MICROCOSM

She starts the engine, wanting
only the air conditioning.
He unloads their shopping cart
into the back and then slides
in against the scorching seat,
grips the wheel, and watches
her finger skim the receipt
until she finally announces
that the store didn’t charge
them for the table lamp.
They both turn around
as though to check a child
strapped into a booster.
It’s there. And, it’s theirs.
Crystal base. Beige shade.
They tingle with chemicals:
norepinephrine, phenylethylamine,
dopamine— the same blend
of neurotransmitters that fired
six years ago in the stretch
of their first extended kiss.
It’s not until miles later,
when normal levels return,
that they turn to each other.
She begins with the rumors
of child labor overseas,
while he explains how
places like that always bully
their way into towns
with promises of low prices,
and they’re both soon nodding
to the idea that all of this,
the unaccounted parting gift
of a sixty-five dollar lamp,
this rare olly olly oxen free,
is exactly what a store
like that deserves.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

DEATH OF THE HIRED HAND, HIAWATHA, KANSAS

I loved his hands pulling that rattlesnake from the baler,
how the thing twitched slightly, as if shuddering in its sleep.

He fetched the shovel to grind off its head, that sick miracle
of jaw still opening and closing on the rusty spade.

I brought the body to grandmother who husked it and shaved off
the tender white kernels of tissue, curing enough meat

to feed one man. Its dried rattle is still a warning,
urging my memory to stay in the barn so I would not be the one

to find him writhing at the gate, gasping in a bloody-backed t-shirt,
while the bull in crimson-tipped horns looked on indifferently.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

It was my job to determine who the marchers were.
And how long they had practiced the different steps they were used to making.
I wouldn’t say that it was a hard job.
Only that when I grew tired of doing it,
nobody else volunteered to take my place.
As it was, the marchers recognized me even from a great distance
and applauded when they realized
that I was counting the people in each one of their lines.
It had been years since anyone had done this as rigorously as I had.
And their confidence in my counting them
left me at the same time actually content and fairly amazed.
I remember one line of ten men, when I said later that there were eleven of them,
smiled, and thought that it was a joke.
But, of course, it wasn’t a joke.
And the eleventh man, who claimed that he resembled me
even down to the color of my hair, when he put his tunic down,
lapsed into the kind of a coma I recognized
fitfully from months of pouring grease over my head
and years of placing birds in the sky.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

SIX LIPS
by Penelope Scambly Schott

Mayapple Press, 2009
408 N. Lincoln Street
Bay City, MI 48708
ISBN 978-0-932412-84-3
2010, 80 pp., $15.95
www.mayapplepress.com

Six Lips is dazzling. Were it for its language alone, I would savor these poems again and again if only to get some relief from the pedestrian gumbo of contemporary speech. Schott takes her readers for a ride as thrilling for us poetry readers as “Avatar.” Her imagination knows no bounds and she accomplishes her feats with the time-honored tool of language alone. Six lips? At least.

Even so, she doesn’t fly off into the stratosphere. Like Frost’s climber of birches, she knows that “Earth’s the right place for love.” She says as much in “Why I Did Not Wish to Float in Space,” one of my favorite poems in the book. She opens with a series of questions reminiscent of God lecturing Job on his powers. For example: “Who spread the western horizon to snip/ the orange sun in half.” She then proceeds to ask an even more impossible question:

Can you feel how our planet spins in a void,
how the shallow mantle, hauling its fur coat
of forest, its slippery skin of ocean, seems
inconsequential over the molten core?

Note the rightness of the line-break after “fur coat” and the aptness of the ocean’s “slippery skin.” Note also that as the poem builds, it becomes more intimate:

I’ve lost my footing in the belly of curled roots,
and I’m scared of falling, of lurching clear out
into space—nothing on earth to touch. Pull me
back by a finger, will you?

What captures me in this poem is the surprising turn it takes to the intimate gesture of “Pull me/ back by a finger, will you?” Her meditation on the vastness of the universe turns into a love poem, concluding with “Please?/ Here, in the motionless house, my face/ brushed by your glance.” What makes Six Lips so compelling is how unpredictable Schott is.

Penelope Scambly Schott is unabashedly female and yet, in a way, post-feminist. She simply is who she is and more power to her. “Counting the Body,” the long poem which occupies the center of this collection, makes her attitude towards herself abundantly clear. Each section plays with a number. She requires

Six lips to sip the sublime,
    two for the mouth and four for the vulva
      plump as succulents and shining with dew—
         ah, youth; ah, time.

The naturalness of the rhyme (lips/sip) and the abundant alliteration characterize her versifying and also lead to the nostalgic note at the end. These are not the poems of a young woman, but youthful exuberance pervades the volume.

In the last section of the poem, she imagines what it would be like “If I Had Ten Thumbs”:

I would wear pink leather shoes with velcro straps
I would strike matches on the sole of my shoe
I would suck firmly on my ten wet thumbs
I would practice exactly how to suck
with rapt attention and rhythm
so as to gratify any man
and I would do it
yes I would
do that
yes

The voice of these poems is often playful and funny. At the same time the overall tenor of this book is conditioned by the impending death of her mother. The poems get darker as the poet meditates on time and aging. As she says in “Eclipse”: “This is the world that ends over and over and then/ goes on without us, our tiny smudge of time.”

