MY WRITING
ASTRONAUT
The error is not to fall but to fall from no great height.
—Dean Young
Porcelained with grief, everything diminishes
below her, her house with its one tree
flung down in shadow. Ever smaller,
the dog throws his head back to bark.
Subdivisions platted at the edge of town
stitch across the landscape, cul de sacs
arcing whimsically, then bright blue
set clean against dense foothills.
A lone mountain road struggles
through folds of copper green.
Soon, an earth that cannot be consoled
is gone—leaving the certainty of rivers
meandering, of gyres and vortices,
spiral eddies. No need reckoning
horse latitudes or doldrums. Now
every oval is a promise of return.
But because she could never name
the sadness or stop the hollowing,
on the portal glass, round as a compass
rose, she covers the earth with her hand,
as her delicate craft plumbs
as deeply as a diving bell into a universe
of elegant simplicity, one body giving
light, another receiving it.
Yet, below her, a mistral sweetens
the land over which it howls, balm
of lavender rising from the hillsides
afterward in the heat,
and in the city a museum guard
yawns among the masterpieces.
There are two gates of sleep, Virgil says.
Choose the true one.
Published in Nimrod International Literary Journal,
Awards Edition
HOW CIRCUMSTANCE
When you go away the wind clicks around to the north.
—W.S. Merwin
As if no other god could alter his decision
the neighbor’s cat loped across the darkening yard,
a young female cardinal clamped tight
in his jaws, and the argument that had
begun to boil between us stopped.
You had been looking at the freshly mown field,
your afternoon’s struggle, and I at you, trying
to find a way to say what I’ve never been able to—
that our long marriage had come undone.
Backlit by the hemlock you were
taking in the day’s last saturated light,
the kind that makes trees seem to glow
from within, light I’d tried many times
to paint, but always failed to in the end.
Soon the bats would be careening above us,
fragile, endangered, their welcome presence
the one thing we would agree upon.
But when your face recorded what you saw—
before I turned to see—you took on the demeanor
of a small boy, hurt so deeply you were beyond
child reason, whose mother left him for
a vaudeville clown who knew how to please,
a boy who loved to gather walnuts
from under the tree, fingers stained for days.
And though you caught the cat and didn’t
wring its neck, and saved the bird, which
showed up miraculously at the feeder
the next day lopsided but otherwise unhurt—
before it was all put into motion so irrevocably, so
without mercy, I was about to say I’d given up on us.
How circumstance can save us from catastrophe,
loneliness seeping back to where it lives
on a moor deep in the belly, while the walnuts
come fresh, as if from the tree again, and a boy
awakened from the honey of sleep
walks steadily toward us.
Published by Valparaiso
TURTLE
Something is always far away.
—Rebecca Solnit
Before the world was comprehendible,
before order was established and we
were saved from story and myth, the world
was a disk supported by four elephants
standing on the back of a turtle.
Giant turtles flew across the sky.
I had a turtle once, a tiny box turtle
that fit in the palm of my four year old hand.
That was a time when I knew things
close around me—our scrappy yard,
clothesline strung from the rickety porch,
burn pile at the far edge, and a meadow
that flooded each spring and sang with peepers.
And beyond the meadow, a stand
of pines lined up like sentinels at the horizon.
At dusk they would come alive and dance,
and I worried they would dance right across
that meadow, growing taller and taller
as they approached, until, as big as the house,
they’d have to bend to peer into my window
to find me, their eyes fiery and mean.
But I had a turtle once, with a single rose
painted on its back. I kept it in a tin box
from my mother’s kitchen. It sat in my palm
all shell until it wasn’t scared anymore,
then peeked out its head and thumb feet,
worried forward along the underside of my wrist
and forearm, its gentle weight reassuring,
the whole house of itself arriving
like the beginning of the world.
Published in Nimrod International Literary Journal
Family is destiny in Pam Bernard’s brilliantly accomplished verse novel. Westward settlement in the early years of the twentieth century, rendered in lush and startling detail, is yoked to the brokenness at the core of Esther’s family. In verse as finely attuned to the measure of the line as it is to layers of meaning, Bernard makes manifest a time, a place, and a woman, and sheds new light on the darkness that gets handed down from one generation to the next. Esther is a wrenching and exhilarating experience: no reader will remain unchanged.
