Jeanne Wagner
Jeanne Wagner is the
recipient of several national awards,
including The MacGuffin Poet Hunt, the Ann
Stanford
Prize and the 2009 Briar Cliff Review Award.
Her poems have previously appeared in The Southern
Poetry Review, as well as Atlanta Review, Mississippi
Review and Spoon River Poetry Review among others. The author of four collections, including The Zen Piano-Mover, winner of the 2004
Stevens Manuscript Prize, her latest manuscript has been accepted by
Sixteen
Rivers Press for publication in 2011. She serves on the editorial staff
of the
California Quarterly.
At the Botanical Garden
for my mother, Dorothy
Its
name, Aloe dorethea,
reminded
me of you.
I
found it
in the Arid House,
still,
we’re both well past irony.
What
would
you have thought of
its
barbed and muscular beauty?
Even
the
word succulent sounds
strangely
mammalian to me.
Genus
of
tough-love, dry ground,
of rare
and random rainfall,
yet the
heat must have been there
once, and
the light intense
for such
a brief and grudging
inflorescence,
as if to
say, for all things there
is a season.
Published
in
Ghost Sonnet
My
mother
used to tell me that ghosts came into our garden at
night.
She could trace their footsteps the next morning in the soft
soil
beneath the window sills, the indention of their soles smooth
as
filed-off fingerprints. They were the
ghosts of her childhood
farm, who
opened the gates and let out the cows from the pasture.
Those
spirits
were pranksters, poachers, saboteurs of boundaries,
they
foiled the confines of flesh, each cell a small, insecure paddock,
a
fortification that fails. Why does the
body try to hold everything
at bay? the
ghosts would ask, their voices plaintive, sibilant as
rain,
unpunctuated, shunning the hard consonants; a sound
somewhere
between a
sough and a soft whistle without the shrillness of bone.
Not
music,
not melody, I understood that, but a language that
was
absolutely pure, if empty: their wind-pipes made only of wind.
They’d
sniff
at our fences for pheromones, stroke the walls like skin.
Published
in
Alehouse Review 2009
My Grandmother’s Hair
She
wore
something called a rat
tucked
inside her hair, a soft sausage
of mesh
wound with gray strands
gleaned
from her brushes and combs,
though I
imagined the hair had twined itself
there on
its own, the way creepers wend
through a
trellis, and fine, sticky threads
ply
themselves around a stifled pupa.
At
night,
I’d pull out the hidden loops
of her
hairpins, and let down her long,
wavy
hair, thin but still silky, tame
under the
light strokes of my brush.
Bodies,
then,
were such secretive things,
surfaces
to be read into, inferred:
the
irregular sag of a bodice; that self-
effacing
spiral of her hair; the blind
right
eye, with its marbled blue iris.
The mad son. The husband I never
heard her
speak of. Her drowned
brother,
his woolen sweater knitted
with a
special stitch, so someone would
know who
the body belonged to,
when
finally the waves unfurled him,
on the