Resources
Montana Poet Laureate 2005 – 2007
Sandra Alcosser's Poetry
Back to Sandra Alcosser's main page
MARE FRIGORIS
Coming home late spring night, stars a foreign
Language above me, I thought I would know
The moons like family, their dark plains — sea of
Crises, sea of nectar, serpent sea.
How quickly a century passes,
Minerals crystallize at different speeds,
Limestone dissolves, rivers sneak through its absence.
This morning I learned painted turtles
Sleeping inches below the streambank
Freeze and do not die. Fifteen degrees
Mare Frigoris, sea of cold, second
Quadrant of the moon's face. I slide toward
The cabin, arms full of brown bags, one light
Syrups over drifts of snow. Night rubs
Icy skin against me and I warm
Small delicates — cilantro, primrose—
Close to my body. A hundred million
Impulses race three hundred miles an hour
Through seventeen square feet of skin and
Gravity that collapses stars, lifts earth's
Watery dress from her body, touches me
With such tenderness I hardly breathe.
Sandra Alcosser
from "Sleeping Inside the Glacier"
WHAT MAKES THE GRIZZLIES DANCE
June and finally snowpeas
sweeten the Mission Valley.
High behind numinous meadows
lady bugs swarm, like huge
lacquered fans from Hong Kong,
like serrated skirts
of blown poppies,
whole mountains turn red.
And in the blue penstemon
grizzly bears swirl
as they bat snags of color
against their ragged mouths.
Have you never wanted
to spin like that
on hairy, leathered feet,
amid swelling berries
as you tasted a language
of early summer—shaping
lazy operatic vowels,
cracking hard-shelled
consonants like speckled
insects between your teeth,
have you never wanted
to waltz the hills
like a beast?
Sandra Alcosser
from "Except by Nature"
TRAJECTORY
The ice dam broke, slabs
jamming a cabin overland,
its faithful dog
locked inside, yelping.
My friend told me a boy jumped
the ice floe, floated for miles
through slithery red mudstone,
trout-skinned shale.
I rode the telling —
it felt like love, not familial,
but of the body, moving fast,
out of control.
We'd raced one night, my friend and I,
while we sucked black cherries.
Silent but for snapshackles.
A dozen white sails.
The body seeks abandon—
somewhere in the limbics,
the cortex, the tangible feel
of being alive.
I'd flown too close
to cropland once, almost crashed
against the soil's water-stained satin.
Einfülung, we become
the moving figure
as it rivers and freezes,
the skin responds, the heart
and eye, we empathize.
I'd watched a blind dog
find a ball by sniffing
where it bounced,
rebounded off a wall.
How magnificent
the circuits of the brain,
how the absence of an object
leaves a scent,
a line of trajectory
for even a blind spaniel to follow.
When Search and Rescue reached
the boy by flowing ice,
they wanted to tie a life jacket on him,
wanted to find his parents
to take him home. He said he wanted
to be left alone.
They threatened to arrest him.
He had long skinny arms and a sharp face,
which he turned away.
The ice floated to the opposite shore,
the boy stepped off, walked
into the forest. No one knew
if he survived, if anyone
ever saw him again.
Imagine careening slick water,
over peamouths and shiners
on a punky boat of ice, like orbiting
the planet on a tempered glass
windshield, one crash
and all would shatter, not shatter exactly,
but fracture full spectrum, like life
as we know it — radiant, beyond rescue.
Sandra Alcosser
from "Except by Nature"
APPROACHING AUGUST
Night takes on its own elegance.a
The catenary curve of snakes,
the breathing, pentagonal-shaped
flowers, the shadblow pliant
and black with berries. Orion
rises in the east, over
fat green gardens, and all meanness
is forgiven.
We canoe the river
in the amethyst hour before dark.
Two billion beats to each heart.
Two passengers fish, two paddle
past the chalk caves, the banks
of aster, the flood plains dense
with white tail and beaver.
We are lost near midnight, a moonless
summer evening, midseason in our senses,
midlife. The sky overhead like glitter ice.
The water round swollen cottonwoods
pulls like tresses and torn paper.
Today I had a letter from France.
"What a truly civilized nation," my friend wrote
as she drank her morning coffee with thick cream
in a country cafe near Avignon. "To my right
a man in a black tuxedo sips raspberry liqueur
and soda."
Here on the same latitude we lie back at dawn
on the caving bank of the Bitterroot.
A shadow slips through the silver grasses.
And then a moth.
And then the moon.
Sandra Alcosser
from "Except by Nature"
FOXFIRE
Once I thought we would know everything,
that's what this was for, this fox fire,
this fragrant energy like nighthawks
screaming at dusk.
All winter I stalked elk that were down
from the mountain and starving.
I walked the low places where they galloped
through slush, the rocks where they wallowed
and pawed for new grasses, the tooth marks
on aspen, the mineral lick, the creek
where the water was roiled and milky.
