Poetry

Just now, I unwrapped her box of letters. Gertrude was an iconoclast
to her gravitas. What she did not know she let travel, recurrence
of rhymes like falling leaves buffeting, autumn breeze from East Side.
Gertrude did not know home tonight or home in the summer.
By the Hudson. Did not know pudding from sauce from Helfgott’s letters.
 
Its mention of parlor poetry as dried hydrangea as pastoral,
as another Gothic point of view. As the bird feeder broke into two,
as freer roads after the scuttling, as prying apart the living architectonics.
Like her piano rolled down the stairs. Of play and vinaigrette
and too much cayenne. That the Tribune was the Tribune after all.
 
But also a need and problem within the chronic hours.
Gertrude did not know the object beyond the object.
Beyond the waterfowl, a duck of oval, of beak and weathervane wing,
of zipper heart, and an accordion tongue. Gertrude did not know
where to put the centre of things. Gertrude did not soak Henry’s cloak.
 
Nor Mildred’s, its hem another herringbone stitch another section
not whole enough or wholehearted or wholemeal enough.
The whole world was no longer a lazy afternoon or abiding love,
an old Gertrude looking at herself in the mirror of the ponding water.
Her head taking the shape of the barn, its shadow a black soot.
 
In midday sun, quiet afternoon cradling itself into the moonless night.
Gertrude was earnest in losing things — the beat-up rosebush
one more variation, foot divisions misaligned, word endings falling
over each other, frothy tumble. Gertrude’s diaeresis, Alice in a deep sleep,
the lean and fallow years from that trembling point onwards.
 
Gertrude’s dactylic dimeter drumming itself into the hexameter,
a twist as with the helix, as with rollercoaster feelings
when affectations run wild, when The Salon levitated
into The Cloud of Unknowing, its noetic white as wispy and dissolving.
Then a removal so she would always ask more questions.
 
As supple as her very last. Gertrude’s Sunday clatter in another suite
to rile Chaucer, even in death, even in love from a distance.
Even in wise restraint and a portrait left in the dark, its phonic echoes
a new refrain of face and facet. And fractured verseforms.
Gertrude’s sudden awakening to sovereignty’s shining eye.
 
Not decadence but wonderment. Not meaninglessness but a prayer,
a detachment and reasoned feeling. A small run of sounds and pictures.
Of a sapling writing out its unknown destination, its basis
and other evidence scaffolding, relaxed into a vine far down the road.
In the vineyard, a redder rose held out in the palm of her hand.
 
 
 
* This poem is a reprint. It was first anthologized as the winner of the Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Prize.