The Tomb of Urszula’s Mouth
Dear God, because I cannot speak, I have learned to hear the trees. Trees talk through their twig tips. Summers, they weigh green on the wind or gather dust of rain’s refusal. Ovate or pinnate, round or spiked in the curve, they talk often of sun: from sun they know nothing comes not of nothing, but something from nothing is made. God, as You separated the darkness from the darkness, so You were the darkness; to split You had to first be. Because utterance is locked in my throat’s closet, I hum silently in my head, “Oj chmielu, chmielu,” a wedding song for the hops vine, I hum it to the trees. Shadows of trees spilling night when day falls through their fans, flaming the fabric gold: light above and the absence of light a borning of something in me, the void of Your love, God, inside. Summers, the trees say this. Autumns and no one leans better into the must and cold of death, a red rapture, a yellow hallowing, knowing nothing ever ends before ending, their bark a testament to patterns: not one notch repeated exactly, but let the silver-soft lichen rim them round, the vine cling and choke. The axe: this is the smoke of my bones, ash calling blade to hurry, bury my body in its black kirtle. Because voice breaks in my throat, the silence that towers speaks to me. And the quiet that clings to stones. And boisterous: the bear, the bittern and the rabbits. Even the spider atop her orb of eggs. Even the locusts winging a small gust of crunch through weeds. But never the dragonfly. Only the dome of the sky like an echo. Only the rain that begins to fall.
Trees Surrender
Darkness closes over the earth. And the heavens are dark at dawn. And a stillness in the trees is bleating: this is how I know that the manor mourns, though why I stepped through its doors into forest is a wing laid against the mouth of memory. The trees tell me of woodcutters on their way, baying a path through moonlessness by bawdy song and boot-crunch. I must say goodbye a hundred plundered times: tree of the crooked branch, tree of the lace-like leaves, tree crowded with abandoned nests. I can say goodbye to the trees, but I cannot say a word to the house. The house with a shut, red door whose secrets you keep, God, in a box whose lock has lost its key. Or maybe I have lost the key to my mind. As I am felled, made fellow, taken from the glance of green when The Shadow enters my hiding. The Shadow finds a stick-girl covered in bruises, her tunic torn. I tell myself to be as the trees. To stay still in the rain. Let myself be log, the last, wet flesh of it. As I must say good-bye to the manor house with its red door staring like a diseased eye, I bid farewell to this thing in me that can almost remember. And God, You say, “The Shadow of Death will lead you to wider water.” As the flesh of trees will be carved into tables or burnt to give warmth to a child in winter, so loss becomes my prayer: “Dear God, make use of me, until pith and marrow flake to ash in the flame of Your good grace.”
Before Boarding the Boat
And it is acorn season now, and chestnut, walnut, little thumps as nuts slap down and sunder, time of the furred ones who pouch their jowls and burrow their bounty. The storks fly off, leaving rooftop nests, their graceful, long-legged bodies lifting to flaps of wide wingspan. It should be a glory. Fires begin to burn in the fireplaces. People try to keep warm. Smoke rises and my body, gone but here, is as good as this smoke, this close-to-nothing. My body—what am I now, Dear God, that when I look, I see shadow? When The Shadow entered my hiding and claimed me for its own, It said, “You are a part of me now, a small shadow thrown.” Then It said that oars will chop river-water and my life go from oaten-wheaten to blue, for it is to water that the others will take me, from my solitude to clamor and the twang of an off-key lute, a crowd in the hull and the sail set towards infinite drifting.
Appellation
When they first meet me, the boat’s folk, they ask, “What is your name? Where lives your family?” My body, disputably here, in a ripped worsted smock, broken boots, clothes that cannot keep out the spindrift chill. I am as much as I am not or do not wish to be. When they see I cannot speak, “Urszula, she shall be called,” pronounces the lady in a nun’s frock dyed pink—roses, too, tucked in her hair, in her cloth’s rim, those coveted blooms. Urszula, she says, in her formal manner, “for she came hence shyly as from a cave. In her black kirtle, she looks like a bear, emerging from hibernation.” I like the name as good as any: claw-pawed, lumbrous, licking blackberries off the briars of late summer. A slow animal. An animal that can heft its heavy body—nimbly—up a tree. Urszula. And I think of constellations, how this name gives my soul to the sky, to Your Kingdom, Dear God, in Heaven. Though I can never remember my name from before. Or the names of my shipmates. So they become The Pink Nun, The Mistress Who Strums a Lute to Scare Spiders, The Man with Squid for Hands, The Captain. Until everyone has an epithet.
