Pilgrim

 

 

                                                                                   

Gypsy, my father once told me, it’s part of our name.

Wendt from Wendland,  from land of wanderers. Still,

my favorite Romance was that this heritage came

from my Austrian grandmother. Born on the boat to Chile,

Francesca Weisser – who died, before I was born,

about the time my runaway father was rounding Cape Horn

 

bound for Germany – rumor was, she had gypsy

blood,  too. So when I phone my mother

from Norway, and once again she wistfully

prods, have you gotten this out of your system?, what

can I say? My friend Helen tells me she once

tugged a canoe free from river-bank mud

 

and the next day a memory surfaced through muscle,

through more than forty years: herself as a child

struggling a turtle, dead, from leaves and mud till

her hands held wonder: maybe what’s happened is filed

within us, our bodies remember what minds cannot.

How else to describe it? And how to explain it’s not

 

just adventure I’m after, but what the inner

world has in store: reflections of earth’s geography

buried so deep in the system, each country I visit,

each new landscape tugs, tugs, and the country

within the body responds. Lungs, in Eastern

Oregon, opening, lungs unfurling, they’d turn

 

the body inside out, if they could, greeting

the sky, informing me, this is where you belong.

And look at Italy, all of the senses meeting

as one: resurrected, the skin drinking song,

and color, and light baptizing the tongue,

saying this, this is your home. No longer young,

                                                                                                           

and still, no end to this road. The way in Chile

the heart, overfull, finds hearts to contain it. The voice

in Germany, tuned with its own. And now in Norway

the feet, for the first time ever, knowing the source

of their song: earth’s anchor – gentle, that shudder

of glacier, mountain, fjord – solid under

 

bones connecting to bones, what holds us together

resonant, what the body always has known.

Roald Amundsen, what did you tell your mother?

Did your blood, the closer you came to the pole,

get dizzy with gravity? Did you  let yourself hear

in your ecstatic pulse, a mother’s moan? Her fear?

 

 

                                                            First published in Calapooya 19, 1998

                                                            Reprinted in Surgeonfish (Cincinnati: Word Tech Editions, 2005)

                                                                                   

 

Meningioma

 

 

Carefully he peeled,

Off my dazed brain, each layer:

Dear, benign onion.

 

                                               

                                                           This poem is recent, and (so far) unpublished.

 

 

 

Give Us This Day

                                                                                               

 

                                                                                                                                               

Just as everyone knows the end might come without warning

Any morning, the usual intersection and someone running the light,

Or maybe a gun in the cafeteria.  Suitcase exploding.  Fuselage

Simply missing one simple bolt.  And we know not                    

To dwell on these thoughts, to survive.

      

Just as when my older friend was dying, and knew it, saying

I’ve learned what I wish I'd known all my life, and I wanted to

Know her secret and didn’t ask, so sure of having one last chance.

This much I’ve learned:   Savor it.  This daily bread.

What if this were our last day alive?

 

So, too, you with your own secret ticking, lab tests predicting

Tomorrow the beats all of us count on could stop.

With proper exercise, diet, maybe

Not for a year.   Or two.  

Or more.

 

Each moment, remember.  Each moment, forget.

Systole.  Diastole. 

Push.  Pull. 

Dear one,

whose heart knows and won't tell.

 

 

  © Ingrid Wendt