pray me stay eager

Ellen Doré Watson

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781938584732
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"These are wonderful, witty, wise poems in love with language and singing the music of the world with all its pleasures and piquancies, its oddities and tragedies. Ellen Doré Watson's vision is agile with quick shifts in direction and vivid juxtapositions. The poems in pray me stay eager contain multitudes!" —Ellen Bass

A dreamy voice turns dark and gritty as Ellen Doré Watson interrogates personal purpose in the face of looming mortality. Poems sway comfortably, fluidly through associative discourse, radiating and championing love and adoration, indulging in simple pleasures with high magnitude and deep resonance. These poems are musical and sing in a different register for Watson in her fifth collection.

Ellen Doré Watson is the author of four full-length collections of poems, most recently Dogged Hearts from Tupelo Press. Watson's journal appearances include APR, Tin House, Orion, Field, Ploughshares and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and to Yaddo, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Watson serves as poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review and core faculty at Drew University's Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Poetry and Translation. She is the director of the Poetry Center and the Poetry Concentration at Smith College.

three

≠ ≠ ≠

The Field Wants Its Sheep Back

Of course that’s me talking, but why wouldn’t

it want a tickle of hooves, a warming of shit,

less empty? Sheep with their panoramic vision

are stressed by isolation, and sometimes

given mirrors, which comfort. Alone

can be expansive—balm or terror. Cold

is plural, swoop-seeps into the crowd

of everything else that is. (The Victorians

spent fully half their time trying to get

warm. Nowadays, only the poor, the jailed.)

Granted the lux of hearth or heat, frigid

is simply a slap, a tightening, survivable.

Cold is no shroud, but a reawakening,

the way the death of a friend of a friend

enlivens after it saddens. Come no closer,

says my every soggy cell. Cost costs.

Still-greenish tufts offer themselves up

all the way to the treeline. Despite

summer’s sheep, they slowly whiten.

Let me spend wisely what I have,

which is only my breath—thin, visible

body heat. I am but a small animal.

Thin Ice

Reedy striations don’t occlude the beneath—

earthy mash of leaves, flat pepper flakes, layered,

tips protruding, tender-desolate above a mirror

surface, gently pressing on horse-mane, nest material,

tickle-brush, fringe. Buff block-shapes further down,

ghost-bits of green-green, a lone leaf burned white.

My thrown stone skitters on ice. The next, larger,

plunks through, and for a moment I am a violator

but then I see that it opened a bubble cell, a city,

a lesion, a map—the way in cold and luminous.

Choices We Live With

Surf blooms out of breaking water, ragged rows

of dangerous blossoms. I’m inside a wave looking

for up—and out of nowhere your face beside me.

Pounding, spiraling, I am smiling, needles of water

up my nose a sure sign I am alive, and you a distraction

still. I give you up for kelp, a tricky handhold. Flat,

and slick, it gives way. Tumbled by another curl,

I scrape bottom, then cork toward light. Later,

on the beach, skinned places sting like new

loss. Without your hands, my chest rises and falls.

Not a Thing

I haven’t been known to address the Lord expletives

notwithstanding

Day by night it’s a human wow I’m after the shiver-spank

of a Zulu choir suddenly in my car

ceremony that can’t be summarized

When night and day touch they are neither one

They ask of us nothing

Lacking an addressee I do not lack wishes

May M.’s rogue cells in Rhode Island

diminish not crescendo

How about less bereft all around

but bereft beautiful word is off-limits

my having been there so seldom

usually nothing but me-me-me in my way

while for decades R. has been moving his and others’ kites

and trains around with his dark mind

despite the odds

Ditto many wondrous others

heavily laden who still find the right

verb the right time

to burrow spark wade

Bless the quiet that can’t be stilled Grant us

if not completion at least open eyes

Grant Y.’s liver the golden thread its weaving

Give us glimpses whiffs of gone lives and order

the good kind blooming in hot spots Let

my windows clap softly open

my hoarse psalm twine

Pray me stay eager

I’m stuck on how foodie and foodless

don’t touch

And how long will oil matter more than water

And how fast will plaque grow into which

and whose crevices

Relentless week-long rain

pisses me off one minute

thrums me clean the next

while elsewhere walls and walls of it

or none

To do unto not to

Must I decide to be alone not to be

For I haven’t yet learned to address the sky

and the verb to fathom may never happen

but maybe a lightbulb is not what we need

For we are all and each on a train

of whatever duration

Be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Thrust / Thirst
• ≠ one ≠
• ≠ two ≠
• ≠ three ≠
• Notes
• Recent Titles from Alice James Books
• About the Publisher