The Forgetting
The boat’s folk gather round me on a day of hiding sun, a goldening, though, on the riverbanks, where trees and vines shine in autumn brightness. The Pink Nun—oh, forgive me, God, she is ugly to look at, with a nose like a warty spoon gourd, hard eyes like blue stones—asks me, in a prying tone, “So what do you remember? Nod yes if you can remember your home.” I shake my head no, hide my face in my hands. “Ah,” says The Lady Who Strums a Lute to Scare Spiders, “then you are one with the rest of us. The best we get are glimpses.” I want to know what she means by glimpses, but voiceless, I cannot ask. The Lute Lady is prettier, though her brown hair sticks out unkempt from under a plain white wimple. She wears simple clothes, a gray smock of cheaper fabric than my black worsted, a smock stained as if by smears of lard or butter. Something about our clothing makes me wonder why we look the way we do, for we are all as different as is a lily from a chrysanthemum, and it seems that maybe in how we look, God, You will give us a clue to how we came here. The Squid Man seems like your average fisherman—and even in that, how do I know what a fisherman resembles?—yet his fingers are long and tentacly, hang limply at his sides like dead squid. And dead is how he describes us: “Young lady, I fear I should tell you. You are dead like the rest of us, born now into the In-between World of Water.” And then he makes a flourish with his tentacly hands and bows: “Welcome.” What is betweenness? I try to ask The Squid Man, but what comes are little coughs. Luckily, he continues, “Do you want to know the rules?” The Pink Nun interrupts, “Of course she does. The rules go like this. Since you are dead, the living can no longer see you. Some of them can sense you, but this is rare. We, as dead souls, all see one another. We see one another as if we were still living. We can touch the objects of the live earth, and we can feel them as real, but they do not register us as real. Though sometimes, we may touch a real thing and it may fall, like a leaf from a tree. Sometimes this happens, we make things move, or sound a little knock that the living can hear. And sometimes, we have the sensations of the living. We hunger. We feel tired and want to rest. We feel hot or cold. Nothing can assuage this. It is our punishment.” The Pink Nun turns to The Man with Squid for Hands: “Is there anything I am forgetting?” He nods. “Sometimes things shift. For instance, sometimes my hands look like squid and sometimes my hands look like hands. Sometimes you can pick up a glove that belonged to the living and you can put your hand inside it, but the real glove remains on the ground. Don’t ask me the meaning of any of this.” And I want to know, God, I still want to know, what is this earth and why don’t I remember it clearly, why does it resemble something familiar yet faraway, as the trees rushing by in a blur on the banks are both here for a moment and gone. The Captain looks askance at us, yells, “Why don’t you all follow Urszula and stay mute?” And his command sends a chill breeze across the deck, as if he, like You, God, can summon harsh weather.
Meekness Is Not Keeping Quiet
The Devil should grab the hem of my kirtle and pull me mudward. Or You, God, should make me chew stones till my teeth tear. I see this arrogance in myself and wonder what else is there I fain would be blind to. I see and wonder if others notice it more. Today the rain rings unceasingly and we all weather the wet, the wind plunging our vessel, trough of wave, trough of wave, heaving us over the breathing body of water—and I watch as The Pink Nun dizzily slips down the floorboards, finally falling from faint. Called to, I will not fetch a cold cloth to lay upon her forehead but turn my eyes upward to the gray hat of Heaven. What is this if not pride? The Pink Nun doughy-faced, moaning softly from her discomfort. Moaning. Why do I not minister? The Lady Who Strums a Lute takes the wimple from round her disheveled hair, dips it in water, and strokes The Pink Nun’s forehead. She does this daintily yet undaunted, her delicate fingers wringing the wet cloth. The shame of my refusal burns a noose around my neck, so now my remorse is loose, moving over me as clouds move. I will remember The Lutanist’s hands, her crooked fingers still nimble enough to sound the instrument—and You are sighing, Dear Lord, in the wind.
The Soul’s Blister Is Not Bliss
Today a violence shakes inside me. I feel it, a bowl full of crabapples in my stomach, a barrel of stones, or hot coals. Once the boat moors, as the boat’s folk have told me it does sometimes, so that they can tread upon the dear earth they have lost, I walk the river path to a marketplace, passing fields of heather where bees plumb the tiny wells of purple flowers. This beauty of Your bounty, Lord, but in the marketplace, I search the faces of strangers, each sealed against me, shut in dismissal of my absence, my being not-there. “Don’t look close,” they seem to say, as if their lives should slink into the hollows under heaped melons and potatoes heavy with the swell of rain. As if my presence drops an icicle of beware down their backs. And I had thought a connection possible, light meeting light, an acknowledgment that we are all drops of the same dew. But their faces wince inscrutable as the melons’ rough rinds, raw as the bloodied beeves. They must not know, because they seem not to see me, that we are the same: this earth ours in ruin and regalia. And I remember then hearing at the water’s edge, in the marshiest shallows, the darting flight of dragonflies, almost too swift to see until they alighted on a sedge, so still it was as if the motion of fire lit a candle from a barn’s blaze, and the candle wouldn’t flicker, or gutter, or yet go out. Why do I fear the dragonfly so? The way the light of the living is still burning, but what then if a day comes when one has woken from a dream, disoriented, discontent, with a mind barely there and a body born unto You, God, unknown to itself yet remembering from somewhere the dream of a staircase, a terrible, terrible flight of cold stairs, but the story of its peril belongs to the echo in a little girl’s hollowed house.
