Two Poems by Julie Carr

New Year

—for Jean Valentine (1934-2020)

The basement, green and cold behind three doors: here was
the middle one
which you know.

In whitewashed walls, your hand had curved around its pen.
It was your kitchen where you draw your brows
and the phone rang: your daughter.

She wanted you to go to an appointment to check your head.
You laughed. I remember things, you said, I’m sitting here with.

Said my name, but it was a question. It was the night
we became again human: though tired, though old, though you did not
                call back

through the whole night, though I had to be
in a different room, “chewing up the mirror.”

In the morning, you had a gift for us: a compass on a long chain
which you wore when you skipped ahead of me, descending into the station.

I don’t know who tied these knots

We’ve been complaining about the same thing for as long as
we’ve been complaining which is long. The boy lowers himself to the floor
and on his knees, jumps. I wanted to write a poem to the future
unborn whose air I’ve been using, to write a poem to my dead mother
whose air I’ve also been using. At her stone
on her birthday, we talked about landlords. The hills held
new corpses, winged ants swarmed a name. It was fall, I needed
sunglasses, my son was excited about the sky. After you, says a young man
with low boots to an old one in a coat. It was good to be born
at least at first, says a woman with a four-footed stick. She makes her masked
                  way
her silver earrings sway. I hiked a hard trail and sat on a ridge.
No amount of sweat or view seemed to ask me to live, but with them
I washed my face.

by Julie Carr

Julie Carr

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