—Jennifer Barber, author of The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made, Word Works
In the early 1900’s, traveling from Kansas to California, across prairie and plains, desert and mountains, Esther’s journey is an odyssey of the spirit, a journey toward self-knowledge and survival. In this brilliant novel in verse, Pam Bernard perfectly blends poetic language, imagination, and research to create a work of stunning achievement, where each character is drawn spare and sharp, each event becomes metaphor. Yet the landscape is perhaps the strongest character of all—save, Esther herself, whose strength in the face of abuse, grief, and loneliness will leave an indelible mark on your own spirit.
—Patricia Fargnoli, former Poet Laureate of NH, author of Winter, Hobblebush Books
Excerpts from Esther
But the first years revealed that Aaron had no
knack for farming. It was not that he
was lazy or weak or not smart enough.
He was a man who guessed wrong—
when to plant, when to harvest.
He let the wheat stand in shock until
it rained hard the day he was to thresh.
Nor was he good with the animals. Horses
agitated when he came near and pawed the ground.
Cattle scuttled, and the one bull
looked for something to butt.
At first Bessie felt sorry for him.
But he grew cruel and hard. Nothing and no one
pleased him. Soon enough she understood
that her husband was provoked not by some
demon, but a brutish, covetous hunger,
an appetite so unforgiving no food or smoke
or drink would satisfy. He ate only to quell his gut,
but the emptiness never left him.
She had grasped early on the depth of Aaron’s
misery. Once, before they were married, he
kissed her so hard he drew blood on her lip,
would not loosen himself though she yipped
in pain. When finally she was able to break free—
his mouth smeared—he bristled like an animal
challenged for its kill. She knew
never to cross him again.
But the first years revealed that Aaron had no
knack for farming. It was not that he
was lazy or weak or not smart enough.
He was a man who guessed wrong—
when to plant, when to harvest.
He let the wheat stand in shock until
it rained hard the day he was to thresh.
Nor was he good with the animals. Horses
agitated when he came near and pawed the ground.
Cattle scuttled, and the one bull
looked for something to butt.
At first Bessie felt sorry for him.
But he grew cruel and hard. Nothing and no one
pleased him. Soon enough she understood
that her husband was provoked not by some
demon, but a brutish, covetous hunger,
an appetite so unforgiving no food or smoke
or drink would satisfy. He ate only to quell his gut,
but the emptiness never left him.
She had grasped early on the depth of Aaron’s
misery. Once, before they were married, he
kissed her so hard he drew blood on her lip,
would not loosen himself though she yipped
in pain. When finally she was able to break free—
his mouth smeared—he bristled like an animal
challenged for its kill. She knew
never to cross him again.
The land brooded with sad farms, barley
just taking hold that would not survive
the drought or the merciless wind,
and beyond the barley grew sorghum,
as far as the eye could see, and what land
did not support a crop suffered buffalo grass,
and prairie dogs the farmers called fury
weeds, busy with their miserable lives.
Esther could not have known while
she dozed—just one of many on this train
traveling in regimental discomfort, folks
who would die working the land
and be buried there—that beneath them,
the great continent of Pangaea was once
split by a vast inland sea, where
winged lizards and giant sharks
and turtles twice the size of an ox
held sway, and long-necked plesiosaurs
with great oar-like paddles prowled
alongside graceful, serpentine
predators forty-five feet, twenty tons—
where she now stirred and nearly
wakened from her dream of mountains,
trillions of miniscule organisms sunk
to sea bottom, their delicate carcasses
forming the chalk hills and limestone
quarries and shale beds that shaped
this prairie—what this girl understood
as flat, unchanging, was in fact the slow
rumination of what had always been,
shifting without notice, the forcemeat
of time on all things.
***
Aaron had unfolded the map
and struggled to set it flat enough to read,
but the best he could do left two hills
where his knees bent under it.
Esther sat very still as she always did
if it fell to her to be nearest him
when he was vexed.
Here! We must be here! Aaron blurted
to no one in particular. Startled
out of her stillness, Esther followed
her father’s gaze to one of the hills
where his finger jabbed at a black dot
beside a thin blue line.
She had seen maps in the encyclopedia,
maps of Africa, of mountains in South America,
the whole British Empire. Never
had she seen a map of Kansas.
Where did we start, Father? Esther asked.
