In a Fender

Not key, not kettle, nor any vegetable
contingency can my large hands retrace,
so that I see, past busted headlights,

rusted hose connectors, and faucet’s drip,
where this is going, to plant,
perhaps, a cabbage rose, no more,

by doorways of our stowed chronology
and doubly-knotted fishing lines.
Cowardice. Something must intervene.

I am an envelope, so numb wind’s whistle
cannot unfold, not move me
from the corner of this room, this dream,

although linoleum allows the lithium
of small mice to scuttle across the floor
and one petal at a time drift gently

on this scar and that, in separate healings
from hauling bales. The chimney
draws down faint sounds of geese

returning. This stirs me, directs me
past the north-north-west of stasis,
and I unfold, rub my hands for circulation,

try not to see myself too clearly
in the fender of the old Chevrolet Bel Air.

Mallard Memory

One duck today on the half-frozen pond,

there should be a pair, two of whatever
sex and kind, pairs
are intended.

It scours
the growing ice, feeds,
looking for a mate or other.
No words in the air, other than my own.
I tie these down, utter a few aloud,
bundle up and exit with my lab.

Like the scent of lavender,
harvested before first frost,
memory is filling space.
The sharpest is of my Stephen, in our teens,
still close-held, long interstices
that never changed us,
and, before his marriage, our last meeting in Peru.

Six years ago, I heard he’d died,
no one to mourn with.
He still fills my heart, though
we were never lovers in the usual sense.

Mallard motion outside
keeps me thinking,
I add three logs.

I never told him about the small fire
we shared, it would have buoyed him—his great laugh.

A drake, green glitter at its throat pulls me back.
My pond is not so much out as inward and down,
my eye to deep springs and sounds
that draw me back from the boulder-filled hill, now iced over.

Outside the duck searches just below the surface,
a whisper behind my eyes’ tracings,
quiet clumps of snow bending each branch.

I want smaller things.
Ice grows in the cold and colder, never fully to the edge
there’ll be room for the mallard on the pond tomorrow.

And the fire during our five-hours on the phone.
I toyed with paperclips as we spoke,
joining them in strange shapes
on the purple carpet, the house empty.

I found Diamond Matches in the desk,
played with them steadily,
while we disagreed on poetry and politics.

Wild tones, almost songs, between us.

Without a pause as we talked, my hair caught on fire,
long hair to my waist,
then cradling the phone in my left hand and under my chin,
I put it out with my right hand.

I never told him, though
he would have treasured it as a part of who we were.

HELEN STEVENS CHINITZ

After teaching and running schools around the country for several decades, Helen Stevens Chinitz was urged by friends toward an MFA. She then began, late in life, to commit herself to her writing. She settled in rural New York, comforted by her large library, her Labrador, and light farming.