ONE ISLAND
BY GRETCHEN STEELE PRATT
$17.00
One Island is an earthy, delightfully vibrant collection by a fine new poet, full of sacred and profane registers. Gretchen Pratt's poems are full of tribes and communities, stories and landscapes from our recognizably shared world. An openness of feeling is jazzily counterpointed by the thousand apprehended things of the world. What we get in the end is a cosmos in which selfhood and world are at play with each other, recombining and changing in encounter after encounter. - Tony Hoagland
Neruda's sea-swept, earth-bound questions might begin each poem in the lovely sequence from which this remarkable book gets its name but Gretchen Steele Pratt goes far beyond "one island" for her answers. She watches and records with precise, heart-stopping invention matters of grief and wet grass, of bare-knuckled hard labor, working through litany and shards by way of ghostly tobacco nets and dismembered barns and pianos from childhood that kneel and ache. Above all, who sings this? she asks back. -- Marianne Boruch
Not even rustles from your red dress, rustles
Coming down the stairs before the red. Not reindeer coming
Toward the fence with their antlers sawed off, toward
Small hands shoved through the chained link, small
Fingernails licked by their dry tongues. Not even fingernails
Sinking into grass. Not even winter sunlight sinking
Without finding me asleep on the rug without
Blankets under the potted Norfolk pine. Not river green blanket
Humidity hanging in the trees. Not Mom and Dad, their humidity,
Amber cocktails melting their veins at that hour. Not amber
Bobby pins sunk in brown pomaded hair. Not even bobby pins
Dropping on the red aisle. Not even that dime dropping
Into my flute before I go on stage. Not the night falling into
Clicking dials of an old gas pump or a cream umbrella clicking
Open. Just bats softening out of the chimney into the open
Backyard blue darkness. Not even me in the wet backyard
Taking off my shirt in front of the new roses taking off.
Church by the Sea
Out the windows goes the darkness of pews,
The cries of the red-headed twins in white
Linen. Beyond, the fog clears, the asphalt
Trembles in fresh sun, the foundation of a
Mansion crumbles. Beyond,
The suck of the tide.
Out the windows goes the creed,
The homily, the fat lady strumming
A guitar. Beyond, naked strangers
Wake and open their hotel windows.
Out the windows goes the white
Scent of ripe lilies, the shake of
Sanctus bells, the creak of kneelers.
Beyond, the sun and moon are both
Floating, someone's life ricochets back
To them as an ambulance screams down
The hill. Beyond, sheets cracking
On a clothesline. The heave of the tide.
Out windows and doors goes
My father's deep baritone voice singing
That hymn about green pastures
Forever and ever. A windchime
Is dragged through the air beyond
The propped open stained-glass windows.