Leonore Hildebrandt
Poet
Plowing the Canvas
Considering narcotics or a cliff
to jump from to escape life's spasms,
its stench, its futile clinging to reflexes,
and also since we dig ourselves
into the ground while still warm -
the question of how to make it
from one margin to the other,
to traverse the canvas via lines
of color, in rows of beans and corn,
leaving spaces, at the end, for air.
(published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Vol 58, No 2, Winter 2007)
The Second Thought
When they revisit the print room, see the assorted letters
in shallow drawers, the cramped machine, its metal
rollers and levers still attached to ink, to engagement,
and how the furniture - a mere placeholder for characters -
still welcomes subversive applications - stand up for your right -
the rebels, thinking out loud, understand so little.
Pressure has brushed and turned the sheets,
thin and dear, time taken away their fearless pamphlets -
but in finer print, in correspondences, they still find
Go forth in peace, the longer version, the work outspread.
(originally published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, 57, No 3, Spring 07)
Due East
They will melt on their way –
islands of ice in easy processionlured by the off-shore wind,
the bay’s silent mouth.Auspicious, my pastels on the line,
waving their drying arms. TodayI found a new window – to face
the morning’s new sun.
(published in A Seaside Companion, Tilbury House, April 2008.)
A Dream More than Twice
Again – you are left at the station, distraught,
narrowly missing the train after the myriad
obstacles got the best of you,again your father touches your hair
and you cry because you are young and
you’d rather be waking from it.Then you lie there flushed, surprised, dismantled,
your hands wandering about yourself –
a living belly, two legs – until yourfingers, their harvest of freedom preciously
gathered over the years, wrap you
in ripples of light.(published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Vol 58, No 2, Winter 2007)
Crossing the Marsh at Night
Under the sky's blind music, I am the confusion
of hedges plunging into fog, the meadow's
green saturations, the misting river's low land.
My hands know the handle-bar's grip,
feel the tire tremble on the brick-laid road.
Running out of breath, I focus on breathing.
I gave away the rooms my mother prepared for me,
taking only a small sculpture, a wooden horse
jumping an unmeasured distance, its stiff limbs
almost in flight, the painted eyes endlessly intent.
(originally published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, 56, No 4, Summer 06)
A Road Song (For You)
At the southern border the desert's pulse
unravels - a battered cop car sits in a dry gully.
Road kill - the barbed wire fence has caught
a man's hat. I dream of a bull, charging,
but I hold him and wrestle him down. If he
comes again I will growl - see him slink off?
Stopped by a shallow water, I wonder which way
is yours. It's early and I'm riding in circles,
bare-breasted, my motor bike spins on the gleaming
gravel. Your city has stairways steeper than cliffs,
houses like tall red flowers. Which one is yours?
The razor wire has caught another one's shirt.
(originally published in The Cafe Review, 18, Winter 2007)
Pale Clouds
Waiting like sadness
in borderlands. To swim the river,
hanging on to water
to avoid the breeze -
a cat pawing the surface.
Then emerging, tenuous
like a membrane of the inner
ear, hair cells whose ends
once broken will not
grow back.
Like feet hampered by debris
and cold, the rocks and sticks,
the hollows.
No turning back. The younger
brother is counting
the seconds - thunder and
more thunder.
(originally published in the Northwoods Journal, 12, No 2, Winter 2004)