I sweated through immovable snow
and fell down exhausted, but when I imagined
I'd stand in a thicket, my eyes glazed over,
my sharp breath, and know the cold
communion of elk, I was wrong.
Once I thought we were all gods
blessed and strutting this lovely planet.
The earth was a minor passing, like the path
down to our ditch for water, pretty
with serviceberry, but transient.
As a young girl I swung upside down
with other girls as we hung by our heels
from a jungle gym and contemplated heaven.
It was a silky place. I preferred
purgatory, like a dark café,
retrievers curled about the table legs
and the warm abraded doors.
At thirty-eight I'm still the babe
of my family. Once I thought they would teach me,
that even their last breath would be a key,
but now I see them drifting off from their easy chairs
like a tribe leaving shore together, the television
blaring, their mouths sagged open, and when they
return for brief moments, they stare at me
as if I were a stranger.
All that I will ever know is right here
in the wash and till of these few acres.
Frost tonight and behind it the whole summer
so brief I can still see the bronco-faced calf
born to the bloody pasture and the brown trout
suspended in its first glittering insect hatch.
There will never be more than twilight, a valley
receding to glass. In this tiny paradise
of common flowers, the waist-high marigolds
blaze up like golden dowagers. Venus rises alone
and early to a cold black sky.
Sandra Alcosser
from "A Fish to Feed All Hunger"
CRY
White legs and pink footpads, the black cat
loved me. It was summer, a perfect flush
of weeds and flowers. Mornings he'd listen
for my kettle, the screen door snap, and he'd know
I'd come to breakfast in the asters. As I ate
a bowl of red berries, he'd burl and stretch
and claw about my hips.
One night as the cat and I watched the moon eclipse
amid the scuttling of bear and mice, there was a cry
from the forest, not seductive, but pained and wailing
like a siren. The next day the cat was gone. I'd heard
that even blackbirds broke veins in their throats
singing love songs. I stood by my window practicing,
trying to shape the feline song, to call him back.
My daughter was no different than a cat,
tapping the window glass over my bed,
crying at night till I rocked her frail ribs
against mine. Her hands on my breast,
dark curls sweated against her forehead,
tell me about the princess, she said, the way
she slept in a blue dress, waiting.
It was a month of heatstorms, lightning scratched
like Sanskrit across the valley. A boy came riding
our footpath. He wore black jeans, a sliver of green
malachite at his neck. The breathless afternoon,
the bees laid out on the red eyes of gaillardia.
Before she left my daughter cut off her long hair
and bleached it yellow.
There were years when I too turned from my mother's
cool white arms. First the pale boy, scarred
and silent, then my husband. We cleaned the ditches
together in spring, raking out the silt and dead branches.
He played a silver harmonica. A ring-boned pony
was what I had when we ran away. A field of salsify
and a black skillet.
Stretched out on the porch this noon, resting
my swollen legs, I'm tired of canning tomatoes,
the house thick with red steam and basil.
The bite of salt and vinegar, cucumbers
floating like green bathers in brine.
All that flesh I've tended gone to pulp.
All that mismatched tenderness.
One weed knows another and each animal has its own cry
and when it's right, it's easy. Easy as my husband
behind me now, holding open the black screen door.
He is drinking tea with honey and a halo of gnats
screams about his face. Let's sneak down to the basement,
he says, where it's cool and dark. He cracks a bead of ice
in his teeth and offers half to me.
Sandra Alcosser
from "A Fish to Feed All Hunger"
A FISH TO FEED ALL HUNGER
On the porch like night peelings,
bags of red hackles.
The fisherman is dressing,
capes of moose mane around him.
In his vise, he wraps the waist
of a minnow with chenille.
We wade downstream. I am barefoot.
The fisherman stands, thigh deep,
seining insects. Perhaps today
in this blizzard of cottonwood
it is the caddis that rises,
after a year in mud, from larva
to phoenix in four seconds.
The fisherman ties an imitator
of hare's mask and mallard breast.
He washes his hands in anisette,
then casts back, a false cast,
watching the insects legs
break the water.
I line the creel with hay and mint
and lay in six pale trout. There is a pink
line that runs the length of a rainbow's
belly more delicate than an inner ear.
It makes the whole basket quiver.
The fisherman does not ask why I come.
I have neither rod nor permit.
But I see him watch me afternoons as I bend
to brush down my rooster-colored hair.
He understands a fish to feed all hunger.
And the lure is the same.
Sandra Alcosser
from "A Fish to Feed All Hunger"
THE ENTOMOLOGIST'S LANDSCAPE
I go the circuit of my enclosure over and over again.
Henri Fabre
He picks through the couchgrass, here a black-eared
chat on its nest of blue eggs, and there in the red clay
a natterjack bathes its warty back. Henri crouches,
like a scarab in his yellow jacket, and waits.
