Eileen Walsh Duncan lives in a small town just outside of Seattle on the Puget Sound, at the edge of a temperate rain forest. Her work has appeared in many journals, including in Alaska Quarterly Review, Swannanoa Review, Cirque, The Lake, Crab Creek Review, Switched-on Gutenberg, Off the Coast, The CDC Poetry Project, Pleasure Boat Studio’s zine Lights, Ramblr Online, the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment, and the city of Shoreline’s Voices in the Forest installation. She received the Bentley Award from Seattle Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
February
It seems like years,
and nothing’s begun yet —
the tulip buds again white and cramped
in the swollen loam;
the soft skins of apple trees
splayed in the spitting rain.
I stand in the dry shadow of firs,
as if drowning in clouds that sink
toward earth and sputter.
February is a river.
And I cannot make it stay in this year, or decade.
I turn, floating, to see you
crossing the lawn to me,
the register of your voice slipping
faintly between the lines of rain,
the round of your shoulder
exactly as I know it.
You nearly vanish in the treacly light,
in mid-step, my memory never a memory
but a dream of something I knew:
As a rain shadow,
that I can name only by absence.
But I seem to have known
always, how your foot would fall
to the sodden earth and water upwell;
the sod’s elastic pull and release,
our loss and coming together.
In a Moment of Disarray, the Seamstress Falls in Love
She feels lucky for no reason
when she sees the small hollow of his throat,
the tendon narrowing
from his heel.
Bolts of muslin, of nubby linen
fall around them into the crack of
light at the bedroom door. His tiny breaths
fill the air, a covey of birds not yet visible.
Sixteen days ago the air seared open
the pale passages of his lungs,
opened her blind womb to daylight.
She knows now how the beast in her
will create a universe without her knowing, will
evolve its beaded life into shapes like her own
while she sits now still, now shifting.
She will not muffle the velvet longing,
the rush and ache when she holds him.
in this pocket of semidarkness
where things have no name but the shape
that mouths that know no names give them,
she will call the wordless sacred,
she will kiss the thief of words over and over.
Jam
The webbed membranes
exhale their inky juices
in heat’s murky arousal, a rising stew.
Her memories return the same
way, except they are colorless,
rolling past and descending,
returning slightly disjointed,
suffused with gel in a
congealing symmetry.
Compulsively shiny jars
in tight-lidded rows
would solve all her problems.
She thinks.
But she cannot remember her own face,
how it was ten years ago. The image
juts up, then alters, overlaid
by her own anxious gaze
into the mirror, year after year.
She remembers a brief sense of longing
as the jam pours, bubbles
in the jar.
Making Dirt
For Dad
My spade slices down
into the meaty black. What was buried
will always return: like this eerie white orb
of orange. Its wet flesh
and sharp scent smear along the blade
as I toss it out, toss it under.
Some thick bits of skin are left,
curl along the surface.
I will wait out the winter,
the transformation.
One block away
they are cutting all the firs.
Each time the saw gnaws
and stops, there is a sound like the sudden breath
taken before a story, but nothing begins. The whole reach
of tree hits with fury. The saw shudders and gnaws.
I know the air will be thick with sap
for months. Each time it rains,
scent will rise again from the burnished stumps,
the twisted white roots.
For centuries perhaps
the firs have curved their way
into the black, acidic soil, around
smooth blue stones left behind by some ancient
river, while their millions of needles
splintered bald light into green shadows.
I cannot go there today to watch this.
I know the lay of blue stones
against sticky, shattered roots,
the soil left behind in careless mounds,
the startling expanse of sky, the refusal to rain
and today the cold round stones, their perfect peace,
still as your heart is now.
The Galway Review 