except the old immutable forms
like a shovel shared at the grave for texts
Ecclesiastes so the bereaved
can choose whether to believe
that death is a kind of hibernation this spring the groundhog
foraging in our yard was smaller thinner a strange
perpendicular crimp in its tail which proved
to the rational mind it was a different creature but look beloved
how by late summer it’s fattened out how its coat now gleams how
when frightened it also hurries into the barn
SLEEP
another heavy frost what doesn’t die or fly away
the groundhog for instance the bear is deep in sleep I’m thinking
a lot about sleep translation I’m not sleeping much
who used to be a champion of sleep
ex-champions are pathetic my inner parent says the world
is full of evil death cruelty degradation not sleeping
scores only 2 out of 10
but a moral sense
is exhausting I am exhausted a coma looks good to me
if only I could be sure there’d still be dreams it’s what I miss the most
even in terrible dreams at least you feel what you feel not what
you’re supposed to feel your house burns down so what
if you survived you rake the ashes sobbing
exhausted
from trying to not smoke I once asked for a simple errand
from my beloved who wanted me not to smoke he forgot unforgivable
I fled the house like an animal wounded enraged I was thinking
more clearly than I had ever thought my thought was why
prolong this life I flung myself into the car I drove like a fiend
to the nearest store I asked unthinking for unfiltered Luckies oh
brand of my girlhood I paid the price I took my prize to the car I slit
the cellophane I tapped out one perfect white cylinder I brought to my face
the smell of the barns the fires cooking it golden brown smell of my father
my uncles my grandfather’s tin of loose tobacco his packet of delicate paper
the deliberate way he rolled and licked and tapped and lit and drew in
and relished it the smell of the wild girls behind the gym the boys
in pickup trucks I sat in my car as the other cars crept by
I looked like a pervert it was perverse
a Lucky under my nose
I drove myself home
I threw away the pack which was unwise the gods
don’t notice whining they notice the brief bright flares of human will
they lean from their couches yes more fear and dread for that one
yes let’s turn the suffering up a notch let’s watch her
strike the match I strike it now when I wake
in the dark I light that little fire
LARCH
short-sleeves in Vermont late November the leaves long gone
only evergreens the white birch bark and our feral black cat
not sheltering prowling improbably in her thickened coat
one more free-range lunch one more of her nine lives
put back into reserve unlike the year’s fresh deaths
as for me I keep my votive candles burning as the larches burned
on the hillside their needles yellow deciduous like the leaves
and now sloughed in the yard beneath the small larch
bent double cascading like a willow weeping is the proper name for it
also for the cherry tree in the yard of the house where my parents’ friend
shot an intruder it was his wife their tree
might as well be here with all my other lost trees childhood mimosas
magnolias the willow oak blown down in a storm surviving in my head
beside the friend the murdered wife the subsequent wife
my parents too and now Peter with his lazy eye and glamorous
doom-ridden Rynn and Carol who had her own reprieves
who used them up I confess the weather matters more and more to me
diurnal is a lovely word another is circadian
ROOF
after a week of daily heavy snow I want to praise my roof first
the acute angle at which it descends from the ridgepole
and second that it is black the color absorbing
all the other colors so that even now as arctic air
blows in from the plains my roof burns off from underneath
the dazzling snow dense layers of particles which are tiny
specks of trash sheathed in wet cloud what chance
do they have against my roof even at night
the snowpack over my head breaks apart and slides on its own melting
down from the eaves as though my roof had shrugged I hear snow
thump to the ground a cleansing sound the secret of my roof
is standing seams the raised ridges
bonding the separate panels to one another an old
wound that has healed no lapped shingles catching the wind
no icejam at the eaves no sending my beloved out with an ax
no roof caved in from the weight of snow as happened in 1924 only
another thump as a slab of snow lets loose leaving my roof
gleaming in the wet residue it takes what it needs
from the lifesource and sheds the rest a useful
example if I were starting over
STORM
one minute a slender pine indistinguishable from the others
the next its trunk horizontal still green the jagged stump
a nest for the flickers
one minute high wind and rain the skies
lit up the next a few bright winking stars the lashing of the brook
one minute an exaltation in the apple trees the shadblow trees
the next white trash on the ground new birds
or the same birds crowding the feeder
one minute the children were sleeping in their beds
you got sick you got well you got sick
the lilac bush we planted is a tree the cat creeps past
with something in her mouth she’s hurrying down to where
the culvert overflowed one minute bright yellow
marsh marigolds springing up the next
the farmer sweeps them into his bales of hay
Praise for Ellen Bryant Voigt
“Reading Voigt, one comes to understand that what we think of as reality is the product of both painstaking observation and imagination. . . . She favors a language that is both precise and lush, and a narrative that is both immediately accessible and richly layered with meaning.”
—Charles Simic, New York Review of Books
“Voigt’s . . . commitment to the syntactic energies that Frost once called ‘the abstract sound of sense’ lends presence and dynamism to [her] primary subjects. She has always been obsessed with forging some link between the living and the dead, and with making a home in a natural world that she sees, shifting her cold eye, as both beautiful and fatal.”
—Peter Campion, Poetry
“‘Hard’ and ‘contemplative’ apply to the adamant and reflective nature of Voigt’s own genius. She is a poet of knowledge, and knowledge in the living, messy world.”
—Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World
“Ellen Bryant Voigt’s gift is the elegy, cool and direct as rain. . . . Poems passionate but disciplined sing line by line.”
—National Book Award for poetry, finalist citation
“Ellen Bryant Voigt has fashioned an art of passionate gravity and opulent music, an art at once ravishing and stern and deeply human.”
—American Academy of Arts and Letters, Academy Award in Literature citation
“The beauty and intensity of Ellen Bryant Voigt’s sus
tained elegy [in Kyrie] leaves us feeling much as we do after listening to Mozart’s Requiem: grief-stricken, transformed, and exalted.”
—Francine Prose
Copyright © 2013 by Ellen Bryant Voigt
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton paperback 2015
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Voigt, Ellen Bryant, date.
[Poems. Selections]
Headwaters : poems / Ellen Bryant Voigt. — First edition.
pages ; cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-08320-0 (hardcover)
I. Title.
PS3572.O34H43 2013
811'.54—dc23
2013009650
ISBN 978-0-393-24141-9 (e-book)
ISBN 978-0-393-35000-5 pbk.
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Headwaters Page 3