Wild Madder

Brenda Leifso

• Publisher: Brick Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781771315074
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poems that stride bravely into the day-to-day, recovering the misdirected intensity at its core.Brenda Leifso's Wild Madder is about way-finding—through those moments in which you no longer recognize where you are. It's about not knowing—who you are anymore, how to be in the world, how to love. It's about what's unspoken and about what speaks—conversation with the wild and animate world. It's about marriage, family, motherhood—the drudgery in them and the quiet beauty. This is lyric poetry wracked with pain, rage, and longing. In the beginning, the collection may read as though it's been steeped in bitterness. Family can ask everything of a partner and parent and then turn around and take even more; Wild Madder feels like a note in a bottle washed up on the shores of a rough sea. But Leifso is not one to stand still or cling to darkness; in fact, we end up so far into the darkness that when she breaks through into light, it's a conflagration of all the things that make us human. These frank, bracingly recognizable poems will be irresistible—and cathartic—for anyone who has ever felt their life chewing them into little pieces.

Sun

If you live until eighty, I will herald every one

of your twenty-nine thousand mornings

just as every jaundiced baby

ever placed near a window

has heralded me.

I will lengthen

and strengthen your bones.

Bleach them.

I will take all credit

for your anticipation of seasons,

your creatureliness,

your pause on a warm rock

to take your boots off,

to dig through the trail mix

for the M&Ms.

I will be the bite

of the deer fly

at the ankle

and the shoulder blade.

While it’s true I am responsible for navigation,

accurate

and errant,

for the unmoved execution

of human pride, I am also the author

of the tree under which Buddha sat,

of yoga’s signature move,

the masculine ordering of the universe

(but also juice restrained and slurpable

under the apple’s skin),

the blisters on the castaway’s lips

and the peeling burn of childhood,

tomatoes in August,

the cicada scratching his back against the heat,

flies on poop, a dog stretched out in September grass,

a squirrel peeling chestnuts on the stoop,

the last cricket packing up his violin,

someone, somewhere, stretching herring on a rack.

November’s dogged rising, even if the hours are shorter,

or longer, or brutal, even if

October’s pockets were loaded with stones.

December. The concurrence of snow blindness

and cinnamon trees.

June Morning

Why spend another moment plodding

back and forth

back and forth,

a blind and arthritic Clydesdale

through the dreary, potato-less furrows

of my serious mind when

with fine threads of sun

spiderlings are sailing forth

from the laundry line?

The heedless squash vines climb toward

the unknown. A whole colony

of ants is already drunk

in the peonies.

Why not feed the children

vanilla cake for breakfast,

with lemon sauce

and cream?

For the Boy Walking in Little Cataraqui

Let your feet remember the mulch

and leaves and grasses, the astonishing

leap of the frog.

Let your hands remember the perfect roughness

of the perfect stick

and a curly birch bark peel.

Let your head remember the shower of sunflower seeds

and the chickadee, alight.

Let your mind be

the folding of a slow river

around a heron’s legs.

Let your heart be a field

o...

Table of contents

• I
• II
• Notes and Acknowledgements
• About Brenda Leifso