Poetry: Katie Ford

Some mornings there was bread on the air
and transoms opened to let the oaks wake you,
light chains of pollen caught on the dog’s sleeping face. 
And afternoons of parades, people dressed like ghosts
and cyclones, like government officials and a giraffe
on stilts, animal of the deep savannah we wished we stood on.
It is a far wish, a spring wish,
and so the people of the parade let go of
balloons they dreamt were their minds,
not the minds they woke to find writhing in the gravel, 
but rising tangerine minds, porcelain white, blue 
of a sky in which to be absolutely lost. 
So much pleasure I remember
when mine slipped from sight
but could be imagined almost perfectly and gone,
warm on the string where I’d held it.

Coliseum Theater
for Josh

The houses burn, the oil rigs burn,
but when the oldest moviehouse burns,
our days are named by fires.
All the films we saw there, their reels melting, the rows
where lovers went because they knew
or didn’t know, it doesn’t matter,
that watching the same story
could make them closer.

Hearing the clicking of the same tapes,
the same rough frames clacking
like a priest’s thurible, the smoky
black-and-whites drifting over the audience
watching the radiantly nimble actors
who loved and died
or loved and lived because something they wanted
to play did play, suddenly, on their phonograph.

All we had then was the movies.
Our own stories kept turning away—
we made silent, glassy agreements not to tell them.
But when the moviehouse burned, what were we
to say? We who wanted so much
to say again, simply,
let’s go to the movies.
Please, just let us go.

Divining Stick

There is no promise from this earth,
though it speaks. Finches
fly from industrial firesmoke,
the low river lies
beside laborers who build back
the entire collapse.

It is June, month of the agate.
In the little watermarked house
I tie the stone to a broom
to make a divining stick. The agate
turns on a yellow thread and gives
a dull chime where metal keeps the straw tight.
I lift it up, I circle it above me.
Where will the water be? I whisper.
Where won’t it be, it answers.

These three poems have in common the perspective of a speaker returned to a devastated city—in my case, New Orleans—and are grounded in images very specific to New Orleans as well as images general to a world under threat of warming, rising waters. “Spring Wish” depicts a scene of post-storm parades . . . Mardi Gras, the year after Katrina, was both a scene of vitality and scathing political statements against the government for their paltry and ill-executed aid in the days and weeks (and years, now) after the storm. The wish that spring, for me, was the wish to let the mind go, the mind broken by what it can hardly, and sometimes cannot, bear. We were all out of our minds a bit then. Can’t we just let them go, those minds?

Psychology often follows hard facts of the physical world—when your house is built with water a few feet below ground, and there are shells pressing it back, and you look through your cracked floorboards and can see the shells because your house is raised a foot off ground…

“Coliseum Theater” is perhaps is the closest thing I’ve written to an ars poetica. I think I’ll only say this: we cannot begin to know how much we rely on the arts. And “Divining Stick” is where we might end up, in the end: back in the waters. Psychology often follows hard facts of the physical world—when your house is built with water a few feet below ground, and there are shells pressing it back, and you look through your cracked floorboards and can see the shells because your house is raised a foot off ground, the water levels of the world, rising now and on a trajectory to continue rising, permeate the brain. Perhaps New Orleanians are the closest we have, emotionally and psychologically, to humans who know what we will all feel when we are under environmental threat. Perhaps we should listen to them. Perhaps we should help them more.

—Katie Ford, Philadelphia, 2013

Katie Ford is the author of “Deposition” (2002), “Colosseum” (2008), and the forthcoming “Blood Lyrics” (2014), all published by Graywolf Press. She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College.

Repossessing Virtue: Katie Ford on Poetry, Katrina, and Wasting One’s Life: Katie Ford with Krista Tippet on American Public Media’s On Being. (2009.)

Follow our discussion of artists’ response to land, landscape and Climate Change here.

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