Sarah Barber: Hesperides
Over the village drowned for the lake
the mountain breathed us out. We rose
and were not amazed at all. We knew
we were good and dead, remembered
the falling body, the skin shrinking back
from the cut: always we’d been about
to be breaking or spilling. Now we broke
into bloom. Now we spilled out like raw
pigment, blue, on white floor. How full
we’d become: storehouses crowded
with nutmegs, peppercorns, cloves; bees
wintered over with wine, sweet cream,
syrup; orchards simultaneous in fruit
and flower. We knew all about the soul:
it was mallow and gauze and shallow
rivers. We knew all about the sensory:
it was supposed to have been so narrow.
But over the mountain over the village
over the lake we rose, the drowned,
and our mouths were full of its taste.
Rabbit’s Foot
You know the old joke: it didn’t work
for the rabbit—which anyway wasn’t shot
on a rainy Friday under the moon.
man would be doing there in the cemetery
with his gun full of silver bullets will never be clear. What the totem means
is not that you believe in luck—these
are backward signs, not one fortuitous— you believe in need, not enough
to confect it from latex bones and synthetic fur
but in mine at least enough to cut and dry what you must have known I’d flinch
from taking—though I’m not squeamish
and it looked far from having been alive.
What Happens Happens in the Body
You are not a windchime. You feel this
when it’s ten below and the window
falls out of the storm door and though
there is another door behind that one—
because this is the way with storm doors:
they protect—soon enough you have to
replace the strip of framing, you have to
admit you threw out when it fell out
in July as if it were never important.
It was. It was always coming for you,
this or that bit of significant plastic
dislodged by one predictable destructive
action. Cue sharp ice forming on a super-
efficient furnace exhaust: it’s exactly what
they kept saying about the sublime: how
it happens in the body and it hurts.
SARAH BARBER’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, The Journal, Fugue, The Malahat Review, Crazyhorse, New Ohio Review, and FIELD. Her book, The Kissing Party, was published in 2010 by the National Poetry Review Press. She teaches poetry and early modern British literature at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.
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