USA

noragreg@hotmail.com

Anita Barrows, May's Poet for Peace, a clinical psychologist with a private practice specializing in autistic children, after years of teaching and translating from German, French and Italian, feels obliged in her poems,  even though her

materials be the most commonplace, "to probe that territory for which form and discipline form the vehicle but that contains something else, transcendent." Her two occupations happily collaborate in her poems. And her two daughters and granddaughter heighten her sense of the immediate, the political, even as her practice in Theravadan Buddhism has helped to center her life and work. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Quarterly Review of Literature award, a Riverstone Press award, a runner-up for a PEN Translation Award for Rilke's Book of Hours with Joanna Macy, and many others. She lives and works in Berkeley.

Here

is a tree abundant with lemons, in dark midwinter. Here
is another instance of embrace, you call it
the ocean meeting the horizon. Here
is your chair, your orange cat, your cup of cranberry tea.
Here is the rain no one was sure would fall.
Here is the conversation, did you think
you wanted another? Here is your daughter
coming downstairs to call her dog, this dog,
who bounded into our lives the summer you thought
nothing so comical would ever again be possible.
Here is the love that seemed impossible, as much
in your hands as that rock you're holding,
picked from the crest of a hill you thought
you didn't have the strength enough to climb.
Here is your joy, that created itself
without your knowing it;
here is the sunlight pouring through leaves
of pyrocanthus, lush red berries, the last sunlight today
between layers of cloud & evening.
Here is the life you meant when you said
to your friends after the walk & the good
morning's work, I wish I were living
my days like this, & she
handed you the carrots she had peeled
only for you, just at that
moment, & smiled
at everything, & said to you, You are.

Pastorale

Once I came to a pasture fence
just after a ewe
had dropped twin lambs. It was
January, my life
was breaking apart. I stood

& watched as the long
glistening blue & red placenta
like a great rope of sea-kelp
slid out of her, & the firstborn lamb
nuzzled her teat, its scraggy tail
crazy with want. But the second lamb
lay in damp straw, shivering,
flailing to right itself
& then giving up,
until I thought

I should climb over, wrap it
in my jacket, rub its belly & legs.
Not knowing if I would help it or harm it
what I did was watch, hating
my ignorance, my indecision;

and when at last it had heaved itself up & nursed
& was lying, satisfied,
there where it was born,
its mother bleated & came
to me anyway over the grass, touched her nose

to my hand, let me reach through the fence
to feel the nubby black heads
of her children, still wet

with the blood & fluid
of their first world, & with some thin
forgiving rain

that had started to fall
in this one

Reflection & body

Dusk. Midwinter.
Water & sky are a single color.
Two egrets in Bolinas Lagoon
stand, immobile, on sticklike legs,
& the reflected egrets undulate in windstirred
darkening ripples. My friends wait in the car
while I wade out a little way into that chill
shallow place, my feet clasped by mud,
bitten by sharp stones. Under this scythe moon,
this scatter of early stars, those
who are losing sight of each other
call to each other the many names
of disappearing

•

Once last summer I drove with Viva
over the rim of Tamalpais
late at night into a dense fog
because there was no other way home.
My whole body beat with the knowledge
that one misgauge, one curve taken a little wide
& we'd go plummeting into the place
Viva's eyes were riveted, the nothing
she braced herself for, ahead of us & surrounding us

•

...& this is why I roll up my jeans & go
out there among the birds, to take that salt
in through my pores, the drenched almost sweet
night air drifting in from the Pacific:
to feel water closing around my feet.

I want to touch it --
that point where reflection
& body reflected
are joined, & know
again there is
no barrier, no protection

•

I thought Viva was dying when she was nine months old.
Staphylococcus in her bloodstream & three antibiotics
that didn't work. I walked around
never putting her down, afraid if I did
that death might snatch her. Like the mother
in Kollwitz' drawing, where you see
death's fingers already gripping the child, I knew
this was a tug-of-war, I knew Viva's life
hinged on how fiercely I could wrestle.
One night, her fever 105º, I bargained away
my own health, the man I loved who was not
Viva's father, poetry. And in the end
it took nothing as mystic as that, a sticky
pink liquid I gave her
that brought her fever down, an afternoon
when the two of us slept for hours
on the livingroom rug, Viva curled in my arms,
sunlight laying across our faces. Nothing
mythic, just a matter
of the right medicine. Yet I tell you
I know what I would have given.

•

...& what if we'd plunged together that night, Viva
& I, down the steep ravine, the car somersaulting
through tangled grasses, careening off trunks of bay,
eucalyptus, madrone, past fog-saturated oak scrub,
pungent blackberry --
what if we'd been caught together in that first
eerie moment when falling
is inevitable, would we have stared, each
of us tensed in our seatbelts, straight ahead
into the darkness that was swallowing us? Would she
have reached for my hand, would I have found
a word, a fragment of song, a name
of something we were both held by? Or would
we have tumbled each alone, each
strapped to our aloneness?

