August 13, 2023

Rebecca Starks

HERE WE WERE HAPPY

And still I fall back on the garden
like a firebreak, as if its walls might contain
the inferno sweeping through paradise,
except this time they were given no warning
because god is the municipal government,
and the tree of knowledge is one of three
thousand palm trees planted from seed
and doused with dishwater until they can live
off the rain, and Adam and Eve are the poet
and his wife whose palms cupped the earth
like a child’s face, like water, saving with love
what was ruined by improvement, until
they turned back to ashes laid beneath a stone,
because the tree of life is a banyan tree
whose roots were hung with jars of water
and whose fruit is barely edible, famine food,
and even this wasn’t spared by the flames
sparked by the flaming swords of angels
who guard the memory of what they destroy,
which are mostly faces, and the begots are us,
shameless as the first begetters
professing innocence while stumbling on
comparison: it is like war, like a bomb went off
to which the voice from the whirlwind replies
Have you ever blown the top off a mountain
or changed the tilt of the earth?
Have you ever stoked the dragon’s breath
with burning grass, or hacked sugarcane by hand?
Have you ever blacked out the moon
so you could see the stars and the stars
so you could see your own blindness?
And the snake? you ask. The snake
is the stardust between them. No,
the snake is the words on the stone.
 

from Poets Respond
August 13, 2023

__________

Rebecca Starks: “It is hard to write about the fires in Maui as they are happening and in the face of the terrible loss of life. I took refuge in W.S. Merwin’s palm garden on Maui. The title echoes the words on the stone marking his and his wife’s ashes.” (web)

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October 6, 2021

Rebecca Starks

PAPER BIRCHES IN SNOW

Impossible to see the birches and not 
think white fragility, their thin skin 
and shallow roots making them first to topple 

with the thaw, here aslant across the path two
caught easily in the crook of a red oak.

Or of my uncle in Bowling Green crying 
in an argument no one was having:
I have roots too, just as good and just as true.

Or how a working-class neighbor left her church
once the minister spoke of white privilege.

Everywhere the sodden white segments lie
ringed and knuckled black, and loosened scrolls of bark 
curl around coral-yellow lining. 

Now that he’s retired from the bank, my uncle 
spends his days rooting in genealogy,

looking backward to what made him who he is.
Mourning, more than he did Mother when she passed,
his beloved dog curled by the fire. 

* * *

Last night snow fell, covering the dormant limbs,
April fools, and all morning it’s rained  
from the canopy in drips and splats, pitting

the water-logged slush below and haloing 
tree bark in that unearthly Tarkovsky shine—

some with overlapping shingles of lichen,
some furrowed in rivulets, some smooth, 
spackled, streaked, or raw pink where woodpeckers tossed 

aside old roofing, each detail riveting 
eyes eager for earth tones—worm castings,

mud budding with minutiae, little green antennae 
sent up from soft moss, speckled fawn leaves, 
mushrooms thrusting through matted red pine needles—

after months of indiscriminate whiteness.
Difficult now not to think white privilege,

this verge of snow you can trample in any 
direction without risking wounding  
anything to the quick, at most a dead limb

cracking beneath the billowy comforter
and yours the only tracks, leading you back home.

* * *

And when it melts: more white fragility.
The last time I really saw my uncle’s wife

I was little, they were hosting Derby day,
mint leaves in lemonade, bouncy toys for us  
kids running wild, our blond, home-cut hair unbrushed,

and then the hush. I knew she was crying
because she could never have children. 

That we were something you could have. Now I see    
in the peeling flap of graying bark 
a family keepsake, the brittle bill of sale,

and reaching over all the other branches,
outlasting them, the brown hand at the auction. 

Now I understand my uncle’s looking back.
The birch’s light bark was meant to be its strength,
refusing the sun’s fugitive warmth

before it could be retracted with the frost.
The snow was never white, only transparent. 

With the thaw you pick your way more carefully.
Water drops run bulging over leaves, 
magnifying every fertile vein and pore.

from Rattle #72, Summer 2021

__________

Rebecca Starks: “I’ve never been interested in family history, but over the past few years I’ve started thinking about why I’m not, why some of my family members are, and why I left my home state and never looked back. I’ve started looking back, trying to understand what has made me who I am. Writing poetry, mapping what I am beginning to know onto what I know, is my way of trying to make out the forest—and make it out of the forest—tree by tree.” (web)

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November 24, 2020

Rebecca Starks

SPEAKING OF DISINFORMATION

I am remembering for a friend
who grew up in a household
with an alcoholic father
whose illness was kept secret
from the kids, only the mom knew
why all the copies of the key
to the car trunk were broken off
but one, the one he kept with him—
I am remembering for her
how one day while the kids
watched cartoons on the couch
they found a half-empty
vodka bottle wedged between the cushions
and brought it to their mom,
not knowing what it was,
and how later that evening when
the father had them all stand
in front of the couch where he sat
on one cushion, their mom on the other,
hands folded in her lap, a cardboard
storage box resting on the crack
between them, and once everyone was still
proceeded to explain
that this bottle was a prize
he was meant to give out
at an awards ceremony, it had come
in this cardboard box, with its two
sets of flaps he opened
to demonstrate how it must have
slipped out and fallen between
the cushions, where some of it
evidently spilled and evaporated—
how the kids wouldn’t have remembered
beyond that day to this
except that it seemed so strange
and formal, the way he called
a press conference about it
when it was plain as day:
the box, the bottle, the crack
between the cushions.