Schott is blessed, however, with a flexible consciousness. At home with animals or the stars, she gives a sense of her life as a succession of lives. Aware of the natural world, she suggests the transmigration of her soul into a screech owl or a horse. Such poems tend to be upbeat and thrilling, but the excruciating demise of her mother haunts the speaker of these poems. She finally gives way to addressing her mother’s death and dying.

Typically, she refuses sentimentality. In “Heart Failure,” she writes: “This is the year I would like to find pity. I would like/ to hurt for my mother the way I ache for my children.” As much as she would like to develop this feeling, it eludes her: a failure of her heart: “I want to be sad that she’s eighty-seven and fading.” Through her use of anaphora and an accretion of brilliant details, Schott builds up the image of her mother:

She lives in her elegant house like a black pearl
from a broken oyster drifting under reefs in a bay.
she lives in her house like a startled rabbit unable
to finish crossing the road.

The poem startles when the speaker imagines killing her mother, as an act of pity:

                                     If I had enough pity,
I would dare squeeze her fragile neck and kiss
her forehead as I press down on her windpipe and keep
on pressing with my strong and generous thumbs.

The poem, however, does not end there. Schott’s spirit is too magnanimous, and her mother changes, showing a gentle “appreciation” of nature that Schott finds surprising. Her mother “watches the squirrels scamper up black bark/ like acrobats of joy.” In fact, Schott doesn’t recognize the person her mother has become:

This drowning old lady is not my mother. Not
abrupt. As I stroke her knuckles, grace glints
in our salt hands.

Drowning because she is dying, the mother undergoes a kind of transformation, as does the daughter. For both of them, there is a communion, a touch of being to being.

While I admired A is for Anne, Schott’s previous book, for her deft handling of the life of Anne Hutchinson, Six Lips takes its readers to a new place through her language and style, but also through her openness, her dexterity, her seemingly boundless range of being in the world. She’s a stunning poet.

____________

Claire Keyes reviewed A is for Anne for Rattle and would be happy to review future books by Penelope Schott. Disclaimer: they share the same publisher. Mayapple Press published The Question of Rapture, a book of poems, in 2008. To be honest, Six Lips is far better than Rapture. Claire Keyes lives modestly in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

In early December
           singing under the hedge
of verbena beside the porch.

What lies the sun tells
          of a few leaves stripped of their color,
parenthesis of rust on the hinges of the car door.

High wisps of clouds
          lit up by something
that has fallen.

The edge of a storm front
          faintly coming, a change in the smell
of the air, a quiver in the wind.

The incipient darkness, smooth as licorice.
          The only light in the house
the one in the closet that’s been left on.

The house quiet except for
          the gnawing in the attic.
The sound of a sound

that can barely hold the weight
          of being heard, a remnant
that ripples down the hallway

into the room where
          you slept. Your books still
dozing on the shelves waiting for you

to open them, or whatever
          it is you will do
when you get back to what you left.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

POEM IN SEARCH OF A HORSE

Time is not reading the poem as you
read the poem, but rest assured he’s slipped
inside the room in his soft, polished shoes,
with his little cough, his bowler hat in hand,
so sorry to disturb. It isn’t that he doesn’t like
to read, he loves to lean across your shoulder,
let you feel his breath, a delicate subzero
on your neck, but he’s impatient with anything
but haiku. Ignore him. He’ll pretend
he doesn’t care, proceed to wind the clocks
with tiny keys or stretch out on a sofa, tap
a tree branch on a pane and wait you out.
Meanwhile, the poem persists in its solitary
business of resisting being made, trying
the usual tactics: silence, tantrum, argument
over rules of play until the stuck mind panics,
a tarantula in hot tar, shouts words out
like charades: moon! anapest! plumage! boat!
desperate to drown out that silence accompanying
the figure in the well-cut suit who’s polishing
the gold case of his pocket watch, remarking
how words pile up like big rigs on a fogged-in
freeway: apple! rainfall! pasture! bell! and even
when the poem finds some purchase, scrambles
up a narrow footpath through a field and stands
inside a grassy insect buzz, holding out
a shaky palm of sugar to conjure up a horse,
a distant train will whistle, spooking anything
half wild. You’re back exactly where you started.
Cough-cough. Soft shoes. Tick-tock. No horse.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

Michael Salcman

THE NIGHT BEFORE

The ex-husbands were the worst; not one showed up
to discuss whether a wife’s head should be shaved
the night before or asleep on the table.
Ex-girlfriends and wives were better, always there
to stake out their territory and proclaim undying devotion.
A patient’s room the night before was like a temple
a moment before the service starts, everyone chatting
and catching up, the pews in front of the Ark
filled with noise, the children of blended families
forced to attend, in loud debate
about what should be done. Each of them had their reasons:
father was much too young or old to get the new drug,
he was otherwise healthy, his heart was strong,
if he knew he would fight to the end or
he wouldn’t want to live as less than a man.
Like this they broke into camps, some still wishing
to keep up the fight by another attack on the tumor,
others in favor of (usually unsaid) adjusting the respirator
and pulling the plug. Unless the man in the bed was deep in coma
or paralyzed by drugs, we took it outside to the hall
and made our decision in that outer courtyard of the temple
where nurses walk their silent carts
and monitors wink like distant stars.
I stepped just far enough away he wouldn’t hear them trembling
to know what I would do in the morning.
Even if he never spoke, I always assumed he listened.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009