The Works of Author Adele Kenny

Poems

Something

I have seen it in the small hills

of a sleeping child's eyes,

in the pond after rain when

water filled the edges

with something like light.

I have felt it in the yellow petal

of a daffodil

that touched my face like a tender palm.

I have heard it in a sighing somewhere,

gentle, like my mother's breath in my ear

before I was born.

And sometimes, when spring comes easy,

I hear it in something high,

in a soft soprano,

in the weeping and warbling

of something with wings.

Snake Lady

She was the main attraction

when the carnival came to town.

Microphone in hand, she called,

"Come on, boys!"

to the group of high school juniors

we dated on Saturday nights.

Inside her tent, away from the popcorn

and cotton candy and all the spinning lights,

we stood in unmeasured silence

with a cult of snake boys

who spoke among themselves

of things that made them men.

Had we been older, we might have understood

their helpless fascination

as the serpent slid between her breasts

and made its thick descent along her thighs.

They never blinked

until her cool and practiced fingers

stroked the diamond coils straight,

tightened on the sliding head,

and coaxed it to a sudden milky venom.

With an innocence we didn't think we had,

we blushed and looked away

from the boys who held our hands,

from the sure and easy way

she made them burn.

Looking for a Place

"...and in the gifted air/mosquitoes, dragonflies, and tattered mute angels/ no one has called upon in years."

- Stephen Dunn (from "Landscape at the End of the Century")

I'm looking for a place

where the trees are wind-heeled and high,

pine and poplar and willow.

I'm looking for a cabin with three walking sticks

that lean at the side of a patched wooden door;

a chair for the sun, a lake with a dock,

and a little night boat

with a star-wake that parts the dark

as we steer toward shore.

I'm looking for a forest and a field

with a red fox for color

and a blue jay and a crow and a yellow primrose;

a towhee for music, a warbler and a wren;

berries and hazelnuts,

and wild mushrooms, the kind you can trust.

I'm looking for a place where

the heart and the hill are prayer bells

that ring on the wings of angels

between God and the rimrock,

a place where memory can live

without failure or fiction,

where loveliness and longing remain the same,

and the sadness is always sweet.

677 East Scott

This is the house where history begins.

Not nearly as large as memory believes,

it's the front-porch place of my childhood,

a cinder block bag of cracked ceilings and long windows,

a side-street fortress of shingle and stone.

Dingy and old, this is the house

where my mother came into the world,

where she and my father left it,

where radiators knocked into night

and floorboards creaked underfoot like bleating sheep.

Here, five generations of shadows

beat like bat wings in the crawl spaces behind the walls.

Through two world wars, the depression, recessions,

this house was the only thing my family owned.

My grandmother sold her jewelry to save it;

my father worked sixteen-hour days to keep it.

How long he lamented, this goddamn house,

woodworm in the window frames, holes in the roof,

and not enough money.

Even in the years I was away, I lived in this house,

buried my dead, and sat with their ghosts.

Whatever my distance, the only way home

is up the time-bent steps and into the rooms

where my mother's watch still ticks in a dresser drawer

and my father's masking-taped glasses

lie next to the worn leather gloves

that keep his fingers' shape.

Oh, house, the wrecking ball swings, the jackhammer waits.

But memory is holy and the earth too shallow

to ever hold your bones.

Black River

Trees darken before the sky as
mist rises from the earth.
In the almost-dark of a late spring evening
the air still holds a scent
of moss on dampened stone,
the bitter tang of bluebells.

A wild swan moves from her cover

of sedge and swamp grass

to follow the last of the light downriver.

Disturbing the surface of the water,

she moves through the sky's reflection,

and disappears.

You are with me because I remember,

a shadow drifting past the curve of my shoulder,

floating among the cattails.

This was once your place

and where the world should have let you go.

It should have been here

where the river turns a little,

with a fishing pole in your hand,

the back of your brown flannel shirt

slipping away from your belt,

your old shoes worn, as they always were,

on the insides of their heels.

I have come to touch your death
with the palm of my hand,

to clench my fist around it

and fling it upstream like bone ash into space.

Go! Go now!

I call down the stars for your ransom.

One by one they fall into the river,

which carries them all away.