Nance Van Winckel

Three Poems

CAUTIONARY TALE

The funny bearded goat
goes down on his knees, the in-and-out
of frail ribs in the dust.

I listen, then tell you what the bellboy
said. Since he used his hands
I use mine. Since he’s crying, I am.

The hotel’s tiled lobby we’d walked through
yesterday—is today’s dust around a goat.
All of us had been bussed to a basement.

Overhead, a factory of gray machines
and the ping-ping as metal parts shook loose.
Everyone gnawing at their own wounds

through a night of punctured breathing,
after a week of upended destinies,
and a long month between your dream

and mine. Keeping our distance,
and then not. The nuts and bolts
falling. I touched your chest.

Those ribs beneath your dusty suit
seemed the first ribs taking in
the first breaths of the world.

TO THE FAR NORTH

A plane aims toward the new moon,
which is luminous over us earthbound
sleepers. The sheen of worn spots
on our nightclothes. Bare ankles
in bare moonlight, where the dead
go searching for their living children—
dispersed now, far into the free provinces.

When I could not speak I gave you the tiny Chinese
fortune. From a cookie I could not eat.
A sentence of Good highways ahead. Kind words.
That scrap of white in your palm.
A patience to slow the failing light
as we stood to go separate ways. Kind
words. Few words. When we had none.

My language is a mist over the maize
back home. Neither these dead nor the living
know it. Here, words are cleaved
by coughs. A mouth of air, a blown lung.
And this clear frequency of moonlight.
Your plane’s wild roar through my silence.

WHOEVER'S THE LAST BLESSED
BLOWS OUT THE CANDLE

To hear a man laughing softly outside,
his face in my mind under those red maples.
To sit in the dark chapel and listen for a last
decibel of the laugh. Waiting it out.

And the stained glass with a tiny white hole
in the blue hem of Christ’s gown.
Everyone who sees it keeps its secret.

Remembering our driver’s mother standing
this morning on the porch step she’d just washed
as she does every day, and waving her wet rag
at us. Headed Where, she’d called,
though we’d only turned and nodded yes.

Outside the church, the plow horses drink slowly
from the new creek. A dirty water. Last week
when they’d pastured here, there’d been
no creek—the rain only light then. Cool
on their haunches. Today they nod up
those huge incredulous eyes, then nod
back down, drinking slowly, very slowly.