Girl Hidden in Stone
Dear God, there is more mystery in Your world than I can know. A mountain purple as loosestrife trundles on the horizon its bundle of bruise, peaked in blown billows of white. I know something is going to happen. The Man with Squid for Hands guides me through a valley of birches, looking for the source of small cries. And where two paths cross, a tall stone stands in a circle of shadow. And from out the stone, as from out a door to a river under the earth, a gray girl shines in her lasting. She is meek and miserable, musty with the ash of shadow’s cling. A girl so young to be alone, weeping hot tears down her cheeks. I take her hand and she shakes like our dread earth’s opening. The Man with Squid for Hands asks her name. “Lilijana,” she says, her voice a whisper with the sound of water’s withdrawal over sand. She stares at us, her gray eyes wide with wonder, her mousy hair and her soiled coat sooty as from the smoke of too many fires. She clutches a small, shut box, and will not open it. So we know. To water she must come, one of us, the littlest, the unluckiest, to be lost to life’s seeming-forever, taken by torment, a fig of a girl plucked loose in autumn, at such an age.
To Share a Bed, a Belonging
Lilijana shivers in spasms. She climbs in beside me, still weeping. “Count the numbers to God,” she says. I think to ask You, God, if I am correct, “They are endless,” but bend back my thumb and two fingers in silence, one, two, three. I stroke her hair. It smells like smoke and hay. And I feel awkward in the way of a tree that has always stood alone upon its hill, though now a sapling has sprouted. Lilijana says, “Sing the story of the first stars.” Voiceless, I lift the curtain of quilts high over us, tent them and let them fall to shelter our unshriven souls. The Lady Who Strums a Lute begins to play a rondeau, not to scare spiders but the darkness that sparks at the edge of anything that crawls. The hull echoes its large, empty shell. Lilijana says that the song is an angel fishing for us. “When will the hook catch?” Because I feel too much of her hurt, I begin to tire of such music. But it trembles through my core, each note rounding the silence, and The Lady crooks the lute in her arms, stroking its spruce sides, tapping lightly on the wood: “There, there, old quiverer, no lute can give a ghost child the comfort of God’s moon in a cloud-covered sky.” And I watch Lilijana stare into the dark, for none of us ever can sleep.
When the Mind Is Milkweed, Our Bodies Are Air
Water ochred over. The Man with Squid for Hands says, “You could swim down to the sky.” To answer him and say, “This world is most real,” would make it less real or exist not at all. Suddenly, in the fever of leaves falling on surface ripples, I am cold in my body as if winter woke from slumber in my bones. I am squared, blockish, a cut measure of ice, or I am a looking-being being looked at, and I don’t like feeling this vulnerable. What does The Man see when his squid-hands touch my shadow breaking to a betterment of close-to-nothing on the water, what does he caress, his fingers pushing a circle of pooled swirl, a fracturing? What am I to him and he to me in this unsteady world? The river ochred over. The Man’s hands, no longer of water, I hug them to my face, cup my plum-plump cheeks in his palms which are chilled with the air’s sting. Lilijana wants our attention, tugs my kirtle. She strokes thistle down, pretends it is platinum blonde hair for a bur of burdock stuck atop a furry cattail. “What is the name of your doll?” asks The Man. Lilijana says, “Dollop.” Some of the doll’s hair floats away. Her head a globe of burdock spikes. Lilijana wants to know if our thoughts are like that, points that ray from our faces. The Man tells her that everything is unknown to us. I would add, unknown to us but felt like the gold of Your gaze, Dear God. A leaf falls to water and mallards in shallows bob with yellow bills under the sheen, their green necks a shimmer, something in all of us yielding as caught fish, each of us yielding to the quiet of the moment, to whatever we catch as shine... And the water ochred over, as Lilijana pulls more thistle down from her doll’s head and watches thought-mist lift in a gust.
