July 1, 2016

Christine Poreba

THE UNCERTAINTEST WORD

As soon as my son has taken the bite
he’s determined is last, he rubs
false dust from his hands—

my signal—“All done?” I ask,
though really he’s only almost done—
still chewing, but finished with sitting.

Which means that I am too. And so
I leave my cup of coffee, two sips
from being gone, something to hope

to go back for. All gone my son says
for bowls that are only half empty.
It’s ethereal: the sky looks almost

like rain. The plane’s status says
In flight, so my parents are still up
beside the clouds, but almost here.

I almost didn’t go to the art opening
where I met my husband, or so the story
goes. Because there’s a kind of thrill

to loss that might have been but wasn’t.
Engine of imagined ruin. In a movie,
the man who almost went on a plane

that crashed is the hero for whom
some other path awaits. And what
comes to those who never landed

in this world, whose hearts
stopped beating?
And of those in the boats that arrived

to Ellis Island and were told they were
over-quota, were sent back across the ocean.
Almost America. On a sunless day near water,

it’s almost easier to see the past,
everyone behind you, spaces on
the horizon to fill. There’s my grandmother

at sixteen on a boat from Poland.
That old photograph of her pushing
my father in a baby swing has the same

rooftops behind as my baby picture
and now my son’s. History is almost
new again. It shimmers on the water.

from Rattle #51, Spring 2016

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__________

Christine Poreba: “This poem was one of those exciting ones that presented itself nearly whole—at least in skeletal form—in its first freewrite. I was on my annual pilgrimage to Poet’s House in New York City, and wrote in my journal, first, that ‘I had been too long away from reading poetry,’ and then—after several pages of notes on the poems I had read—that I was ‘almost tired from reading poetry. Almost ready. Almost done … Almost implies closer than near by itself, but almost close means far.’ Thankfully, none of those lines made it into the poem, but they did offer me an entrance into the poem, which is one of my favorite moments in the process of writing poetry.” (website)

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February 24, 2013

Christine Poreba

BETWEEN MISSING AND FOUND

We thought we knew, all week,
what was out our hotel window:
one faraway slope, buildings
piled close, wind from another
coast. It was plenty.

To think, all that while, the glistening
point of Mt. Hood rose behind
the fog, silent as light.

Seeing its pale silk appear
out our window at sunrise
on this last morning,
I think of a large poster
I once drove by, taped over a small
picture of a cat with the heading lost.
The poster shouted WE FOUND HIM!

The joy of those capital letters
floated through me the way
this mountain appearing makes
something also like joy course
through me.

I think of when my husband
told me a car had flown through
a stop sign straight across his path,
and if he’d been half-a-second slower
in braking, he might not have made it.
He’d been saved before I knew
I might have come close to losing him.

And how once I lost my grandmother’s
star-of-sapphire ring, then found it
at the bottom of a small pitcher
of pencils, but kept looking for it
afterwards, without meaning to,
kept remembering its star
as something gone.

Through habit we drift suspended
somewhere between being lost
and being found.

Like that young husky the color
of Mt. Hood’s snow-capped peak
who landed outside my fence after
he dug out from his own. Together
we walked; I searched for any signs
of an owner looking for what he’d lost
as the dog bounded ahead, in pure whiteness,
toward whatever it was that came next.

from Rattle #37, Summer 2012

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March 7, 2010

Christine Poreba

UNPLOTTED

One woman leaned
over another on the shoulder
of the road. A thin black
sweater fluttered backward.
Whatever had happened
had just happened.
Trucks piled up
behind us, a procession
for the woman none of us knew.
And in this curve of dust
and sky, on Route 62-180
to El Paso, beside a mountain
where that morning
we’d risen in the wind,
where somewhere close a border
had been drawn,
we waited and were told
the wait would be long.
Men stood in clumps,
speaking Spanish, taking turns
to walk out to the desert
and relieve themselves, glance
through swaying brush
at the afterwards ahead,
wives still in their passenger seats
with the doors nudged open.
Such an easy thing,
to wait, to be alive, but
some of us closed our eyes
and sighed. How soon,
we wanted to know, could
we be back on the road like those
who would come upon this curve
in a few hours and pass over it,
as they’d pass over any other
spot along their way, not knowing?

from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

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