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The Trains
We felt them first. Fingers pressed to the rails,
a dull rumble filled our hands and hummed into
our arms before the cone of light, the great clatter
of metal against metal. Trestled high, above the
bridge on Grand Avenue, we knew those tracks
went on forever, between trees that lined the ties
like stations of the cross. The hill was forbidden but
holy, thick with clover, ripe with berries in spring.
The year I was nine, an April blizzard swept the
sky and we went to the trains in the dark. The wires
strummed into sparks, the rails were a dazzle of
shadows. Our faces – ghosts of our selves – reflected
in every train car window, lines of breath etched in
passing glass. Above us, chimney smoke hung like
smears of candle grease among the clouds.
We were grubby and poor, but we believed. We said
our prayers, ate fish on Fridays, and never rode
those trains. We could only kneel in something like
wonder, something like praise, and wait for the
tracks’ reverent shudder. The memory is a gauze
engine that time blows through and keeps me small.
Copyright © 2008 by Adele Kenny. All rights reserved.
2006 Allen Ginsberg Award.
Published: Paterson Literary Review, Issue 36, 2008-2009.
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Of Feathers, Of Flight
That spring, a baby jay fell from the tree,
and we took it to Mrs. Levine before we
looked for its nest. But the mother, she said,
would know our hands and reject it.
How we cursed our fingers in the name
of that small breast and breath, cradled it
in cotton, answered its cries for eyedropper food.
How we prayed that the mouth would become
a beak, the feather-stalks wings, and they did.
The day we freed it, it beat, a heart-clock
wound and sprung in Ruth Levine’s old hand,
and, finally, finding the sky, flew higher than
all the briars strung like metal barbs over
the backyard fence – higher than the redbud,
higher than dreams we knew how to dream,
a speck of updraft ash and gone.
Heaven, fuller then for one small bird, spread
its blue wing over us and the tree and Mrs. Levine
who, breathing deeply, raised her arm to the light
and moved her thumb over each fingertip as if
she could feel to the ends of her skin the
miracle edge of freedom, of feathers, of flight.
Copyright © 2008 by Adele Kenny. All rights reserved.
2007 Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award.
Published: Merton Seasonal, Summer 2007.
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Whatever Might Pass for a Dream
The trocheed tick of the mantle
clock is trained on the coming
hour, tomorrow already taking
shape. It’s mid-summer and years
ago, relentless heat on both sides
of my pillow. At Warananco Park,
my father holds me under fireworks,
skyburst and boom while I sleep.
The vision shifts, my mother and
father dance beneath a willow gone
in the storm of ‘56. Someone is
singing. The sound is breathy, is
misty, is sweet. Fitful and faint, a
night cricket rubs its forelegs together,
the first pale bird warbles and weeps.
Copyright © 2008 by Adele Kenny. All rights reserved.
2006 Paumanok Award Finalist.
Published: Lips, Issue 28/29, 2007.
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In Memory Of
(After Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix)
No movement but this: subdued luminosity, sunlight
from the distant city. River. Bridge. There is always
a background (that far, this close), and what memory
does – like the dusky lines of a double shadow,
it multiplies loss.
In Rossetti’s Beata, a sundial casts its metal wing
on the thin, blown hour when leaving begins.
Red dove, white poppy: the woman, transfixed,
slips – diffused like light through darkened glass –
her hands open and soft.
I am here and you aren’t. It is summer –
the sky is clapper and bell, the lemonade sweet.
I can almost hear you singing. In that voice
without margin, the octave’s most important notes
are high and low.
Copyright © 2008 by Adele Kenny. All rights reserved.
Published: California Quarterly, Vol.34, #2, 2008.
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Confiteor
“But this mutability – what is it? Is it soul? Is it body?”
– St. Augustine, Confessions, Book Twelve, Chapter VI
Imagine Icarus before the air let go,
before the sea lunged up. Imagine
the downward pitch, the boy wing-tipped
and sticky. Of course he failed, we all fail.
