Miraculum

By Ruth L. Schwartz

As in her previous collections, Miraculum shows Schwartz's true ability as a poet. These poems are passionate, tender, tough, and brimming with life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Autumn House Press
• Release date: Aug 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637680452

Book preview

I.

You learn poetry by moving step by step among things and beings, never isolating, but rather containing them all within a blind expansion of love.

—Pablo Neruda

Forms of Prayer

1.

Bring me all the days, I say. Beaten, weeping, scarred.

Bring me the blossoming, the hidden branches.

Bring me the promises, the limbs that break them.

Bring me the love, the history we can’t stop making:

sail-planes of the shoulder blades, slope of hip and thigh.

Relentless untamed life of flesh. Sweet grief.

Bring me before and after; wedge me in between.

Our lips and bodies, our burial grounds.

Together, we dig and undig ourselves

like children in sand.

2.

The salmon caught and full-force thrashing

up the unyielding hatchery walls.

Also, downriver, the uncaught others,

spinning, splashing, muscular, irascible.

Our bodies glistening in combat,

fighting not each other

but the boundaries of skin:

walls that confine us, that we leap against.

The brilliant pink and iridescent gleam

of the salmon wrapped in paper

on the top shelf of your fridge—

and how we cook and eat it, knowing what we’re eating.

3.

We sit at the table and seven crows fly overhead, cawing loudly:

Okay, they seem to say. Okay. Okay.

In the beak of a crow, Okay becomes a commandment.

Not that all is well, or even adequate. Just that all is all. All is.

Who could argue with the certainty of fourteen wings?

Near dark, the dock a small island of light,

the water around it holding the paleness of sky.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Evidence

The sparrows round and dark as tiny

Buddhas on the twigs.

A pair of crows that jeer and boss,

black as the closed eyes of fire.

A russet-chested robin, rooting through the dirt.

All the live things in the dirt,

pushing to the surface, drinking, breathing

with their bodies.

All the leaves.

The way the perfect cells of green,

the branching symmetry of veins,

the growth toward curve and point, toward

walnut, maple, wing,

exist, in part, for each moon-colored worm

that eats itself a perfect cradle, curves

inside it now, still eating,

or rather, suckling, the golden bead of its head

rocking almost imperceptibly

against the edge of leaf, the edge of

love—

Dangerous, Generous