Lisa Beech Hartz

Chapel

At the last remaining untamed
spot behind that big old house,

my father and I considered

which trees to keep. Which

skinny saplings showed promise.

Was that a beech?

Black birch? What scrub to clear?

How much rock fence to expose?

His long pruning saw—
its toothy blade—

bit and cut, bit and cut. Trim
close to the trunk, my father said,

It helps the tree to heal. I snipped
and snipped. Think of it:

You and I had not yet met.
Green-scent of sap bleed.

Vine scratch. All the late spring
shades of leaf—

holly to azalea. My father and I
stood back together, pleased

with our little glade. How
could we have known we’d made

a wedding altar? Laurel light

spangle, limestone glitter.

 

Calamity/Catastrophe

I find myself
parsing calamity—

your alarming illness

and no diagnosis,

sudden or great misfortune;

versus catastrophe—

a disastrous conclusion.

My mother, catastrophe,

called to ask if she’d called already.
Which child are you?

Miscarriages: calamities.
Fresh grief layered in again

and no warning.
We could assign colors.

Ghost friends, smoke. Dead
father? Bruise from plum

to new leaf. Soon my mother
won’t know me. Not even as

the little red-headed one
in the middle.

Mother-absence, that’s lavender.
The hue and the scent. Earth

and not earth. The echo children?
Yellow acres of hope,

smash-petaled.

Smithereened.

 

The Physiology of Drowning

I saw my father in a dream. He said:
Where else would I be?

My mind unspools, submerges.
Dread descending

like a scrim, a fogged window.
I wake into mourning. I find

I’ve swum out alone into some
familiar unknown. My father

once cast words at me like hooks
on a line. All landed, sharp.

I am word-scarred.
Damage I don’t recognize

until I’ve arrived.
Like the fish torn into air,

jaw caught. Oh, yes,
says the fish.  Here it is.

After this, abyss.
Once, I was on a boat so far

out I couldn’t see land: the first
terror. The second, after dark.

The storm. I thought I’d be tossed,
lost, and you’d never recover my body.

I’ve read the fear of drowning
causes drowning.

 

Mother-Love

My mother calls
from her little room

where there is no outside.
There is no before. She

doesn’t read anymore. Or solve
the puzzles I sent or color

in the mosaic prints. Too much
trouble to take a walk, she says,

Thank goodness for television.
What would we do without television?

My father’s ashes in a box
she dropped off at reception.

Not my box, she said.
That dust her husband.

Eighteen when they met,
eighty-one when he died.

I listen hard. Try to
miss her. Always she stood

at a distance. Like a hint, like
a rumor.

She had such glamour.
Olive skin, near-black hair.

Coral lipstick.
How many times

was I reminded I was nothing
like her? All the love

she never surrendered.
I want to say: No regrets.

I make up for what she can’t
remember. You used to

sew all my clothes, I tell her.
One pattern lasted years.

 

Tongue or Spire

—after Dafna Kaffeman, I Thirst for a Homeland, 2006-2020

 

What hands could render
these tiny impossible blooms
and grasses from glass, stitched
into Lucite boxes fixed to the walls?
Inner gallery a square in the center
of a square in the center of a bigger square.
Cotton plant, coastal pine, lantana.
Native plants of Israel, or should I say
Palestine? I don’t understand
the words, but the letters, Hebrew, Arabic,
more than language, and the red everlasting.
Even the glass wasps are only playing dead.
The artist never lived in peacetime.
Define peacetime.
Our son fourteen. An astonishment
after so many losses. This morning,
school run. I watched our son’s narrow back
as he walked away. Back so narrow
and shoulders so broad. Our son says
the metal detectors are performative.
Define performative. I’ve never heard of
Oxford, Michigan, but I was born

 

just miles away. There, a boy was bullied
so his parents bought him a gun.
Flowers require no translation.
When you give a boy a gun.
Chekhov. You don’t respond to
terror with terror. The place you came from
never saw battle. I, on the other hand,
want to snatch our boy back and run.
What does homeland mean? The artist
uses the bench-top technique of flame-working.
Flame: ignited gas, typically incandescent
and often shaped as tongue or spire.