Odessa

Poems

Patricia Kirkpatrick

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781571318930
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

This collection is "an astonishing achievement" that renders grief and illness in "supremely lyrical, brilliantly imagined... poetry of the highest order" (Connie Wanek). A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in Kirkpatrick's Odessa fighting for her life. The tumor presses against her amygdalae, the "emotional core of the self, " and central to the process of memory. In poems endowed with this emotional charge but void of sentimentality, Kirkpatrick sets out to recreate what was lost by fashioning a dreamlike reality. Odessa, "roof of the underworld, " a refuge at once real and imagined, resembles simultaneously the Midwestern prairie and a mythical god-inhabited city. In image-packed lines bearing shades of Classical heroism, Kirkpatrick delivers a personal narrative of stunning dimension. Winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry Winner of the Minnesota Book Award

PARIETAL

Have I made an error?

What are you saying to me & am I in-my-senses?

I didn’t know where I was going.

—OJIBWE

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PERSEPHONE’S ENTRY

This is a place where snow burns your feet.
The beloved disappear.

Dark always.

Some branches, loose veils, the sound
of water dripping
although the ground is saturated with ashes.

They bring food and a pail of water.
Bring fruit the color of bloodstain.

What they said to be afraid of:
Green apples. Matches.
Swimming too soon after lunch.
Talking to strangers. Not this

same day endlessly passing. Wake.
Work. Sleep alone
or crammed against others.

He wants little from me really.

Walking the corridor

I go over and over in my mind. What I did.
What I could have done
differently. What I
didn’t do.
Men come at dawn and start digging.
I expect it will take a long time
to learn they find nothing.

Stolen, shut in, hidden.
Small room. Shrouds. Eye to eye
with a beak
and talons. Kept
in a low place.

Remember you are not yourself.
That’s what they say when
caught off guard.
Or to protect their own interests.

Core means the innermost part.
I remember lessons
with flowers on the table, learning
the name for papery carpels

in the ripened ovary.
In a pome.
An apple. I remember seeing

fire on the mountain.
We held out apples to horses.

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THE ATTORNEY: from THE ITALO POEMS

Your husband is leaving.
You have to choose.
You have to get an attorney.
Go downtown near the steeple and derelict pigeons
where the bells alone cost millions.
Walk into corporate heights, crying,
state your name at the desk,
weep at a table longer than your dining room,
decide what to keep and give up.
Smart and tough
without love, the attorney
knows the law, knows the patterns,
as birds this time of year, sensing winter and frantic
to get what they’re after,
sometimes tear wings when they come to the window.
Broken, a window screen cuts but it keeps birds outside;
stays invisible enough to show light.
This is called cutting your losses.
This is called seeing the big picture. Even a kind man
speaks in numbers, measures
what was promised,
what was denied, broken, lost.
The attorney asks and your answer
costs ten thousand dollars.
You thought there was a story that made your life a river,
a corner at Clement Street and the Park Presidio Bakery
where you gave a man your dream and your man, your man
is gone now. The train has left
the station. No use. Listening.
Tired footsteps. Stairs.

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The birds outside bathe in dust. Listen for the falcon.
Ahead of you your husband is waiting with a lover.
The attorney knows hell hath no fury
like you. Like yours.
No laws providing maintenance
when the roof leaks, the car floods,
you have no one to touch you and almost no
savings. The attorney draws up papers
that describe your role as parent, decide
whether to return the minor child
before or after fireworks.

You remember how you nursed the children,
how your nipples, swollen with infection, bled.
How you loved. Your husband.
This is called giving over to emotion.
This is called a business negotiation.
You’ve never read a spreadsheet and so must trust
the attorney to know
which judge, which statute, which waiver,
which gabardine suit to lean forward in, murmuring
“mental health issues.”
The attorney represents you
but measures two sides of the story.
What is truer than the truth?
Floating rate. Income stream.
Once you touched a baby’s fontanel.
The name for what the attorney touches
is money. You need an attorney
to touch money for you.

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You want to keep your house and your children’s
affection when you have been stupid,
torn, and forsaken.
You want to smear your hands across
the attorney’s suit when you proofread the settlement.
You look out the skyscraper window
without screens, without
pigeons bobbing on ledges.
Cling to your story
and try to tell
the truth. You owe the attorney money
and you have to choose.

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FAMILY COURT

To get here we carried flowers,
touched skin,
took a vow, made a child,
broke a promise.
Maybe we made mistakes.
Now change fractures the core
of lives we knew,
brings us to benches, hard seats
along the wall.

When two plates of earth
rub against each other,
having nowhere else to go,
they crack or shatter.
“Brittle failure” geologists call it.

How could it happen to us?
Bodies are mostly water.
We think people want to be good.

Outside, day lilies bloom in planters.
Inside we’re screened for weapons.

We stare at hands or look across the room
where others wait too, stunned
by the passage we’ve booked,
the ticket that delivers us
to steerage,
the lowest deck on a journey.

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Some of us are taken to small rooms.
We might have attorneys or
orders for protection,
push strollers, hide bruises with scarves.
Blinking te...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• ALSO BY PATRICIA KIRKPATRICK
• Dedication
• AURA
• PARIETAL
• CAIRN
• NOTES
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright Page