Lance Larsen

December 2, 2022

“Widow Water” by Lance LarsenPosted by

Lance Larsen

WIDOW WATER

All summer, garden snakes slithered in and out 
of her grief. Now she has Canada geese to count, 
 
as they angle south for the season. The lake 
is empty of wings, reminding her how ice first 
 
honors edges, how inky skies honor where 
he drowned. At night, she makes and unmakes 
 
the bed but never sleeps in it. By day, the leaves 
don’t fall fast enough so she walks under 
 
the maple, banging branches with a rake. Gloves? 
She lost them weeks ago during a midnight 
 
ramble, so now she wears his hunting socks 
on her hands, wool with red stripes. She saves
 
his whiskers in a shaving mug, clipped fingernails 
rolled up in an old bra, little fixes that fix 
 
nothing. She used to scatter mums on waves 
but grew tired of watching them serenely float. 
 
Now she lobs one of his hammers or a handful
of screws, each splash a little gulp, a thank you.
 
On the couch tonight she’ll light his last cigarette
and let it smolder down to ash while she eats 
 
a pomegranate, jewel by bleeding jewel, smoke 
tonguing the wall like a spirit seeking release. 
 

—from Rattle #77, Fall 2022

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Lance Larsen: “I find it nigh impossible to write an elegy without thinking of Bishop’s ‘One Art’: ‘then practice losing farther, losing faster.’ ‘Widow Water’ traces the rituals, or soul bargains, we make out of the everyday to memorialize a loved one. Who knows what will help us cope, collecting whiskers in an old mug or throwing a hammer in a lake? The loved one is there and not there, and sometimes we can’t tell the difference.”

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November 28, 2022

“The Girl” by Lance LarsenPosted by

Lance Larsen

THE GIRL

The girl has been missing five days. 
Also her boyfriend. She’s fifteen, 
red blonde hair, friend of my daughter. 
We’re taping a flyer to every door—
who wouldn’t? The girl’s pink backpack 
with skulls has entered my house, 
her two hands and a pencil ready to cram 
 
for Chemistry. We are covering a part 
of town too good for us—Yale Way, 
Harvard Circle, Stanford Lane …  
My daughter tapes the south side 
of the street while I tape the north, 
for speed she says, then she wanders 
to my side, speed not a god she wants 
 
to worship all alone. Our four 
taping hands much happier. The girl 
has been missing five days. Her tennis 
shoes scribbled with anime faces 
have entered my house. There are ants 
that know where she is and lint between 
her toes, maybe tampons and old 
 
taco wrappers and a green water bottle. 
And with each flyer, we are helping 
to drag the reservoir and comb 
the woods and wander a mystery street 
in Mexico, stuffing $20 in her right 
pocket, $40 in her left. We cross a river 
and my daughter throws in a stick. 
 
Gone in a swirl. The girl has been 
missing five days. We are helping 
her escape a man made of barbed 
wire and the beds he wet as a child 
and the cats he burned with cigarettes. 
We are with her cold body, patting 
her hand, helping her toes study 
 
the temperature of dirt. Meanwhile, 
I’m studying shades of fear, light yellow 
masquerading as daffodils, the shaggy 
browns of a dog barking us off 
a porch. The girl, missing five days, 
is not thinking of pi or personification 
or E=mc2 or resilient Rosa Park. 
 
The girl’s freckles have entered 
my house, the part in her hair. 
And just last week her arms balancing 
two pizzas—her chewing mouth, 
my daughter’s chewing mouth. It feels wrong 
for the girl to go missing so close 
to Easter. My daughter asks if I am ready 
 
for a break. We cross the street 
to sit in little-kid swings in the park. 
We want this to last, the saving 
of the missing girl, her collarbone 
and ankles, her henna tattoo, birthmark 
over her left eye, on a morning, blue 
with waiting, we may never see again. 
 

—from Rattle #77, Fall 2022

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Lance Larsen: “When my daughter’s high school friend went missing, I found myself in deep denial: how could she be gone, she was just in my house? I wrote this poem to explore the magical thinking that filled those days of waiting. If I rehearsed certain details (street names, colors, freckles, etc.), maybe she would come back. Of course, I was also trying to cast a spell on my own daughter and keep her safe forever. I consider this a poem of prayer, a poem of preparatory mourning, even if Deity is never invoked directly.”

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September 24, 2021

“Urine Poem” by Lance LarsenPosted by

Lance Larsen

URINE POEM

The last thing the dying do is pee themselves.
My paramedic brother explained this
to me at my aunt’s funeral. Everyone, he said, 
Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe, Batman, Catwoman,
even James Dean, who died driving his silver 
Spyder, which he nicknamed “Little Bastard.”
Even Jesus, I asked? Well, he said, maybe not Jesus.

