Spells for Dread

^{(for Pam and Bill)}

1

Since when
was the breach
and what broke, a door
or wall, nothing we hadn’t
defended, everything we regarded—
the vague mattress, a filthy shirt
flung over the chair, the little cook stove
we heated water on, food
if there was any—
as having mattered to no one
but us? This rupture
filled the space, our lives
with blood, but I say                                                               
it was blossoms, blossoms.

2

Later would be the clatter of bottles.
Windows overlooking a valley.
Now people come to scavenge.
The noise distracts you from decoding
the meaning of your recurring dream:
someone breaking in, looking to harm you.
Sometimes you know them,
and regardless the question of
whether you cower or fight.
Over the year you have this dream
you realize courage isn’t
not being afraid,
but the fact that you were
and you stayed.

3

The shimmering trail crossing a clear sky
growing brighter and brighter at dusk
didn’t dissipate. The haloed round tip.
The luminous streak. We thought it a rocket
or bomb, not landing but leaving
in its wake nerve gas
or some other poison to drift
over the hills around us as a glittering dust.
We’d sit in a circle together,
marveling at the luck
of communion, the flickering
candlelight. The care that was cure.

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“This poem began with a vague sense of barren landscape, as in the far north of the Icelandic tundra, but with an imagined scene of harm suffered and survived. The poem asked, How does one live after utter loss? What does one do? The link to all the violence and loss in the world for me, as perhaps for many women, are the emotions buried following long-ago experiences of several personal assaults. These no longer affect my days, but have now resolved into empathy for others suffering elsewhere. The fear still returns, however, in recurring dreams. The cure the poem discovers is in the transformative capacity of language itself, how imagination concentrated in sound shifts the vision, if one follows it into insight.”
—Cynthia Hogue