His son, Little Paul, keeps a birdcage full of peacock moths,
all male. Downstairs a female slips off her pale cocoon
and stands shivering. Wet fur, maroon and white.
On her wings, enormous chestnut eyes. Henri carries her
in a bell jar from room to room. At night he and Little Paul
turn the suitors loose. They storm through the cypress
to the laboratory where they beat against
the white gauze bell.
When the bait is right, anything can find you.
I look across the river this morning where last I saw a grizzly
batting swollen salmon. A large man stands in a thicket
of raspberries, waving. He wears a tweed jacket
and patent leather boots. Perhaps it is the cottonwood bud
I smashed, dabbed behind my ear like bloody perfume.
Mother's gone off to Maine in search of a secret island.
She will gather lobster, rub their green bellies so they hum
as they enter boiling water. On the leeward side
she will meet a Rockefeller who mows his own
boulder-dense lawn. If I stay in one place too long,
grow my hair like a banner, and for the hummingbirds
hang out a red begonia, whose secret island will I be?
Other than the muscular man, only one person comes.
An old painter with a reducing lens, she grades
the landscape: the mountains are a bookcase
full of shale and lichen, the trapezoidal lightning,
the air that tastes of grape jam. By all standards,
she says, we are sublime.
I myself prefer small scenes. I would have liked Henri.
We could have spent the day together on our hands and knees,
year after year the same weed lot, studying the digger wasp
as she squeezed a wild bee to her breast, then turned
to lick honey from its gasping tongue.
Sandra Alcosser
from "A Fish to Feed All Hunger"
MICHAEL'S WINE
Winter again and we want
the same nocturnal rocking,
watching cedar spit
and sketch its leafy flames,
our rooms steamy with garlic
and greasy harvest stew.
Outside frosted windows—
claw marks high on yellow pine,
Venus wobbling in the sky,
the whole valley a glare of ice.
We gather in the kitchen
to make jam from damsons
and blue Italian prunes,
last fruit of the orchard,
sweetest after frost, frothy bushels
steeping in flecked enamel pots.
Michael, our neighbor,
decants black cherry wine,
fruit he ground two years ago,
bound with sugar, then racked
and racked again. It's young and dry.
We toast ourselves, our safety,
time the brandied savory
of late November.
I killed a man this day last year,
says Michael, while you were away.
Coming home from town alone,
you know the place in Lolo where the road
curves, where the herd of horses got loose
New Year's Eve, skidded around
white- eyed, cars sliding into them?
Didn't see the man until my windshield broke.
Could have been any one of us.
Twenty-nine years old, half-drunk,
half-frozen. Red and black hunting jacket.
Lucky I was sober. We stand there
plum-stained as Michael's face
fractures into tics and lines.
He strokes his wine red beard.
Michael with no family,
gentle framer's hands, tilts the bottle,
pours a round, as if to toast.
It was so cold, he says,
that when it was over,
he swirls the distilled cherries
under a green lamp, there was less
blood on the pavement than you see
this moment in my glass.
Sandra Alcosser
from "Except by Nature"
WOODPECKER
On the day the poppies
burst their tight green fists,
and the geum and the geranium
bloomed all bloody red
and ruby, so the pileated
woodpecker returned.
He richocheted off the pine trunk,
then picking among yellow bugs
sped quickly to the pea vines.
Fat-breasted, he drilled his name,
let it drip and trill round the forest,
down his throat,
landlord of the mountain,
mafioso in a tweed vest,
red-crested whale of the sky,
he announced the summer solstice.
We ran to the window knowing
at last snow would melt on the Bitterroots
to flood our fields, knowing
it was time for aurora borealis,
heaven's beast, her tentacles
flicking like jellyfish
on the shortest
night of the year.
We did the dance of the woodpecker,
the fat flicker, the pagan priest,
when clover bloomed, salsify
and wild roses, and we knew
that winter was over, we did the dance
of the smart, hard-headed,
flashy creatures of the world.
After all, in summer when blood
is thick and dark as the flicker's crest,
when we might all fatten on berries
and weeds alone, isn't there room
for each of us, even the greedy ones?
After all, have you never wanted
to drive at top speed,
to slam into a tree or dive
from a ledge or catch fire
or slit your wrists
and let the fluids geyser?
Not suicide, but its burning,
not rage directed at humankind—no,
the heart remains a sweet berry and ripe.
But red drives the stickleback
wild, red small spots among the green,
among the brown rocks.
And so on the long day
of the summer solstice
when the world spins
silly with light, we do
the dance of the woodpecker,
twirling our skirts
and mustaches, tapping
our resonant branches,
our underwear flashing white,
as we shake the irregular flags
of our body into
undulant, raw flight.
Sandra Alcosser
from "Except by Nature"
