Elinor Ann Walker

after a photograph posted by Mark Wunderlich–and Satie

For the Piano in a Snowy Field Surrounded by Trees

What dissonance, what anomie is this? 

The wind blows its cold chorus, Diabolus 
in musica, sans resistance, straight through 

(nobody’s) anyone’s upright instrument, 
abandoned, un-paneled, stripped to bone-open 

nowhere, pedals patinated, a key slip of silent notes 
or unsung secrets, a skein of strings unmoved, 

a tree-ringed clearing, an installation of absence, 
evaporating snow, ivory-pocked dirt, the open sky 

an interval from the keys of F to B, blue sighs 
trembling through the skeletal branches

of hardwoods, this fragile bridge stringing 
earth to air without hammers. Listen.

Oh, hello, orphaned piano. 

I think I see the ghosts and dryads swaying 
in time to Gnossiennes on the empty breezes. 

May I play you out of this wild loneliness 
like the shadow of a bird that goes before the bird,

adagio,
with conviction and rigorous sadness ?

Note: “With conviction and rigorous sadness” is a translation of “avec conviction et avec une tristesse rigoureuse,” tempo markings from Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 6 (1897). 

A Cento of Serene Length

title after Gertrude Stein

My body craves dresses, a single seam falling, 
flowers swirling in a pattern, 
a coral neck scarf. A hand (not mine) 
restless under each buffeting layer, 

so I alter the pattern to fit a phantom of me,
the blue and the dim and the dark cloths. 
I began to feather-stitch a ring around the moon.

I have spread my dreams under your feet, 
folded my sorrows. I have. I have

button-down, dress after dress, limb, 
necessary waist. What is this current 
the wind must sew with needles of rain? 

Each summer threads a green familiar maze 
of night and light and the half light. 
It will look like the patch quilt my grandmother made. 

Because I shed my childhood with my clothes— 
with cloud for shift/ how will I hide? 

Wearing nothing, a negligee of gnats,
with dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew . . . 
whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm . . .
the blue nightgown floating around my ankles . . .

. . . like I’m choosing a body/ to carry me into this world.

Sources: Kim Addonizio, Mary Jo Bang, Andrea Blancas Beltran, Victoria Chang, Toi Derricotte, Rachel Hadas, Hazel Hall (more than one line), Saeed Jones, Deborah Paredez, Linda Pastan, Angela Shaw, Anya Silver, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, May Swenson, Chase Twichell, William Butler Yeats (more than one line). 

Hard Mast 

I forage step by step, 
the acorns under foot
crackling, their amber-
smooth skins breaking
open; like boats, 
their scaled cupules 
have also gone aground. 

The white oak drops 
its verse as one nut 
then another plummets, 
bounces, pops from bird feeder 
to fountain to dirt, from roof 
to gutter to patio stone, 
rat-a-tat. The tree has a lot 
to say about the lack of rain
in its periodic blossoming.
It often takes 50 years,
sometimes 80, for an oak tree 
to produce at peak.

Up the road, hiking trails 
are closed because the bears 
abound. They feast 
on the boon: true nuts 
of pericarp, kernel, 
and embryo, the outer shell 
an ovary wall to tender 
a new tree into being.

I think of the fell 
of trunk, bark stripped, 
then soaked, then bent 
to make baskets or seats
for stools, the handmade 
evidence of my father’s
and my grandfather’s hands, 
though they are now under dirt 
not unlike seeds. What told 
the trees to let go of this hard 
mast, this forest fruit, 
all at once?

A bumper crop, almanacs say, 
temperature, precipitation, 
the previous spring’s conditions—
all might determine how many, 
how much will feed quail, crows, 
woodpeckers, jays, wild hogs, 
squirrels, foxes, deer, black 
bear, wild turkey, voles, mice, 
raccoons, opossum, more 
creatures than I can name. 

The white oak splits seasons, 
before death—after—drought
and rain, what is held to be 
released and when. I gather 
into baskets my father made 
these origins of plenty. 
The younger tree I planted 
in his memory has not borne 
a single thing. There is still time.

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