Pauletta Hansel
Memento Mori
for Joseph Enzweiler, 1950-2011.
“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” John Berger
“To make a poem, you must pull the clouds through the doorway with your soul.” A voice in Joe Enzweiler’s dream, November 1995.
All morning clouds press low
and thick around my house.
There is no doorway
wide enough
to welcome them through.
I read your poems again;
they know what we forget--
this life, always
a breathless rush
to become memory,
and we must stop
it now and then,
hold it in our hands.
So in those slow
months of your dying
you stood still for us,
as did once the nameless
man who lingered
in Daguerre’s dusky boulevard
and in your poem—world
fading into light--
we watched
as you stepped utterly
into our past.
Apologia
That year, like you,
I smelled of cigarettes and river
fog— always someplace deep
inside my chest there was the ache
that was not only rasp
of smoke and damp
but you.
I’m sorry,
not because I could not
save you in the end,
but for believing
that I could. I used
the boneblade
of your loneliness to peel away
the layers of my pride
until I too was bone
on which new flesh could grow.
I left you
nothing in return.
Tending Green
1.
I come upstairs to write
still smelling of cilantro
from my husband’s herb garden--
his garden, I say, though I’m the one
out there nipping buds
that should not be left to flower,
watering what’s new and tender,
trimming back last year’s
rosemary, oregano. All winter
we plucked leaves from their half frozen
stalks and crushed them into our warm pots,
the whole house smelling green,
as I do now—green spilling
onto my page, flecks of it sticking
between my words
like bits of salad between teeth.
2.
My husband said his friend
spent the weekend digging
up his dead wife’s roses--
couldn’t look at them again
this summer; last year he’d let the weeds
grow tall and mingle with what’s left
of the domesticated wildness
she had tended in the years before
he’d turned to tending her.
Now he’s turning her garden
back into suburban green.
3.
He is not much for green,
my husband. He’s more of a dirt man,
working thick clumps of compost,
peat moss, manure into the ground
where through the winter
my flowers sleep. In spring
their leaves come up a swath
of green with buds that open
to a crazy quilt of color--
my flowers, I say,
though he’s the one who made
the beds, digging the holes
for the roots to go down
deep beneath all that green.
4.
It makes it easier to mow,
so said my husband’s friend with,
I imagine now, a glance away
and out the office window--
so lush, this spring, it grows
so fast it hurts your eyes.
So green.
Pauletta Hansel is author of four poetry collections, including The Lives We Live in Houses and What I Did There. Her fifth, Tangle, is forthcoming from Wind Publications. Her work has or will appear in Atlanta Review, Postcards Poems and Prose, Still: The Journal, Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, and American Life in Poetry, among others. She is co-editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.
Memento Mori
for Joseph Enzweiler, 1950-2011.
“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” John Berger
“To make a poem, you must pull the clouds through the doorway with your soul.” A voice in Joe Enzweiler’s dream, November 1995.
All morning clouds press low
and thick around my house.
There is no doorway
wide enough
to welcome them through.
I read your poems again;
they know what we forget--
this life, always
a breathless rush
to become memory,
and we must stop
it now and then,
hold it in our hands.
So in those slow
months of your dying
you stood still for us,
as did once the nameless
man who lingered
in Daguerre’s dusky boulevard
and in your poem—world
fading into light--
we watched
as you stepped utterly
into our past.
Apologia
That year, like you,
I smelled of cigarettes and river
fog— always someplace deep
inside my chest there was the ache
that was not only rasp
of smoke and damp
but you.
I’m sorry,
not because I could not
save you in the end,
but for believing
that I could. I used
the boneblade
of your loneliness to peel away
the layers of my pride
until I too was bone
on which new flesh could grow.
I left you
nothing in return.
Tending Green
1.
I come upstairs to write
still smelling of cilantro
from my husband’s herb garden--
his garden, I say, though I’m the one
out there nipping buds
that should not be left to flower,
watering what’s new and tender,
trimming back last year’s
rosemary, oregano. All winter
we plucked leaves from their half frozen
stalks and crushed them into our warm pots,
the whole house smelling green,
as I do now—green spilling
onto my page, flecks of it sticking
between my words
like bits of salad between teeth.
2.
My husband said his friend
spent the weekend digging
up his dead wife’s roses--
couldn’t look at them again
this summer; last year he’d let the weeds
grow tall and mingle with what’s left
of the domesticated wildness
she had tended in the years before
he’d turned to tending her.
Now he’s turning her garden
back into suburban green.
3.
He is not much for green,
my husband. He’s more of a dirt man,
working thick clumps of compost,
peat moss, manure into the ground
where through the winter
my flowers sleep. In spring
their leaves come up a swath
of green with buds that open
to a crazy quilt of color--
my flowers, I say,
though he’s the one who made
the beds, digging the holes
for the roots to go down
deep beneath all that green.
4.
It makes it easier to mow,
so said my husband’s friend with,
I imagine now, a glance away
and out the office window--
so lush, this spring, it grows
so fast it hurts your eyes.
So green.
Pauletta Hansel is author of four poetry collections, including The Lives We Live in Houses and What I Did There. Her fifth, Tangle, is forthcoming from Wind Publications. Her work has or will appear in Atlanta Review, Postcards Poems and Prose, Still: The Journal, Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, and American Life in Poetry, among others. She is co-editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.