poems by Lisa Hemminger

On the Porch Swing I Imagined Us

Some Artists

Two Minutes to talk to Emily Dickinson

Lake (Clenched)

Down Town

My Family

The Vindicator

On the Porch Swing I Imagined Us
- from her new book "Complication Compilation"

Someday, some precious one of mine might find a fossil,
an artifact of that place we once were, walked through, built,
conquered and never forgot. In our youth,
we thought our future would be a statue and filled with statues,
holding up in storms, as stubborn as old earth to leaving despite
the onslaught of pigeon shit, negative thought and much much
worse. We believed we'd stay through others' poor choices:
deaths, accidents, or divorces of those who'd run anaerobic to
the slope of our sheltering dromedary shoulder.

We imagined fixing this porch swing time after time after time,
so many times in fact, the act becomes a photograph, where
sometimes we're complaining, sometimes singing, but
nevertheless, always repeating.
Repeating. Sure as a calendar
With a sequin moon justified on a right collar of sky,
stuck fast like a moth on a pin on black velvet we study for
consecutive, light years and know like an accumulation of basic
math
laid down upon a charming learning curve.

There will be no such scrapbooks here, scientific or romantic.
We do not turn to each other now, knowingly in the car or
frantic for help or for good like the dream of our youth foretold,
but the clenched fossil of us doesn't hurt, the only law has worn
its jagged edges down, and when I do casually turn my head to
the you I knew before you hitchhiked down another road, you
have become my Esmerelda,

proud bone backed off
with no more teeth to bite or

line of jaw to tense or sunken
eye to draw me in and hold me close on this porch swing I
imagined us.

Now, all that's left wanting, beyond the throw of this wise old
swing,
in a few more elements to break us down to dust,

and our first vacation
on a warm, stiff south wind.

Some Artists
- from her new book "Complication Compilation"

Some artists never visit Mount St. Helen's, or go to a dance or even outside.
Their galleries sit dumb and blind
without dilated eyes inside
without the clap of jostled wine along the glass, magnetic sides
at openings or closes.

We could do worse than wish for years to find a living piece of
art
whom no one seems to recognize,
To hear a busy hammer squarely hitting talent's head
and be first to construct a building of awe before more valid
architects
zero in instead.

Their paintings, words, graceful notes of clay
sit comatose upon their spines or float in jars of fate's
formaldehyde.
If they could walk down streets one time, they'd
more than likely bend the world,
the giant blue-green centrifuge, the spinning pail of
physics and whim that pulls mostly similar elements in
and coagulates a murky skin in order to protect, but
consequently gags to death most rarity.

In every zillionth plain postcard,
a band of unexpected songs warms up
for a concert of surprise at the foot of a dead volcano.

And some artistic genius you would never guess,
might have married, loved or left your mom,
but also another worldly wonder on your front lawn
if they had learned to look beyond the edge of night when stars
went dim,
beyond the night they were not asked to prom.

Two Minutes to talk to Emily Dickinson
- from her book "Colossus Taught Us (Once)"

I like your hair. After you died, your sister Vinnie argued and cried about it, it was too tight, too thin, too closely pinned to your head like your mouth through it's life. You are, Emily, the only nova you never knew. You blew a century aside with dried up ink, you first, fast mistress of mistrusted meter, postmodern cadence and beats measured out like any other recipe, ever. I hold you very carefully in my heart where you're alive and well and in the prettiest state--the finally knowing where all poems start. For 100 years and counting, we've been tapping on your grave. Men live in Amherst just because you died there and there are 66-year old women named Emily after you. Libraries hold you high in the air, schools dissect you, philosophers digest and reassemble thoughts you thought long since left behind. You teach me words like daguerreotype, tippet and tulle. I dreamt you swept through my life on a Saturday night, laughed and then said, "Lisa, you party like multiple tables of men!" I have both footnoted and noted you loudly instead. I carry your words around and around in things called busses that lap modern miles. Your most famous poem became "Because I could not stop for death" and did you really never? You laid a town down when you entered the ground in a white, flannel shroud. You constantly show me the strength of a pause. So, if I worship in orchards and count the bees in the field and save wild nights, wild nights for mooring in thee will I someday make my glorious way to women like you and Anne and Sylvia? Have you chatted with Plath? Do you talk incessantly now in death to work out shy anemone pains of your past? I know your safe and warm in your solitary cell. Sleep well, Emily. I'll continually croon for you, my epiphany, my poltergeist poet, my fuselage muse.

Lake (Clenched)
- from her book "Colossus Taught Us (Once)"

I built all night around a morning with you. Woke up, heard dew cracking down like Rice Krispies
on crisp leaves and had to walk to you, blue, lake.