But Aaron was at it again, trying
to smooth the paper and paid no attention.
So she leaned in and saw that he had circled
Montgomery County, where the farm sat
heavy on the land, where Bessie’s brooding
countenance brightened as she worked
in the kitchen garden, its precise rows
of potatoes, sugar beets to feed the hens.
Esther conjured the snap peas and kale
near the tidy bed of verbena, her mother
bending to harvest thyme and marjoram,
their lingering fragrance.
Then the girl looked up toward her attic room
and saw herself there at the window,
gazing out beyond the barn.
She was thinner than she’d imagined
herself to be, in that life, just days ago, but
she’d thought her mouth to be a grim slash
across her face.
And it was.
The smell of fried chicken brought her back
to the train, to the family across the aisle
noisily opening their box lunches,
and to Aaron, still fingering the map.
Disquiet settled in her stomach.
Everywhere she had ever been in her life
was within the distance of the width
of her father’s hand.
Remarkably, in Blood Garden: an Elegy for Raymond, Pam Bernard is able to deliver us to the Western Front, and more specifically, to the horrors of trench warfare, and tell the story of a seventeen year old New England farm boy who fought there in the Great War. She accomplishes this by staying true to the reliable narrator’s steady voice and by building these lean poems around surprising and deeply human insights into the war that changed human consciousness.
— Bruce Weigl, poet, memoirist, translator
Blood Garden: An Elegy for Raymond is a powerful and poignant prose poem. Its vivid images—both verbal and visual—pay both homage to Pam Bernard’s father, “a soldier of the Great War,” while evoking an America at the outset of its journey from innocence to engagement in the violent world of the Twentieth Century.
— Robert H. Zieger Author of America’s Great War: The American Experience
in World War I
Breathtakingly honest, BLOOD GARDEN: An Elegy for Raymond allows readers a window into the Great War by plunging us into the lives of the real men who lived it. Pam Bernard's poetry is both accessible and haunting, and her images will teach students as much about war as any historical account.
—Jean Trounstine, activist, Professor Emerita, author of Boy With a Knife
Excerpts from Blood Garden
June 1918
Bois deBelleau, northwest of Château-Thierry
A gentleman’s war it was at first.
The determination to accept casualties
would bring victory. Bravery was all.
In their bright uniforms, the Newfoundland
Regiment’s 87th and 88th attacked with colors
unfurled and proceeded in parade formation
into machine gun fire, as the brass and drums
of their bands played from the front trenches.
Of the eight hundred one troops who marched,
sixty-eight stood to answer roll call in the morning.
***
Division Headquarters are opened
in a chateau at Boucq. Swans glide in the moat.
The gardener hums as he prunes the wisteria.
Creaking windmills still grind the peasants’
corn and church spires stand guard
over the sleepy village.
Not far away the village of Rambucourt
is being ground to dust.
***
The ground is churned to porridge.
The water cart half disappears; its horse
has gone off the brush work track
and bogged. Raymond does his best
to put a sack under the animal’s hoof
to give it traction, while Cas strokes
her long neck and withers, chanting softly
There’s a clever girl, there’s a clever girl.
But the boney mare falls dead
right where she stands, topples
stiff as the miniature plaster horse
the boys had tried to set onto Raymond’s
windowsill just two springs past—
all those million years ago.
***
Many horses arrive by ship. Slings
around their bellies they are hoisted by crane
from the deep, airless hold where, in terror,
they have been stowed, then swung high
above the deck to the cobbled quay below.
Those that survive passage serve as
mounts for cavalry divisions, draught animals
for regimental and artillery transport.
They pull limbers, caissons of explosives,
lorries leaden with supplies.
Unprotected targets, they are often
the first to be hit. Their moaning
is worse than a human’s to hear, bringing
men to tears of rage and helplessness.
Their bloated, rotting bodies clog
roads and supply routes, sometimes
with gas masks, fitted like absurd
feed bags, still strapped on.
Over three million horses were mobilized
in 1914. By war’s end
eight million will have perished. v
THE GIFT
The moment at evening
when the pictures set sail from the walls
—W.S. Merwin
Knowing Mrs. Gildersleeve suffered in extreme heat, my mother had phoned, and when there was no answer, stopped by. I‘m here, Anna, Mother said softly, then pulled a chair close. Mrs. Gildersleeve lay on her flowered divan, the pink and yellow roses on her flowered dress wilting onto her generous body. Her startlingly pale face floated in a sea of leaves and trailing blossoms covering the wallpaper and carpet. Even the drapes were flowered.