Things come unglued. And not surprising –
this mutability of mutable things.
The way Breughel painted it, life goes on:
ploughman, shepherd, oblivious sheep.
Life goes on: the stream beside me is star-
streaked; minnows, like grace notes, silver
over stones. Birds murmur and settle their
wings like prayers spoken in hopeless places.
The earth curves into place. Water. Silt. Sky.
The moon rises and keeps on rising.
Copyright © 2008 by Adele Kenny. All rights reserved.
2006 Paumanok Award Finalist.
Published: Tiferet, Issue 5, Autumn 2007.
2007 Pushcart Prize Nominee.
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East Rahway
“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”
– L. P. Hartley
All it takes is something familiar – something small,
deep in memory’s birthwood: the shape of a hand or
a stranger’s eyes in the sudden light of a theater when
the movie ends. The past is our first language,
a speakable grace.
On summer nights in East Rahway, our fathers sat
on front porches in worn t-shirts, their calloused
hands wrapped around beer cans as the last stars took
their places like nail-heads on a dark and holy board.
Inside, our mothers sang as they washed the dinner
dishes, and we went to sleep with the easy grace of
children. Our grandmothers all spoke with accents,
rolled their stockings down to their ankles like
nylon UFOs, and people shouted at them when they
spoke, enunciating carefully, as if our grandmothers
weren’t only foreign but deaf. Different from the
beginning, we were the city’s middle children, never
as tough as the kids from the projects, and only half as
cool as the kids who lived behind the high school on
the other side of town. Cut off from the rest of
Rahway, we lived between Route 1 and Linden airport,
in a place where sleep was rubbed out of night to the
sound of trucks stumbling over potholes and propjets
taking off on runway number three. Safe in our own
society, we lived a little religion of unlikely saints
whose blood offerings were elbows and knees that
scraped like autumn leaves on the sidewalks. In East
Rahway, hardly anyone died or went away. Those were
the days before we knew what dead meant. But when
Mr. Malone, who lived in the corner house, did it, the
bagpipes wailed and skirled for three days in his living
room, a hundred octaves higher than all the blades of grass
we ever held between our thumbs and blew against – a
different kind of party. There were no soccer games no
little league, and no one drove us anywhere. Days were
the days we hiked down Lower Road to Merck’s Creek,
the mosquitoed water stained even then by chemicals we
couldn’t name; but, oh, the bright and oily rings that spread
above the stones we skipped like shivering circles of mercury.
There were forests then, across the street, and deep. We were
wood nymphs and Druids, foreign legionnaires led by
my cousin Eddie. His handkerchief Havelock flapped
beneath his baseball cap as we followed into the hymned
and scrawling weeds, the underbrush belled by our footsteps,
trees tuned to prodigal birds. We were Arthur and Guinevere,
Merlin, Morgan, all the knights, and one Rapunzel who
lost her hair in a bubble gum accident. We did things
differently then, believed in summer’s synonymous sun,
December’s piebald light, white-maned and glistening,
the moon above us, cloud-ribbed in semi-silhouette.
The past falls like water from winter boots. Merck’s Creek,
darker, dirtier with new pollution, moves more slowly.
The streets, once so wide and willing, are smaller. And
the forest is gone, the initials we carved lost with fallen trees,
the green spirits laid to rest beneath a block of factories. But,
still, if you cross Route 1 on a night overworked with summer
stars, and stand on the corner of Scott and Barnett, you will
find our fathers there. Winstons and Marlboros burn, beer
cans shine in the baritone heat. Our mothers and grandmothers
sing, ghostly soloists, eggshell voices reedy, thin.
And we are there, pockets ringing with Pez candies,
lips pressed smugly on chocolate cigarettes; those old
bones still in the road – skull and neck, a few vertebrae
that once we tossed like dice to tell our future. Listen –
a child’s voice calls Excalibur! into the night.
Copyright © 2008 by Adele Kenny. All rights reserved.
From Chosen Ghosts, Muse-Pie Press, 2001, ISBN: 0-918453-17-8.
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