After Apples, the Moon
I steal a bed sheet from a clothesline (cross myself, Dear God), the white sheet blue with dawn. Fold the linen double, then double it again. Knot corners together to fix a sturdy sack. Slip through an orchard, mist off apples mulching into earth, earth scented heavy with an apple blossom’s sweetness. Apples falling, roll and rot as the windfall ones go wounded in their honey-ooze, swelling the ground in mounds beneath each tree. Hold apple over apple in my hands and with a twist of wrist snap twig to wrest fruit free from branches, slippery with rain’s cling, each droplet like a crystal bee. Fog. More fog. A low hover hazing the horizon. Fill my sack to a bundle, the weight of my crime stacked as apples, shifting stone-round in the cloth and bumping with jostle as I run. Run. I run. And of course, my apples aren’t apples but the shadows of things rent. Though that night on the boat we pretend to eat apples, as if we aren’t always doomed to be hungry, always wishing we could be one night older or younger, nostalgic for that kiss people know as children, an apple tucked in the hand, an apple to taste Your glory, Dear God, sweet as salvation. Though our gone stomachs register the rumble of an emptiness that never can be filled.
Old Woman’s Summer
It is Babie Lato, the time of year for tow blown from flax. Weather warms as if to warn us that the winter ahead will be bitter. All of the boat’s folk see what The Woman Who Strums a Lute to Scare Spiders does not want us to see: a gossamer film afloat through the air that clings to clods of earth or catches itself in the withered stalks of dying wildflowers. “Webs meant to scare us, to say we will be bitten,” says The Woman with the Lute, but we all know better. We all know what our people believe. To them, the webs of film thick in the air mean that The Blessed Virgin is spinning at her wheel, holding in her hand a holy distaff, to make cloth for the cold souls lost in Purgatory, unable to enter the gold gates of Heaven. Peasants count themselves lucky if wind blows this tow unto their sleeves, believe it’s a blessing for their dead. Does anyone wish a blessing for us, now that we are all but forgotten? Are we forgotten, Dear God? Did someone once curse me, saying, “May your soul never rest?” The Woman Who Strums a Lute fears that her unshriven soul won’t be forgiven. Lilijana wants me to explain. I catch wisps borne in the air and beckon her to do the same. Nothing happens. The sky above does not lower. You do not take us into some resplendent home, some eternal summer, Dear God. We are lonely for You, but no matter how much thread The Blessed Virgin spins, we still wear our curse, to be caught here wandering, to sail from shore to shore, never arriving in Heaven, never clothed in grace. But the living hear a keening in night’s wind. It is ours, of our pain, for we cannot remember our days among them. What comes back to us, if anything, is a shimmer of dream, the way the moon splits to a manyness of light on the river’s wavelets. Lilijana looks so sad, as if she is trying to picture her mother’s eyes bent in gentleness upon her. Whenever anyone asks her if she remembers, she says, “Yes, I remember,” points to her heart. But she will not say anything more. Wouldn’t any mother be Mary? Be mild mercy wrapped all around her? Do I speak in riddles? But You, Dear God, are the riddle-maker. As a shadow is always a riddle to the light, as gourds spilled over boot-trodden ground are a mystery to all but the vine. As Purgatory is but a word that purges all feeling from our honed and homely passage.
Because the Maples
Because I cannot have what I want and the maples. Because I knock and the door is not opened, and the maple leaves lie flat underfoot, wet with last night’s rain, riddled with rot in their reds, tawdry, torn by what wind must have whipped them. Because I carry a feather of a wish, so slight it could be airborne, faceting in a whirling way, and the starlings. And the unseen starlings cracking open the day, screeches in the branches like something heavy hoisted, a ball of iron when it splits, the night-sodden voices of starlings suffering to bear blackness into day. And into my heart that lost its key, heart choking back what could not be dark blood. I wouldn’t mind erasure, but the mist. The mist and the sun coming like a cold thing through it. The mist that tells me no matter how single my simple, blue hope, this is what I am: a cloud drifting earth to dissipate, leaving the sad leaves slicked and slapped, the leaves another sun will set dry again, and all trace of me gone, memory like water, memory like rain, passing, past. I pick up two leaves, a red and a gold. They hold a beauty bare. I would pocket them, to know all they are and to know they are all I am to be given, all that has not yet been taken away.
Gillian Cummings is the author of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and My Dim Aviary, winner of the 2015 Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press. Her most recent chapbook is The Shy Yellow (Dharma Pine Editions, 2023), a letterpress edition of twenty copies. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, The Cimarron Review, The Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, and in other journals and four anthologies, including The Best of Tupelo Quarterly. She lives in Catskill, New York, where she is editing her first novel and trying, tentatively, to learn to play the cello.