Ruth Thompson: Poet & Channel

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What Speaks

What speaks is unconditional. Therefore

it is not a poem.

Yet it knows a single blossom on a twig.

It knows the sound of thunder rolling in

and heat rain

and the small birds talking amongst themselves

from within the leaves.

It knows the coral stripes on the milk snake.

It knows you also in your stripes of complication

and the unwinding of your dying.

It is the earth speaking to you, the earth you share.

Go out, then, and give your attention

to the bent grasses along the trail

and the one blossom still sleeping on the hawthorn.

Having a Drink With My Daughter At the Casa Del Mar

She is a Renoir rising from this gilded half shell, a shining
Van Gogh sunflower, a tree full of August apricots.

She throws the banners of her laughter into the coffered ceilings
and the castle awakens. The waiters leap to serve her.

Outside the window, a Breugel: skaters and strollers and dogs
and a sun just beginning to drop over a stitched seam of surfers.

Lights go on in the fish place down on the pier, where we used to go
when she was a baby, when living in Santa Monica was cheap.

I think of that restaurant in the Trastevere, where every night
she toddled into the kitchen to visit, bright and uninhibited as a robin.

I remember my body shaking, and her crowning at last – no pale
Botticelli angel but black-haired and vivid and yelling like Kali.

Now I pray to the gods of clean tablecloths, plein air.
The ghosts seat themselves around the table, waiting to be fed.

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