Poetry: Heather Christle

For Henri

Heather Christle

 
Blank road and then trees like a corridor
begin. How does that happen. How funny

for anything to start. It is the edges
we use to make art, but that is tough:

we live in the middle and so little in fact
seems to end. This dull continuous world!

Though a horse I think gets distinguished:
it runs, it knocks a loose blossom down.

 

More Swans and More Women

Heather Christle

 
A swan makes a bad pet It is a murderer
but very beautiful just like a woman
If you see a woman moving in the water
you must run away very fast to a mountain
It happened to me once and there
are no swans on a mountain
This made it lonely and natural so
I was very safe but I forgot
how to talk and when I came home
people could not see I was a woman
although I made a lot of statues to explain
and I live by myself in a cottage and
the water is no longer working It won’t
make me beautiful just wet and the same

 

Route 109

Heather Christle

 
I travel all day with a window before me
me a blushing bag
                            the world a pretty din

glass is the part I don’t see
while all day apparent the sky

to which I’m no closer
                                   from which I’m disbarred
the stony sky blank and unmoved

the air I breathe in was once Caesar’s
to what do I owe this dim past

to the glass I’m a peasant
                                        a fool
to the sky I am some kind of riddance

a driver behind a safe wheel
w/ lakes to the side
                               a putative blue
 

Heather Christle is the author of “What Is Amazing,” “The Difficult Farm,” and “The Trees The Trees,” which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. She is the web editor for jubilat and teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. A native of Wolfeboro, N.H., she currently lives in Northampton, Mass.