from Poets Respond
November 24, 2020

__________

Rebecca Starks: “I was trying to understand, on a smaller scale than national politics, how an obvious falsehood can seem obviously true to someone else, how it requires both active and passive participants, and how we can ignore for a long time the cognitive dissonance.” (web)

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October 3, 2019

Rebecca Starks

LANDSCAPE WITH RAI STONES

Dozens of them, not erratics from melting glaciers
but the kind of boulder you can buy for your yard
and mow around to divert the monotony of ease,
big as Yap islander money, those huge wheels
of stone too heavy to move except by title.
All these tents and carts might as well be Rai stones
for all you can uproot them from your street.
The homeless call it home. They’ve gotten comfortable.
They might as well sit on a seaweed-draped rock on the coast
and call it money, call it theirs until the next wave.
It was your idea to raise the funds for them,
these boulders squatting all along the sidewalk,
occupying the margins so you don’t have to be seen
trying not to look at what others don’t have.

from Poets Respond
October 3, 2019

__________

Rebecca Starks: “I wrote this in response to the news that San Francisco residents pooled funds to buy boulders to keep the homeless off their street. The boulders have since been removed (for pragmatic reasons).” (web)

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October 8, 2017

Rebecca Starks

OPEN CARRY

What if each of their Lives had Stood,
a folded Umbrella, until that Day—

What if the National Umbrella Association
lobbied to change luck’s laws
and we could open umbrellas in the house,
lay them on beds and give them as gifts—
and even on sunny days, carry them open
in night clubs and churches,
movie theaters and elementary schools,
offices and outdoor concerts—a real cause,
so we no longer had to leave them shut up
in closets or hanging on walls
or leaning against porch railings
or stashed in the drawers of bedside tables
in hotels—so that everyone could be prepared,
everyone be saved, the black honeycomb
of mourning stand its ground
shoulder to shoulder against the cloud’s
dark motive …
It rains four inches a year in Las Vegas.
What if this isn’t the time to talk about umbrellas?

I have one in my bag right now,
a Robinson, a Gamp, a spring-loaded automatic,
at a touch it will bloom
to receive the syncopated sound of rain
dancing, hopping on the taut roof
the way a gun can sound like firecrackers from the sky.
It’s true there are still puddles and spray,
there is the lower half of you, the arm aches,
the skin blows inside out like a skirt in the wind.
See the man trying to keep a woman dry,
covering suede and silk and hair
with the shield of his body.
What if umbrellas don’t keep you dry,
people keep you dry, and are broken trying.

from Poets Respond
2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor Winner

__________

Rebecca Starks: “The impulse for the poem came from something Mike Spies said on NPR this week, during an interview prompted by the Las Vegas shooting: ‘At the core of [the NRA’s] agenda is to normalize gun carrying in as many places as possible until it just becomes as natural of a thing … as any other accessory that people carry around.’ Other elements of the poem come from the news coverage of the shooting, in particular the portraits of those killed, including several men who died while shielding others.” (website)

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February 11, 2016

Rebecca Starks

POLITICIANS

They rely on your forgetting. They forget
themselves, or everything but. Around forever,
always the same, but always distancing themselves
from who they were. Like the first secretary
of the regional party committee—responsible
for not putting iodine reserves in the water
after Chernobyl—they aren’t criminals
but products of their time. The time is always now.
The place now is Flint, that prehistoric tool.
The same products, but made of cheaper ingredients
in deceptively slightly smaller packages
with new health claims. They want you to buy them.

They don’t remember how the refrigerator died
one summer and they didn’t get a new one
for a biblical seven years—maybe a few weeks,
they say now, refusing to look at the proof,
the email where we refused to come home
again until they bought a new one. My guess is
it’s the capitulation they meant to block out,
not the seven years they bought bags of ice
for the freezer each day so they could keep a jug
of milk cold in it. Once a week they bought
a few pints of ice cream and ate it all at once.
But the seven years had to go, too. It’s a process—

They couldn’t decide on what kind to get.
The new ones were bigger and didn’t fit.
Double doors, freezer on bottom, ice dispenser,
novelties they shelved as too radical a change.
We don’t like the new one when we visit,
we can’t reach things, we bump our heads,
it takes up too much room but doesn’t hold enough.
We haven’t forgotten what the old one was like
or what was where on the shelves: Velveeta
and pimento olives and Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup
and Smucker’s jam and gallon jugs of skim milk,
and margarine and D cheese, we called it, for its shape.
The food is still there but it never goes bad.

Now there are leafy greens and grass-fed butter,
at least when we visit. Great Harvest bread
instead of Roman Meal, and in the cupboard there’s
low-sodium Progresso instead of Campbell’s.
That’s progress. It feels like progress
until you look for a functioning can opener.
But I understand, with all due respect, why people
give up and vote for their parents anyway. Because
they know them, they aren’t so bad anymore,
they’ll do what you want. They were never that bad.
Though didn’t they—did they really?—rent a car
every day for fifteen years, when theirs died?

They laugh.

Poets Respond
February 11, 2016

[download audio]

__________

Rebecca Starks: “I wrote this after watching the New Hampshire Democratic debate. I was thinking about how voters are expected to have short memories and often accommodate the expectation. The Flint water crisis and cover-up has also been on my mind, and I was struck by the parallels recently when I read Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl. And it all took me back to my first experience of politics, if it’s not everyone’s—the family I grew up in.” (website)

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