The Visitor
Down the hill, in the field of sweet alfalfa, they're
freezing each other, the children
playing tag and I'm up at the house, I'm
in the picture window, thin
and distant like the glimpse
of a surfacing fish. What dark waters
the house is, behind me, settling
into evening. Dusk
and there are, of course, fireflies. Tell me,
what was your name? When you visited once,
by the backroad where the stones glowed pale
in the moonlight, I was too young, I still thought
I belonged to the world. But now
quartered in this house, watching the neighbors' children
turn to dusk, I feel
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poem by Kate Northrop
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Hiding
—to my sister
Because the moon in late October made landmarks glow: the broken
gate, our yard
full of stones, the attic window
suddenly foreign, across its face
a blue dissolve. In spite of that, the farm
remained an arrangement (barn
behind the house, pond
across the road) and a girl sometimes
feels torn. We turned our dresses inside out,
ran into a grove. We played
you're blind, Molly, try to find me.
It was a family game: get left
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poem by Kate Northrop
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Late Aubade & Explanation
Once in a field, in a wide rising stretch of paintbrush
& purple vetch, we stuck down
a tent, like punctuation, and drank through the evening
our bottle of bad wine. When you looked up,
the weather was holding: a few breezes,
a full moon silvering the flowers
to white. In the distance, I heard the ache
& slide of snow, the beginning of crickets. It was twilight—
the landscape was lifting.
•
A mountain. The clouds, further up,
came down. A Book of Hours. A tent in which we twisted,
pressed each against the other, drunk
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poem by Kate Northrop
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Unfinished Landscape With A Dog
Not much of a dog yet,
that smudge in the distance, beyond the reach
of focus. It's just an impressionist
gesture, a guess. From the edge of the clearing, the farmhouse
materializes, settles
into wall & stone. The water,
making the surface
of the stream, makes
reflections. So why shouldn't the dog
accept limits, become
a figure? Is it like the girl who sits
in the hall closet and says she's not
hiding? She's inside—
listening without the burden
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poem by Kate Northrop
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Iowa & Other Accidents
There was snow that afternoon covering the road
which twisted toward the secret
of water, the mysterious surge
of sludge & loam, the living
Mississippi, unlike the rest of the Midwest,
drawing itself through landscape. There was an appointment
you were keeping
in Moline: a cheap hotel, booze, a little blow. On the Lower
East Side, a woman
spills her martini, makes a gesture
like erasure, or regret. It was almost Christmas.
In the rear view
suddenly, the car you will always describe as oncoming
must have slipped into a skid
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poem by Kate Northrop
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The Dead
Their reward is
they become innocent again,
and when they reappear in memory
death has completely erased
the blurs, given them boundaries. They rise
and move through their new world with clean,
clear edges. My grandmother, in particular
has become buoyant, unattached finally
from her histories, from the trappings
of family. By no means was she
a good woman. But the dead don't care anymore for that.
Weightless, they no longer assume
responsibility, they no longer
have bodies. Once,
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poem by Kate Northrop
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The Geranium
How can you stand it—looking at things?
For example, the geranium
out on the patio, the single pink
blossom in the sun? Or stand the sunlight
moving through it,
illuminating, holding the flower open like a high
clear note, an ecstatic
widening
which arrives, arrives. What
do you dowith it? While the shrubs and the lowest
overhanging leaves
lift slightly in the wind, the blossom
doesn't move. It's the object
of affection, and this is how
it hurts you:
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poem by Kate Northrop
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Affair With Various Endings
I. Kempton, Pennsylvania
Perhaps the last of the light
lifting this evening from the field of wheat
means something. Perhaps the view
includes us, and we are not errors
in the landscape
or meant to be erased. The painter, it's true,
prefers not to preserve
our figures in the brush
of hills layered into green. Perhaps he too
is careless with the truth. What lies
have you had to tell to land you here
outside Kempton, with the creek rising behind us?
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poem by Kate Northrop
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