Steven Cramer
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Steven Cramer is the author of four poetry collections: The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (1987), The World Book (1992), Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997), and Goodbye to the Orchard, (2004), which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and was named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. His poems and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry, and Triquarterly; as well as in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poets and The POETRY Anthology, 1912- 2002. He has taught literature and writing at Bennington College, Boston University, M.I.T., and Tufts University. Recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently directs the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge.
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GOODBYE TO THE ORCHARD
Beautiful from the get-go, we were
Incarnations of the new, and pure sex.
I’ll miss that, along with the unicorns.
The organic bower of our garden grew
Into anybody’s memory of a bed
Or a mattress, in a shack near a lake.
“Mistakes, like love, are to be made,”
You said. I hadn’t thought of that.
That first autumn was easy, the liquor
Of decay headiest at noon. And the orchard,
Let’s face it, had begun to resemble a casino,
All its tables rigged in our favor. The yoke
Of being cared for is what cast us out,
Not that immense, bearded librarian,
Our curator, and not our having learned
How to get on one another’s nerves.
Goodbye to the orchard: green
One day, the next day blood. We know
To stiffen at a voice; how to tell the truth
From an untruth; what’s sweet, what stinks.
Behind each sleeping dog, another to let lie.
Who knew an innocence taking ages to perfect
Could fall so short when time came to live?
You knew, and then you let me know.
Self-Portrait with Insomnia, Rocks, and Fireflies
I might have been encoded
a few eons ago
as an oblong stone, flat & perfect for skipping,
kissed & kissed & kissed; & if pitched
skillfully enough, Mystic Lake
wets me a fourth time,
then settles me bottomward,
one among millions
cast into the snail's pace of underwater time.
But it's Wednesday, Love,
well past midnight. I've been peering
into the jolt of a black window.
I could swear I see the fireflies
that teased a summer lawn
decades ago, the flash-black-flash of their belly-lamps.
They're beetles, not flies—
did you know that?
Neither did I.
A sort of enzyme—Luciferin—combines
with oxygen to create their light.
Nobody knows what makes the light
switch on & off, least of all
the darning needle of my wakefulness
practicing its stalls over a lake
that might have bitten or licked as readily as kissed.
And besides, what I'm calling fireflies
we called lightning bugs. None of us
connected their glow to sex, & beside
you now I'll swear to anything:
I'm that tired in this sleepless daydream
as a deeply appreciated pebble, while a ring
of rocks circles the August lakefront fire—
On each rock, someone chants,
but I chant the most persuasive chant
up from the bottom of the lake.
Hearing that chant, the shell-
halves of our hands keeping time,
all of us thrust into future & past
listen & regret a little less.
Crazyhorse, Fall 2006
SINGER
I knew trouble and endured it,
grief and desire my companions.
In winter my enemy attacked.
The better of the two, I was bound
in rope made from my own sinew.
All that has passed, and so may this.
There was a man condemned to live
outside the city he loved—even death
meant less in exile—and a woman
who dreaded the child inside her.
Her dreams were dreams of drowning.
All that has passed, and so may this.
If the mind becomes a wolf’s mind,
it will force misery on misery,
make cowards heroes. If courtiers
want the kingdom overthrown, yet fail
to speak, they will remain courtiers.
All that has passed, and so may this.
At first doom sees, wherever it turns,
more doom. Then, in time: joy.
I’ll say this about myself: my name
was a name you knew, and I sang
until another singer took my place.
All that has passed, and so will this.
after the Anglo-Saxon poem, “Deor”