She had been an ambassador’s wife, and before that, an opera singer. On the mantle was a photograph of her standing next to Winston Churchill. She was taller than he, with broader shoulders and a confident smile. A large woman herself, Mother for once seemed oddly small, settled in beside her.
This was a time when experience and intuition accounted for something. One could be a practical nurse, with no formal education, and my mother’s reputation as a sensible and caring companion was well known, even among the wealthy tenants of the Griswold House, where Mrs. Gildersleeve lived. My father was caretaker of the once elegant estate. We lived next door in the caretaker’s cottage.
People would call at all hours asking for Mother’s advice, and if they could not afford a doctor, for her to come right away. If she were cooking dinner, she’d call my sisters and me into the kitchen and quietly explain what to do to get the meal on the table. Then off she’d go. But that day she had tried everything to make our neighbor comfortable, removing her nylon hose and loosening her corset, bathing her forehead and inner wrists with cool water. Nothing had worked.
Mother had lived through much, and her face held all that anguish and heartbreak, but a measure of joy, too, so that when a rare smile occasioned her lips, her eyes remained dark and sad. But she knew how to feed ten of us around the table by stretching the small portion of meat she could afford with potatoes, or by serving biscuits and gravy or chipped beef on toast. And she knew how to treat the sick. If you weren’t feeling well, you wanted Esther there, sitting by you, stroking your arm, or fixing milk toast if you needed nourishment.
Now Mrs. Gildersleeve lay prostrate in the stifling heat. Her breath had slowed to a fluttery gurgle, her lower jaw working with each inhale and exhale. Mother took a deep breath as if trying to help her, shifting slightly in the straight-backed chair. She turned then and gazed intently at me. I often accompanied her on these visits, cherishing our few times alone. I would be eleven on my next birthday, and because I was wandering in those middle years between being a child and no longer a child, when the world was full of mysterious signs with few words attached, I sensed something was terribly wrong.
Mother held forth then as if she had been given the gift of speech for the first time.
The spring was a wet one and that morning the draw was bank full, she said suddenly, her voice clear and bright. By afternoon the Pumpkin had flooded half way to the barn.
Mrs. Gildersleeve’s hand moved imperceptibly. Mother took it in hers and closed her eyes.
Sheep don’t like to get their feet wet, she went on, almost chanting now, so my brother William and I laid cornstalks in their stall in case the creek kept on coming. But we’d no sooner finished when the barn door flapped open and a tremendous rush of water tumbled in.
I sat dumbfounded. My mother had never once told me a story of any kind, never opened her childhood to me. When I’d asked what it was like when she was young, she’d say she lived it once, and didn’t ever want to return. But there I was with her, a girl my age, I imagined, water closing in on us, in a place more vivid than my own life—the acrid, almost pleasant smell of the barn, the sheep, bleating pitifully, heavy with wool. Shearing had been planned for that week and lambing would be soon. Taken by the water the sheep would surely drown.
And so it went that day attending Mrs. Gildersleeve, my mother pitched headlong into memory long buried, into a swelling stream gone mad, each of us on the fragile raft of her life—even sweet young Anna is there, fresh from her voice lesson. Somehow, we lift sheep and carry them to higher ground, where they bound away to safety. But the water keeps coming. When a pregnant ewe is stranded on a hillock no bigger than a tabletop, William fords the angry water to rescue her. I am bursting with happiness.
Then with a great heave Mrs. Gildersleeve let go a long rattling breath that seemed never to end.
At once I was back in the desperate heat of August. Stillness settled over us, into every florid corner, quieting the delicate figurines lining the windowsills, the satiny tongues of exotic plants with impossibly long names, the small naked Buddha, which, Mrs. Gildersleeve had once told me solemnly, needed no clothes. I’d delivered the newspaper one morning and she’d invited me in. The room was heavy with a mysterious fragrance that kindled in me a hunger. It was not for food I yearned, as I think of it now, but for that which I did not know—for the source of my mother’s sadness, for the confidence in Mrs. Gildersleeve’s smile, for a story that offered a place for me beyond my own small life.
Published in Mom Egg Review