Joan Houlihan

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Joan Houlihan's work currently appears in: The Gettysburg Review, Fine Madness, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and online at:

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You can contact Joan at: joanh@webdelsol.com

Mini-Chap from WDS

Joan Houlihan

Poetry Selections for the End & Beginning of the Millennium:

The Somnambulist
Stark, North of Gainsboro
Hydrangeas
Matter
Matriarch
As Winter Will
In the Turn of a Year

THE SOMNAMBULIST

Not safe, a fanatic without faith,
I arose from bed as if incompletely
burned. Only unsteady, not a golem—
not much of a talker, either.
Just mumbled through a mouth.

It must have been bred in the blood,
this walking, this hypnogogy,
as much family as my pouch of paltry things,
my scruples. But coming early from a last
compassion, as soon as I had a mind to make,

I'd go stand in the church on high places,
the altar ledge, the head of a saint, a voice
through me: Give me your winged
and injured; all the expiring breeds.
So charmed was I by the damaged.
So impossible to reach.

STARK, NORTH OF GAINSBORO

His body follows its shrunken pattern
and specification: he is placed in the final chair,
he is clapped with heat along the landscape
of his skin. Each metacarpal of his wrist
is quickly cracked to smaller sticks.

All that we can do is done:
the strapping and jolting, the ceremonial
drubbing; the mummery and finger-play
behind his volted head. We hose him
as we would a tree, his wrinkled trunk runs deep

with ants. The body, pinned and porous, shivers,
briefly sways, as if a damaged wall is lightly pushed.
Empty-handed and incarnate, he is taken like a pet
and carried with his head cupped from behind.
Look on him. He is always ours, and cold.

HYDRANGEAS

Salt air flutters them, cradles
their heads, lolling and solemn

as babies born slow. The heft
and bend is determined by stem;

by water, genetics and sleight of wind.
We left what unsettles us to come here

where the lengthy water unstops and spills,
mottled by sunset, crossed by gull,

immortality’s waves in a chamber of skull.
The children grow hairy and tall as they sleep.

Loose boats are bruising the dock.
What the sea dredges up in the dark

this time, is sand tooth, spine, effacement of rock—
hard fruit of the tide, left where it’s dropped.

Unnestled, we listen to salt air drift
across the hydrangeas; its shift.

MATTER

I make a little mother out of mud, sticks
and a bit of gauze. Once formed and dried,
she’s bound to disappear: powder to my fingers.
All my plaster saints go down that way.
Wormwood. Gall. Holes of age.

Not that it matters, but
I once saw Mars through a telescope:
pockmarked, awash in gas, but distant enough
to have dignity. All this farawayness has to stop.
So much homesickness, but so little home

and so many notions they call tradition.
Knife, fork, whip of potatoes—all the womanly arts.
I am not so much lost, as far, as spilled
as if moved from the table too fast—
as salt from a lidless box. And the one candle

I molded and set on the mantle had to be lit.
To enjoy the burning, mother said,
because something holy was happening then,
and all was made to be blown away—burn of cry,
steam of want—expelled like a mouthful of air.

MATRIARCH

Not all of us become luminous
enough. And for those few, it shows

in the face. As if a burning beneath
the clothing. As if a bride, or a saint.

She is basking in absence, giving
way, who spoke strongly to me

with her hand. Tablet under her tongue,
curled on a cane, she waits.

"The penny withheld is spent,"
I say. Or, rather, I want to say.

Beneficent in her contagion,
holy in all her parts: toenail parings

and talcum, blued filament of a hair.
High and flimsy as iris, nodding

in afternoon, she is the root of me,
deep, and ninety miseries long.

I offer my hand. Almost good enough
for the charred print of her own.

AS WINTER WILL

Mown, or lifted to the loft, our summer hay,
As on the lawn you were somber and said your lines:
Give the man a touch.
In need, your face looked upward,
Broke to mawkish, and a melancholy
Took your throat, the hope of a new alphabet,

Away. As winter will, it built spun-sugar
Crannies, and we crept, and prayed, took every care
Until your hair was topped with silver, my cheeks
So cold from your wise breath. I broke the frozen roses
And this was as close as we could get, and this
Was how we lived: in a drift of memory, a tilt toward
Youth. As if we could. As if now
Were not enough, in its clang, in its hand-
Held bell, in its taste of nickel, sharp.
In this fashion, our years flowed
And we made our bed with mortality, left the gates
Open, the mind vacant, intentionally.

I have given up everything. Nothing is
Left for you to pierce, examine; my youth
Is a small crust. Don't touch.
It keeps better here, in my drawer, than outdoors
Where the air might turn it wrong. Now let's talk
As we hear the rake drag small debris, a crack of twigs;
The ocean water as it drips from empty nets,
The murmur at an accident as the crowd
Turns away from a gone situation; a sound
That's only us, that we put up with, like a crying
In the leaves at night, that rises once, then drops.

IN THE TURN OF A YEAR

This is regret. Or a ferret. Snuffling,
stunted, snout full of snow—

diffident, barely approaching,
eye on the hemlocked road.

As the end of day shuffles down
the repentant scurry and swarm—

an unstable contrition is born.
Bend down. Look into the lair.

While just-born pieties spark and strike
I will make my peace as a low bulb

burnt into a dent of snow. A cloth to keep me
from seeping. Light crumpled over a hole.

Why does the maker keep me awake?
He must want my oddments, their glow.