Starting with a bone
                               for Anne

        1

        Sometimes, on winter afternoons,
        somebody's mother would make a soup
        starting with a bone, a shankbone
        the butcher had put aside.
        The whole house would fill with the smell
        of onions, celery, potatoes
        releasing their crispness, offering
        what earth had offered them
        to the broth swirling around the bone
        that sat at the bottom of the pot.
        All the flavors that had come into being
        in different ways, mixing with what
        the bone, too, gave forth, bone
        of this animal who had lived its life
        in a field, a pasture
        somewhere we never imagined, we
        who waited to be fed.


        2

        We watched a film about a boy
        who would have done anything to survive,
        & did:  became a traitor, invoked murder
        on the heads of his own people.
        Who can judge him?  He was a boy,
        He wanted to live.  In the end
        he lived, was reunited
        with his brother, fathered sons
        of his own.  The innocence or pragmatism
        in his face gave way to sadness.
        He sang a song:  How good it is
        to be sitting together
        with friends.

        Always I have thought
        that, given such circumstances, I would have gone
        down with my hand in some
        stranger's hand, hoping only
        to remember some song of grief
        or praise to sing in the face
        of terror.  But who knows?
        The film  asks if there is something
        to choose that is more
        than survival.    The film asks whether survival,
        in the end, is the only way
        to transform desire into wisdom,
        wisdom into sorrow.


        3

        What is hard is transmuted
        to softness & we say

        it is heat that performs
        this mystery, makes space
        expand among molecules, invisible

        widen around invisible.  What is locked in
        begins to emerge.   What can't  be eaten

        turns to something
        you could eat.

        What is dormant

        sprouts green, knows at last
        what it has been
        created for, gropes its way

        into daylight.


        4

        .... and how sometimes, eating this soup,
        you would find in your mouth the bone

        or a piece of it, curiously
        tender

        How you would crush it between your teeth
        & find it not even as resistant
        as raw apple or a crust of bread

        How it would come apart, then,
        in your mouth, & how you would taste

        the flavor of all it had taken in,  the flavor
        of everything that was
        this soup:

        vegetable, animal, salt



        5

        This soup is for the sick
        This soup is for those who mourn others who have died
        This soup is for those who have not yet learned how to mourn
        This soup is for those who are cold
        This soup is for those who stand in line for hours, waiting for 
water
        This soup is for those who have no water
        This soup is for those who are too weak to walk, & have fallen by 
the way
        This soup is for those who sit, holding the heads of those who have 
fallen
        This soup is for the child who has just started to name what is in 
it, who says
                                                                             
                                                beans, peas
        This soup is for the child who has forgotten the name she was given
        This soup is for the child who has searched every tent, looking for 
his father
        This soup is for the cow whose calf was stillborn, the cow who came 
to the edge
                               of the field so the children could put their 
hands on her broad head
        This soup is for those who planted these carrots, for those who 
planted these
                               onions
        This soup is for the rain, this soup is for the soil
        This soup is for the animal whose bone it was made from
        This soup is for the animal whose bone it was made from


        6

        If you have too structured an idea of your life......

        If you are in anguish over what you have lost.....

        The man in prisoner's clothing
        hears a familiar voice, looks over
        at the crowd of newly captured prisoners, finds

        his brother, separated from him
        years before

        & Lara, long after the weeks
        in the frozen rooms, where Zhivago
        wrote -- daily -- poems of their love  --

        sees him from the window
        of a bus
        passing through the crowded city

        moments before his death




        7

        Take my hand, look for me

        How, across widening space,
        will we know one another

        Will you eat this soup?

        This earth is a body of broken bones
        We belong

        to nothing
        except as we are transformed

        by it, except as it is transformed
        into ourselves

Stations

(1)

Once in the sundrenched Woodacre hills
I saw a line of ants
in bleached grass, some

going north & others south, some
carrying pieces of food & others
nothing. I knelt

there among the sticky weeds
under the blazing autumn sun
& touched the stations

of their bliss, their beautifulness
& their execution,

their want, & what I took
to be their forgiveness.

I am in the world to love the world.


(2)

All day heavy rain; but when
I walk out after midnight
with my dog, the clouds
have parted, the nearly
full moon

stares out
over the closed houses
& dances itself beneath us, in

puddles stirred
by a sharp wind.

Clumsy, mud-
splattered, we stumble

between two
endlessnesses,

our way
illumined sometimes & sometimes

dissolving in darkness.

for Emma

(previously titled "The space between, " excerpted from
"Faithful." Sonoma Mandala 23. (1995/96)

© All Copyright, Anita Barrows.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.