Left-Hand Signals
After Ilya Kaminsky
Look
how the lame, too, move
in ways mysterious even to them.
Watch our neighbor who sees
my stumbling on worn-out knees. See
how it makes his walk joyful and free.
Be glad you can bend with me,
nevertheless, to trim out dead stems
and then straighten knees — slowly —
till you find yourself
staring down into greens,
bright rosettes at the centers of things,
survivors of winters, the mysteries
of columbine, hellebore, bluebell immortals,
as Osip Mandelstam writes. (And who could know
better than he with his Eyesight of Wasps?)
Fly up with that float plane over there (it’s easy).
See glints off the bay, off vacant
store windows, off towers
emitting bad news, off a wing,
and then watch what shines here
as sun plays and delays the darkness —
the darting eyes of a cat, ill, but happy
to pounce on flashes of light,
signals that, to my surprise,
are coming from my own hand,
filled with dead stems and still wearing
a fifty-year-old wedding ring.
.
Muriel Nelson’s publications include the poetry collections, Sightsinger (Encircle Publications) and Part Song (Bear Star Press, Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize), and chapbooks, Please Hold (Encircle Publications, Poetry Chapbook Award) and Most Wanted (ByLine Press, ByLine Chapbook Award). Nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, Nelson’s poems have appeared in Guesthouse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, New American Writing, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, and other journals and in several anthologies. She lives in Federal Way, Washington.
.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 