From the Archive: Rumpus Original Poetry: Four Poems by Maggie Smith
This was originally published at The Rumpus on September 21, 2017.
INTERROGATORS OF ORCHIDS
What do we do? We birth the new citizens
& answer their bodies with our bodies.
We rock the new citizens to sleep.
We clothe them with skin & stamp
their passports with milk. We teach
the new citizens to walk & speak.
We show them orchids & ask,
What do they look like? What would you ask
an orchid if you could ask it anything?
We show them wind and light in the trees
& ask, What does it sound like?
We hold their hands in our hands
& rub their palms together in small circles
& ask, Do you hear leaves touching
each other? We teach the new citizens
to question landscape. We teach them
to love by questioning, & they ask,
Where was I before this place, before
your body, before, before? We birth
the new citizens—interrogators of orchids,
interrogators of air—and bring them
as far as we can. We bring them
to a kind of border, signed & stamped.
The world is a letter we leave them
to steam open. We let them see
dappled shadow under the trees
& ask, How does light not lose its patience
between the sky & the ground?
RIVER
For all its rushing, the river can’t listen.
And if I’m being honest, this river
is really a creek, only so high and fast
from the rain. It came halfway up
the backyard, stranding the swingset.
I am tired of the sound of my voice,
tired of waiting for a sign. It doesn’t matter
if this river, this big-boned creek,
hears me. I have lived with it all my life.
It’s touched me since I was a child.
It’s tongued my ankles and knees,
and knows them by touch and taste.
But what kind of memory
can a body have, a body of water,
when what flows by is always new?
The shipwreck at the bottom
of the backyard hill has a slide
and monkey bars where birds perch
above the flood. It doesn’t matter
if this river is listening. It’s not
from around here, and it’s not staying.
STONE
Anything the stone knows,
it knows from experience.
If the stone knows touch,
it has the rain’s cool lavishing
of attention to thank.
If it knows heat in my hand,
sun-warmed, dry and smooth
as a cheek, then light is where
it can direct its gratitude.
When I close my eyes,
the lids glow. They’re learning,
together, to be stones.
What does the stone know
today that it didn’t know
yesterday, or the day before?
Violence, too, is a teacher.
The rain drilling a pinhole,
a tiny mouth in the stone,
a tiny ear or eye, over years
is a lesson in patience
but not only patience.
The shoe scuffing it down
the pavement is a lesson.
The stone can be broken
against its brother,
over and over, until together
they dazzle with fire.
DETAIL
You’re the kind who looks at a painting
& wonders what’s happening beyond
the stretched canvas, where it wraps
around the wood frame—as if
it were a detail from a larger work
or, like a photograph, one small scene
inside a wider one, curated by the eye.
You wonder what’s beyond
the bowl of fruit, beyond the gray sea
with its meal of wrecked ships,
beyond the mother holding her burning,
red-cheeked child. You’re the kind
who thinks there must be more
than this, more than what you see.
The kitchen might be filling with bees,
drawn buzzing to the bowl of red
and yellow apples. And the waves,
the waves might be ruffling white
and folding over on themselves—
breaking, breaking like a fever.
***
Author photograph © Studio127.