Can you smell me on my way like I smell you coming closer? You proudly wave, loudly gave away
your stink of roiling guts of fish. Everyone should be so quick to smell naturally, exactly what
they're made of

Hello mutter, hello water. Lake earns the power reserved for so may four letter words, eating slices
of island worlds for breakfast
for better and worse
for curves and bends so important to beaches.
Your to-do list is all of nature's business. Your bubbles quibble, they quarrel with hellacious storms,
always pushing, always shoving, always wondering aloud, should I north, west, southeastern go?
You know, lake mixes up more than sand. It divines human flow. It makes us know what we only
thought we know, it grabs moods up, tosses them to and fro like uncovered hairs where we live this brisk fall
Lake, you've been small.
When it was hard enough for me to hold a thought,
I've held you in a sleepy hand against a scuffed bus window.
And you've been bigger lake, than a
late best friends wave in retrospect.

No surprise you ultimately take our breath away, being water and all. Your art---danger contained
----massages my heart. Are you nodding or shaking that full, blue flat head? Laughing or crying for
endlessly trying to wake up the shore, lying there on your back glued to any old sky with countless
black eyes. Do you see countless wet mes on every crest that floats by? Do you groan, "Here come
the swimmers! They dive in without permission, break my thin skin and sometimes even drown right
inside me!"

Scenery envies you lake. You're the cold center of more attention than trees can rustle up in their
best season drama. The leaves are begging the wind to throw them around just so they too can be
heard. You just fidget in your seams lake, caught, holding buildings at bay, sloshing around in little
arguments, constantly licking your chops, spilling and spitting on rocks that turn and lock you in.

Unleash your distended beach and we will meet again lake
inside Sundays, on purpose, for free.

Down Town
- from her book "Colossus Taught Us (Twice)"

When I visit these towns
We all end down,
Stories wrap around me like holidays.
There are more plotlines laid down here than plots themselves.
The plot's a little bit different for you today, isn't it?
You crooked little pieces of what survivors trust,
You crooked little pieces of what survivors say. This afternoon--
And do you still call it afternoon anymore, anyway? This
Afternoon your long-affixed gaze is fixed on a woman with blinks.
You remember blinks, don't you, that necessity of life and also,
One of it's tricks?
Your neighbors the Gnats
Do not care how long I choose to meditate here,
They still dangle headlong into my hair,
Not stopping or caring over your grey blankets like I dare.
No matter how long I stay, you outlast me.
I walk this trampled green, the all it seems of you,
And stumble on the big Lost and Found.
We are not so different, you and me.
You too got drunk and ran away.
You too played games with names like this stately Betta Blum.
You too drove girls to shady places to make out in whatever ways you drove.
You too leaned against warm stones which should logically be cold,
Grabbed your chest and begged your last breath to never ever leave its hold.

Life calls me back. I must wander
home, pick out new clothes and be witness to new fashion.
But a few blocks away from the gated space in which we met
I hold up a Byron's hotdog of life and dedicate it's lettuce tresses
to you Betta Blum, to you Julia Rose, to you Jonas Paradise, to you Joseph Abrams
and the rest with names long lapped.
I'll be back. In one-two-three blink. I'll be back, just wait and see.
For I have leaned both toward and against these stones
I have written you poems. And I have called you home, not just home to be.

My Family
- from her book "Colossus Taught Us (Twice)"

May they rest in peace.
No, they're not all dead, but they dodge police on every street
and awkward corner. And with Indignant
noses they scare off or trip up rules
by merely living by the skins of teeth.
Some missing, some dead, some just obsolete.
Fortunately for me, my keep keeps
their souls dangling free without much help from relative feet.

In fits and starts we tend to sober up, but
then we tend to pout and spar
My family, we love our cars, hold vigils in bars,
call a heart a heart and are barkers penultimate, juggling lives.
Blessed we are. Iconoclast heads perched atop everlast spines that prodigally come inside six-
packs of nine lives.

Only when we one eyed sleep, my family does,
do we dare to limber up gingerly and fanciful and problem-free.
Where family hexes lay down to stars,
we thug around on heaven's only grounded cloud,
more solid for us there than any of our precipices here might be.

The Vindicator (which is the name of my hometown newspaper)
- from her book "Colossus Taught Us (Twice)"

My paper route included Higgins Funeral Home,
where I saw my dad dead in his favorite suit.
Every Monday through Friday at 3:15 PM I laid
The Vindicator to rest in the black mailbox that creaked like the coffin inside.
Then I pulled my paper sack down the scented hallway
to the water fountain for the living people. I'd tiptoe
tennis shoe soft up to each exhibit and stare at the black fingernails
of men and peeling lipsitck of women who didn't have time to primp.

Occasionally, there was a funeral alive in the building and that meant
Mr.Higgins, who lived upstairs, embalmed and bottled bodies in the basement and
monitored dirges on the floor between. He'd rub my sweaty 10-year-old bangs
with a fish-cold hand that stank like flowers.
I balked and walked away remembering my dad's hair,
parted on the wrong side --- forever.