21 Years After the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, I Confront Mary Oliver’s Ghost in the Middle of a Genocide
I ask her if she’s picked
any flowers today, and what
are their names. I ask her
what birds she holds closest
when bombs from the other
side of the world begin to rumble
in her caged and beating
chest. I ask her
a thousand questions
about blue.
**
We are walking in a garden soft
with blossoms whose faded
stories curl like fog
when they land in Mary’s
moonlight hair. Our footsteps
make tangled music
through the grass & drifting
seedheads. In the distance, waves,
wind, roses, the scent of a small
body dying or newly dead—
fox or gull or long-legged heron. Fish
or frog or weasel.
**
Like history, this world
does not have sides.
Additionally,
a bomb can’t rumble
in a chest. A bomb
inside a chest is death.
**
Name all the blues you loved
in your lifetime, I demand. Start
with the first one. Was it a spreading
bruise? A spray of asters in a glass jar
on a kitchen table, in Ohio?
Was it the sky, and was it raining?
I watch the wrinkles moving
across her ghost-face. Her eyes
are not the eyes of a poet
but of an old woman alone
and missing her love.
She is already walking
on the blue shores of another world.
**
I have never felt
the presence of a ghost,
never stepped into a sunlit
shadow or cut my skin along
an unknown coolness.
I am haunted by voices
with hazy origins. Almost-
beloved songs. A language
that spills salt-trails of seaweed
from my open mouth
when I try to speak it.
**
Seventeen and righteous and new
to breaking,
I organized a student march
from Porter Square to Harvard Square.
We walked out of class
and into the streets.
We met on Cambridge Common.
There must have been a rally
though I don’t remember it.
I remember the slush. I remember
that the march did not stop the war
from happening, and now—
**
Here is what I have learned about hauntings:
What isn’t already alive
and rooted inside
your blooming chest
can’t haunt you.
**
Thirty-eight and many-times-broken
I marched ten miles from Northampton to Hadley
in the December sun. I marched down Main Street
in the rain. I marched to drumbeats and to singing
and alongside strangers. I shaped my rage into
a march, held it strong inside my back and thighs, walked
and walked and walked. It did not stop
the genocide from happening. Now
**
I’m asking Mary Oliver’s ghost if she’s picked any
flowers today, and what colors, and what
do they smell like, and did she
startle any bees
away from their cups of sweetness
when she reached for those stems of swaying breath
with her no-longer-living hands.
**
Of course
a ghost-hand
can’t pick
a flower.
**
This isn’t a poem about despair.
**
What haunts me: the end
of rain, a baby’s
stream-bright laugh,
the fraying Hebrew prayer
my grandmother never
taught me.
The beginning of
**
the question.
**
I bend close to Mary Oliver’s old face.
I ask her how, with the fifty-four bones in her two
human hands, she made so many poems
**
and why.
**
She looks at me a long, long time.
Her gaze is a haunted ocean.
I think: We both love water.
I think: Let this ocean become
a flood, let it flood the cascading voices cut
from the throats of Gazan children
back to their bodies, let it flood their bodies
back to the earth that bore them,
let it flood the marchers as we move through the hollows
and the cities and the stockpiled endings, let
**
the water come.
**
This poem isn’t a parable.
Mary’s gaze is just a gaze.
**
All around us
weather
rushes.
**
I wasn’t born a flower, Mary says,
as if a flower could do
what a march couldn’t
what a poem couldn’t
what ghost-hands
**
can’t.
**
She is holding every shade of blue
in her arms.
**
I reach toward her. Blood-hand
to ghost-hand. I want
to touch. All those wild blues.
I want to smell their thousand
smells. I want
**
Mary to hold me in her arms,
another shade of blue.
**
She isn’t smiling
when she sets that bundle
of flowers down
and puts her ghost-hand
in my living one.
When she presses
our hands into the dirt,
gives our fingers to the dark
to swallow, says
**
sweet world,
here.
Spring Body
Violets & thunder & frogs: Spring again, and I’m aging out of my debut body.
There are gnarled bulbs in my throat. They want to sprout a new body.
I ask the elderberries for advice, the sumacs, but they blossom like water, fruit
without fuss. My fingers aren’t budding, they’re storms. Is all this roaring you, body?
Thirty-odd years you were still and now this. Why did you tell me such
mouthwatering lies? I was hungry. I had teeth. It was lonely in my blue body.
Now every night I dream of rivers. Even the softest water cracks my lungs
to blush, and the current’s getting stronger. I long for a canoe body.
In the bird-loud mornings, a nameless creature claws out of my bones, leaves
tears unfurling and red. Call me a cave body. Bursting like stars body. Lit up with dew body.
Friends tell me that spring is change, brings luck. All that green delighting.
Daffodils wear their faces like suns, but I’m too worn to shine, too blurred, too body.
Accuse me of not trying & you might be right. Who wants to work this hard to slide
into a skin that sings. Who wants to have to ask: Tattoo, body. Skew, body. Brew, body.
If I could remake my thumbs as sentences, I would. If I could turn my chest
into a paragraph, my lips to commas—yes. What do you need to get us through, body?
Name a scar you can’t disappear with a story. I’ll start: everything my body grew
and bruised. Poet, Swimmer, Moon—surrender. There’s no such thing as a true body.
Laura Sackton is a queer writer based in rural Massachusetts. She’s known around the internet as an evangelist for earnestness.