air
no longer bubbled to the surface—
well, that’s just how it is.Life’s cheap, cats keep
having litters, gardens teem
with growth. That same brother denies
he drowned Japanese beetles
by the dozens, plucking them
from Grandpa’s roses, though I saw him
do it. I can’t forget
the man I met on a beach who shared
his documentary on man’s inhumanity
to fruit—footage of mouths
bearing down, knives cutting
into flesh, gas chambers
tinting innocent tomatoes
some approximation of red.Ridiculous. We’re none of us
vicious, are we? Just making room
to breathe the thin air
of our intention to live.
My Polish grandmother didn’t mean
harm to anything—she was just
doing her job, the way she fed
wash through the wringer
of her new machine, whistling
a tuneless ditty. Safe in Garfield Heights
when Oswiecim became Auschwitz,
it was easy for her to choose
what was necessary
and what was not.
THE MORNING AFTER YOUR VASECTOMY, I SEE
a crumpled e.p.t box in the grass beside the road.
It’s not hard to picture the teenage girl who flung it there,
facing the triptych of choices—She is the Madonna
holding a perfect baby who never cries.
She is hearing her newborn coo for
an adoptive mother. It is she in the Pietà cradling the absence
of body sprawled in her lap—her stained glass images
splinter into sleepless nights. Or maybe the test strip
didn’t turn blue and she is thanking God
on her knees, making promises
she thinks she’ll keep, forgetting in her reprieve
how his kisses melt her resolve.
If my mother had believed in birth control
I wouldn’t be here, it’s that simple:
four babies in four far-flung cities within five years.
Number four, I still cling to the belief some special grace
is born with the unbargained for.Today my body aches for milk it will never make again.
I feel gutted, sterile, can’t imagine sex without
that molded dome fitted tight to keep out
all but the most determined
of babies, that tiny crescent of possibility
linked in my psyche with desire. It’s not the memories
of our two, both conceived within days
of putting the diaphragm back in its box,
though I feel the tug of those lusty nursers,
now past all the milestones of early childhood
but a few unbartered baby teeth. No, it’s the unborn
I grieve—our first, scraped out on a sterile table
in a fourth-month miscarriage while I cried;
our last, who slipped away in a red clot
when you didn’t want her, though I’d filled
the house with flowers from my friend’s garden
before I gave you the news. Looking at your face
I somehow knew all those vases crowded with gardenia
and azalea and iris, even the tendrils of jasmine wouldn’t be
enough to hold my accident child here in this world.
Maureen Ryan Griffin was born in Cincinnati,
Ohio and grew up in Syracuse, New York and Erie, Pennsylvania. She lives
with her husband Richard and their children, Amanda and Dan, in Charlotte,
North Carolina. Her first book of poems, When The Leaves Are In The
Water, was a part of Sandstone Publishing’s emerging poets series.
Griffin’s awards include the Mary Jean Irion Scholarship from The
Writers’ Center at Chautauqua, New York, the Thomas H. McDill, Hayman
“America,” and Brotherhood Awards from the North Carolina Poetry
Society, and selection for the 1995 and 2003 Blumenthal Readers and Writers
Series sponsored by the North Carolina Writer’s Network. In addition
to having published in numerous literary journals, she has recorded her
commentaries for public radio station WFAE and has work forthcoming in
two 2003 anthologies, Thirteen (Simon & Schuster) and Hungry
For Home: Stories Of Food From Across The Carolinas (Novello Festival
Press). She is currently seeking publication for her memoir with recipes,
How She Fed Us.