Three Poems: Jennifer Perrine
When He Asks where you are, and you refuse to give exact coordinates
Think instead of saying, mountains, saying, snow
Think of how you might describe the sun’s luster on those mountains, the cool glister of that snow.
Now think of that opal he gave you two months into your smittenness, after the gods knocked you over with such a blow you wore that blue
jewel in the hollow of your collarbone, shiner on a silver chain around your neck. Think of how it winked and flashed like the crimson
throats of the hummingbirds he fed with sugar and water mixed and poured into red-ribboned glass. Think of his hands, stirring the fine crystals
until they dissolved, as if they were never there at all, magic trick to make the sweetness disappear. Remember that taste, that dazzle
like the glory around the moon on the day of the eclipse, when one of his hummingbirds battered its relentless wings against your chest,
disoriented by the sudden dark. Think of how hard you tried to calm it, how he tried to calm you, until you were becalmed, a ship at sea, waiting for wind. Recall how your skin lit at his touch, how when he would say, we are stardust, you felt that body, incandescent and remote, explode so it could make a home in your bones, stake its claim to your fragile frame. Remember how he would say your name almost never, until the end when it was the last word left. If you must, recollect the forest you walk through now, in these mountains, in this snow,
how you are still looking over your shoulder for the bird you hear but cannot see in this blaze of light, how you wait for it to go out.
haibun in which there is no getting away from it all
At dawn, a small darkness darts across the snow-buried bank on the other side of the creek: a squirrel, perhaps, or the mountain cottontail that’s left faint tracks in the powder outside this cabin. The creature disappears into the evergreens—which mostly are, though the forest has its share of snags and stumps, bare trunks sprawling languid in their bed of white. Freed of needles, they reveal their browns and blacks, their silvers where fire burned them to a shine.
Inside, the stove consumes the stack of split logs that seemed endless only days ago, ticks its steel body in the stillness, wisps its smoke into the gray sky. A mosquito—lone survivor of a new brood hatched in the last thaw—batters against the window’s broad face. On the table, someone has left a handful of strawberries to deliquesce and a seashell that bears a hole from a child’s experiment: one minute in vinegar enough to eat clean through this mollusk’s castoff home.
This single room is stocked for winter: mason jars full of staples, shelves lined with solitary games, with recordings of songs to play in moments when the silence is too much. The air is hot enough to crack skin. Still, the cold creeps in, even with these layers, these woolen shirts and socks and scarves, even with these comforters blooming with their fields of
narcissus and fawn
lilies, spring is a promise we are not keeping.
