Ava Leavell Haymon teaches poetry writing in Louisiana and in New Mexico. She has published widely in journals, including POETRY, PRAIRIE SCHOONER, and THE SOUTHERN REVIEW. These poems are from a collection, THE STRICT ECONOMY OF FIRE, which will be published this fall by LSU Press.
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CARE AND FEEDING
"Clean your plate," the fire's mother used to say
over and over. "There are starving children
in Asia." So the fire acquired a taste
for them. When she grew into a bigger fire
and learned she could travel by herself, she found
those hungry brown children mouthwatering.
Truce with her mother's instructions -- no worse
than most daughters achieve, so eager to please.
Fire loves all children now, knows to undress them
without pulling tight collars over their heads,
reddens dark bruises from roughhouse fathers,
tickles skinny underarms to rapture, nuzzles
chapped cheeks with that open-oven breath
that carries the good mother smell of food.
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"WHAT COMES":
AN OFFERING IN GRATITUDE FOR A SAFE EXPEDITION
("WHAT COMES is one translation of The Buddha's name)
Curled in a hole in the flagstone steps
to the venerable Stupa Swayambhunath,
a bony mama dog nurses a single puppy.
"Life is always right," Le Corbusier said
when he saw his model tenement crosshatched
with laundry and graffiti. Their bed
too small, mother and pup stuff in
as though shaken down in a sack
or grown overlarge for a womb.
At the base
of the long stairs, the crowded city exhales early morning
mist. Kathmandu again, holiday again. We join
other worshippers to drone up three hundred risers,
women with red tassled plaits, red blouses, red
striped aprons, vermilion tika-spot on their foreheads,
monks in saffron, magenta, shaved heads, barefoot
children hawking postcards, charms -- "Two fish,
Buddha mind, Madam," "Mandala from Lhasa" --
the squeak of prayer wheels, juniper incense.
At the top of the stairs, temple monkeys slip
through the grates before the waiting copper Buddhas
and steal the marigold offerings.
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VISITATION: Goddess of Prosperity
The fourth night of festival, She comes,
Goddess who grants or withholds,
Lakshmi Herself, trailing flame-colored silks.
All the household must be lit
with butter lamps, flames cast
against scrubbed walls. The mama's
hands are red. Tonight will tell.
The night of the fourth day,
She comes. Lakshmi, who decides.
Let it be enough, prays the mama,
her hands red, the butter for the lamps
costly. There is never enough food,
the tiny fires twinkle. Never enough food,
chant the babies. The night of the fourth day,
She comes. It is Lakshmi, to reward
or take away. Elijah drawn to Seder cup,
St. Nicholas to the feast and yule fire --
the old ones warm their unforgiving bones
at the bright celebrations and make sure
that the grave-brittle rules are holding fast.
On the night of the fourth day,
She comes. Lakshmi, who decides.
Watch the wicklamp on the threshold
for a flicker at Her step. Listen
for the bracelets, the thin coin
of Her judgment. Let it be enough,
the mother prays. The grandmother
whispers, from her dim corner:
All fires are burning children.
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THE QUESTIONS WOMEN ASK
for Joan Welch
Classic mountaineering: we rotate
tentmates night by night, shuffle order
on the single-file trail. Accident is inevitable.
In the safety net strung under a high wire,
the give in every knot must be the same.
Women trekkers, we ply a finer web,
against ancestral dangers. In the first hours,
we compare cameras, sunscreen, boot lacings.
Later, newspaper questions all around,
where/who/when/etc. Later still, confidences
and griefs -- families, abortion, parnerships past
and still present, children wešve loved, children
wešve failed. The matriarch sherpa, Ming Mah,
joins us, and Dormah Sherpa, a guide in training
who still loses her way. Beyond a certain altitude,
conversation stills. Wešve tossed our haphazard stories
into a no-recipe soup that must sustain us
for the duration. We turn our attention to breath,
dream, exertion. We are siblings, united for survival
under treacherous parents. Our faces watch
the unpredictable ground, sky. To each other,
we do not speak. The mountainsš beauty confounds
our balance, charms us into self-forgetting. Sisters
must be vigilant for each other. The mountains
do not pay attention, and there is no rescue.
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STARS FOR THE GANESH HIMAL
Fires on the next mountainside
flare the same size and brightness
as the medium stars.
The constellation
Lakshmi's Bowl sloshes them
over the earth, a blessing.
One flame
moves, steady as the unflinching firefly
we followed at dusk, but rising
slowly as a child walks --
up the terraces,
the curves of new mountain,
at last into the sky
with her sisters.
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