I was ten and scared, almost eleven
and constantly blushing, and now the world
was wetly new. If someone died on screen, 
I pictured a puddle. For expiring queens,
I added enough piss to lick survivors.
No one was off the hook. That final death
kiss in Romeo and Juliet, the Zeffirelli version—

I pictured a dampish blush in the prince’s crotch.
All the great war scenes, ten thousand bayoneted 
bodies—they smelled of blood and smoke.
Also urine. For weeks, my world was soaked 
in briny Hallelujahs, an ode to spills—
all undies of the dead soaked, his and hers, 
pants and skirts, shorts and slinky gowns.

Despite our noble architecture, wet would out, 
water would wend its briny way. James Bond,
the Beatles, the life guard I was crushing on, 
prickles of hair under her arms, all would trickle
into the next life, their thighs bathed 
in the motherly stuff we once swam in,
all skin christened in the end, all soiled,

all almost sacramental. Thank you gravity,
thank you dews distilling. We drank 
and we simmered, and this broth snaked 
our fissures and crannied our nooks. 
Wolfman Jack, Nadia Comaneci, all three
glorious sisters on the Brady Bunch, John Wayne, 
me. Each time we peed was a dress rehearsal.

First the dry whoosh of spirit leaving the body, 
which the ancients weighed in whispers,
in the wing beat of a gnat, then the dam 
would break. Or at least leak. Exodus 
in the end, water and salt, water and silt, 
all brackish molecules 3.5 billion years young,
all seeping back to the sea, goodbye President

Nixon, goodbye Julia Child, no one to trace
that final journey but angels and lapping dogs.

—from Rattle #72, Summer 2021

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Lance Larsen: “In a poem over 20 years old, I describe floating in a swimming pool late at night: ‘I kept the lights off to blur my edges.’ In childhood, the demarcation between self and world often felt smudgy, as if I was on the verge of dissolving into something beautiful or terrifying. I was never entirely clear which. How to center yourself on this darkly turning planet? When I try to rewind the clock via poetry, that strange opaqueness, that lovely permeability often returns. And mystery, once again, is everywhere.” (web)

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March 29, 2021

“And Also I Ran” by Lance LarsenPosted by

Lance Larsen

AND ALSO I RAN

I wheedled a ten-minute visit from the night 
nurse. This was Friday, the evening after 
my best friend hurtled through a windshield 
at 70 mph, the day before I drove 
to a numbing family reunion for blue-hair aunts. 
He had a machine to count his breaths, 

a tube to collect his pee, and a pair of legs 
that would never again shuffle or glide through this life. 
Every six hours his Stryker bed flipped him 
like a flapjack, stomach down for now, 
with a cutout for his face, so I sprawled 
on the floor. Days before, we had lain on grass, 

close as sleeping bags, counting stars 
and girlfriends we didn’t have. Tonight, more 
of the same bull, and less. His chin and my dirty 
shoes trading gossip, the eighty-seven stitches
on his back playing hard to get, and the moon 
outside skinny dipping in the fountain. 

I was fifteen plus four months, and my friend 
was fifteen plus blood all over the Ford 
Bronco, even on the road, even on trees, 
he said, promise me that you’ll definitely check 
out the crash site. And I said no, not 
one part of me wants to see blood on trees.

Before leaving, I counted stitches on my friend’s 
bad shoulder, then touched his good one, 
warmish like when you put your arm around 
a girl at a matinee. And the hum of machines 
was a prayer to healing, and the dirty
tiles were a prayer to grit, and the intern 

was a ten-fingered prayer to vitals and charts.
And my friend saying Hey, man, later, was amen. 
Outside, the sprinklers sputtered and hissed
and did a silvery dance with the grass, the stars 
tried to go all the way with sleeping cars, 
and the dark said, What is this, amateur hour? 

I broke into a run then, sliding through chain 
link to an endless empty parking lot. With so many 
overhead lights I had three shadows at once, 
like three wavery souls. When I ran, they moved, 
one pinning me to pavement, one sliding 
off like oily water, one being born up ahead. 

What did I care? When I closed my eyes 
they went away. Just a buzzing breeze 
and these slabs called legs doing their work. 
They didn’t want to run. My lungs pushed 
them, my slippery beating heart, and my friend’s 
catheter leaking amber bubbles into room 514. 

Who needed a soul, or the disappearing shadow 
of a soul? Breath was enough, and hurrying
blood, provided it stayed inside. Nine-thirty
at night, the day after and the day before. 
A clean, brisk, heavy, terrifying, innocent 
Friday in June. I ran and ran and also I ran.

—from Rattle #70, Winter 2020
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Lance Larsen: “In a poem over twenty years old, I describe floating in a swimming pool late at night: ‘I kept the lights off to blur my edges.’ In childhood, the demarcation between self and world often felt smudgy, as if I was on the verge of dissolving into something beautiful or terrifying. It was never entirely clear which. How to center yourself on this darkly turning planet? When I try to rewind the clock via poetry, that strange opaqueness, that lovely permeability often returns. And mystery, once again, is everywhere.”

 

Lance Larsen is the guest on Rattlecast #97! Click here to join us live at 8 p.m. EDT …

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