No Ordinary Place by Pamela Porter

Like I Told You
    It’s like I told you, sometimes I live
    not wholly in this world:
    you know, a person can slip through
     
the sheer fabric
    of what you think this life is made of,

    and just because you can’t see it,
    doesn’t make it not there —
     
the smallest tear, for instance,
    you step through
     
that leads
    to nowhere you have ever been

    and drags you toward itself,
     
like the afternoon
    I stood on an empty road
    made simply of earth, the scent of earth
     
rising to my nostrils,

    a few stones scattered at my feet
    and no other living thing I could see
    to the thin line of horizon,
     
only a bird
    lifting the song she had just made,
     
new, in her throat,
    into the blue shell of the sky,

    that seemed to call me to turn,
    walk deliberately into a field of ripe wheat,
     
the solemn and golden heads
    full with their own strange music, and I,
     
walking into it,

    the wheat covering me above my waist,
    and nothing I could see
     
but the burnished heads shining
    in the sun, reaching to the sky
     
and the sky
    bending down so low
    they touched each other, when I knew
    something was there —

    a pair of yellow eyes, the wild
    watching of one who had not been seen
     
for many years
    and was presumed no longer to exist,

    and at the moment of my thought,
     
the eyes had gone,
    and there was no hollow in the wheat
    to tell me it had come, that we
    had beheld each other’s eyes,

    and I wondered then
     
if I had seen it at all,
    not another soul in the field
    to tell me, too, about the eyes,
     
the tufts of fur
    inside its perfect ears, the stare

     
that said it knew me
    and had known me all along,
    and you begin to look around, wondering
     
where you are
    and if you will ever get back
    to what you know as the world,

    but you do somehow,
    because you can’t stay there,
    that’s all there is to it,
     
you must go home
    and do the small things you do
    that make up your life,

     
and by doing them
    put the day to bed
    and call forth the night
     
in its vast
    and unexplainable darkness.

Seeking and Finding
    Birdsong
    at the window.
    A Tallis choir.
    And just off the train

    reddened with rust,
    Dawn —
    with its briefcase
    and its newspaper.

    Now you rise and search
    for the poem, which is
    the world,
    singing itself —

    wild, quick-winged,
    with its memories
    of night, the walking
    trees, the moon

    whose powerful paw
    splashed light
    on your forehead
    as you slept.

    Fence. Branch. Wind ,
    you say, naming what is
    out there ,
    but find it, finally,

    inside you,
    little scarlet bird
    that has trilled all night
    a melody

    in all its variations,
    quicksilver
    as a snail’s trace,
    fierce as barbed wire.

    Such stubborn music, this
    second heart
    beating in your chest.

A Table in the Wilderness
     
for Cherrie

    The spoon he lifts to her lips
    holds a sun, the soup
    I made from memory.

    Around the table as we eat,
    our arms touch.
    We hold her in this net.

    She is waiting to climb
    into earth
    where her room waits,

    where the clocks are set
    to a different hour,
    and many are called,
    and many chosen.

    She will rise and climb
    into the sky,
    become a sparrow
    with sorrow in her beak,

    she will be lamp and shadow
    in our empty houses,
    will lie down
    in the loneliness of stars.

    We will search the night for her,
    our faces shining, bewildered moons.

Tongue-Cut Sparrow
    The child begs for the same story
    night after night. She waits
    beneath the white-starched sheet
    in her bed beside the window, full open
     
to the caught air,
    unstirred leaves of the mimosa.

    She pulls the sheet to her face,
     
sniffs its clean,
    and waits for her mother to come,
    open the book, and begin.

    Beneath the telling, her mother’s voice,
    the child wonders why
    the old woman cut the tongue
     
of the sparrow
    fluttering among the bamboo,

    and so in her days, the child
     
sings for the bird.
    She sings to the old woman
    and believes the magic in her singing
    will turn the old woman
     
gentle and