by Maleea Acker

Anna, the bells are sounding and the light
is light, rather than just what we see.
How can I feel at home?
They are your bells, Anna, and the cuckoo is sounding,
the mountains clear, the swallows returned. It’s so blue
I feel something inessential caving my head.
The church window liquid, the door of my house red, and those far horses
your neighbours, your sheep just back from the fields.
I see something just now that plucks me.
Ciscu’s pine sap of coal and dark smoke
like amber, like liquid that rises to the touch.
I’ve inserted the cutting, Anna,
into the wild rose’s stem. Quitaba las espinas,
tied it with sisal, spooned the dark wax. The sky is too large
for this, what, this wing? A matchstick swallow
lights itself. The sun gone. Josep leaves, Ciscu will leave.
I am falling into your valleys, Anna.
Tan earth pelts the slate cliffs of Burg. Something’s
trying to take off but can’t endure the weight.
Wild cherry knotted into quince, the cutting
now higher than its stock.
He’s smiling at me. We could
remake the world like this, these tiny insertions
of green, in wind, Goliara, record player bird,
playing, blackbird, playing, your bells,
Anna, their throats like flames.

Maleea Acker is a writer, typographer, publisher (of La Mano Izquierda/Left
Hand Press), translator and English instructor. Her first full length collection of
poetry, The Reflecting Pool, will appear with Pedlar Press in the Spring of 2009. In
2007, she spent four months in Spain working on a new manuscript.