Five Poems

By Maya C. Popa

Alpine Fellowship 2020 – Writing Prize Winner

My Brother Doesn’t Wake Up Wishing We Were Closer

Years I aimed to be, if not beloved,
then necessary: default accomplice

to summer violence, tadpoles shot
along the lake, arrows sinking in soft skulls.

Our parents pandered to his power,
his bored cruelty accepted as a boy’s.

No one was surprised when he left,
but no one could be sure what for:

reckless, premature death, or disappointment
blurring its own shadow. It was June,

the hammock still some distance
from the ground. I believed in that

internal life that silently weaves between two
a kind of due, imagined holding our parents

like unbearable flowers while the years
crept blindly through the garden.

What I believed would have kept me
in a hopeless girlhood. He told me once

about a frat brother in the woods of Virginia
(all had been drinking—no one could say

how he got there) who awoke to a deer
peering over him, steam rising from soft

articulations in its flesh. And he followed
to where nothing was expected, unexpected—

the creek bank, mossy shoulder, all attachment
to plot unreasonable. Years, I mistook

the boy for my brother, palms flat to
the earth to find a trail out of our family.

It was my listening that cost me, hoping
to be heard. My compulsion for the confessor’s

tether, to feel his cool mouth at the shell
of my ear, then to sleep all night in the gossip

of grasses, where the breeze tallied the trees,
and it was possible to wake him.

Late Genesis 

Now the earth was full of violence, j-walkers,
sports deities, faces on skin and screens
worshiped evenly.

With everything visible, it was hard
to see the world,

to believe you were another meat.

There was malice, but mostly
a kind of grief.

Leaves on trees but a shiver in the daylight. 

Chiefly, it was language
that confounded them—

permafrost suggesting permanence,

not the flux of a fjord,
not the forfeiture.

 The people combed for answers
without footprint, ones hedonists
would recognize as relevant, 

(these were hung like sneakers from a power line)

but the picture of a polar bear
perched atop an icecap
made everyone feel lonely and unclean. 

They wondered such a thing had ever existed,
a knoll of living snow, eyes plucked
from a child’s coat. 

                                            Hadn’t it all
seemed beholden to them? 

Newfoundland to Vancouver,
McClure to Bering Strait. 

Noah was 500 when the floods came,

his children—Shem, Ham, Japheth—grown.

All the sons had sons after the flood,
as ice takes its cue from ice

before it ends, in elegant agreement.

Spring

Time persists, yes, I can see there are new branches.

The grass, first in a line of transformations,
seemingly risen overnight. 

Color is pouring back into the hours,
or forgiveness, whatever the case may be.

With one decisive tug at the earth, the robin’s drawn forth
a shimmering worm, 

with such precision, it is almost a cruel pleasure. 

This, the nightmare we dreamed but did not wake from.

Time is passing, I concede.       A squirrel leaps
from one branch to another.

A hawk studies the field at dusk.

The park announces the season over and over
to no one, 

and the silence cranes to listen.

Terraces of light now that the day is longer.

When joy comes, will I be ready, I wonder.

Wound is the Origin of Wonder

A cross-breeze between this life
and the imagined one.

I am stuck in an almost life,
in an almost time. If I could say,

but I cannot, and so on. Sunlight
dizzies through the barren trees,

the skyline, a blue fog against
a yellow light, and on the highway

every Westward car blinds me.
Every surface reflects

that quiet understanding: decisions
have been made, irreversible decisions

to upend beauty for something
approximate—the airport hotel,

its Eiffel Tower on the roof,
a playground near the public storage.

Beyond, bridges like monuments
to fracture, and a sign for Pain Law:

not metaphor, but litigation.
Who would not, given acreage

in another’s mind, lie there
for a while to watch the sky be sky?

 Instructions for an Impending Snowpocalypse

Build an igloo by betraying
one truth for another.

Leave snow's soft world
for its handsaw alternative

and live there, mournful
in the half-space between

a word's ether and its real touch.