Michael Henry

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Poet: Michael Henry

Michael Henry is co-founder and Executive Director of Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the largest independent literary arts center in the Rocky Mountain west. He is the author of three books of poetry and has received fellowships from the Colorado Council on the Arts and Platte Forum. He was recently awarded a Livingston Fellowship from the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation. He lives in Thornton, Colorado, with his wife and two daughters.

Poems

Prayers

Each prayer you whisper is a small bird
rising up, alighting on a branch in the tree
of desire, twisted gray arms, flashing leaves.

These birds will not enter heaven,
will not lose themselves in bright clouds, or run
into picture windows. They hover

and settle in the ivy wall along
the garden, their small voices ringing bells,
their flitting nerves unseen.

You know their closeness each day,
wingbrush against your cheek when raking
the leaves, a shock of breath. At dawn

they wake you, their conversations
a chatter of words without punctuation
or denouement. When you gave them up—

on your knees, in flannel pajamas,
your hands pressed together, smooth
candle-flame of fingers¾you believed

they would come to rest in God’s ear
and make your life something else
than what it is. But you know, you know:

they are just gray-brown finches, with hearts
like ours, searching for seed, building
downy nests in the eaves of the house.

August, Public Pool

Children swarm under the tower. A hammer
ticks on steel high above, where a massive bucket tilts.
Farther, farther. Almost there. By the false blue
shoreline, three teenage girls bronze their backs.
Boys walk past, flexed and puffed, swallow hard,
lick dry lips. Everything is tease and
anticipation. My little girls are in the mass, waiting.
A bell finally gongs, the bucket tips and spills
chlorinated molten silver on the masses. There are
screams and shouts, and then, it’s done, for now.
A lanky boy cannonballs into the deep end.
A mother floats on a tube, eyes closed,
twin ponytailed daughters ferrying her along the lazy
river. If I were more—more something—I might
grab my wallet, go buy a popsicle or
Cherry Coke. Sweetness burning my throat, ease all
around, the sun going down gold and intimate.
But I’ve had my life of wanting and sometimes getting,
and even though part of me wants to never leave,
the pretty-boy lifeguards have already begun
to stack chairs. Closing time. My girls scurry up
blue-lipped and shivering. They want
chocolate cones at Dairy Queen and I won’t say no.

To Sylvia Plath

In my head a voice recites your lines.
Your blacks cackle and drag and interrupt
the joy of the swing band music,

alas, their brass can never last. Too full, too rich,
it carries me to tears, fleeting yet shameless.
The band is crowded into the gazebo,

the sun gold and dying, pure heat.
Off in the distance, two men push a cart, gab
in Spanish. From them a boy buys

a can of lemonade. In the distance,
a blue fountain shimmers in the center
of the brown lake. August is here in full

and I am getting used to this sort of thing.
Your summer bees have drowsed and are
lazy, their compass shot. Everyone

I love is either buried, or far away.
Your old colossus remains
on the hill, and never will get put right.

Like you, I am morbidly cloaked. Like always.
Lemonade and sweet music
force a momentary stay, little more.

This morning I read “Edge” I read “Balloons.”
I saw you with those people and the bees,
your thumb with the bloody cut.

I don’t expect a miracle, or accident.
Far away from here, someone is
leaving a pebble on your stone.

Poem Beginning with Lines from Bob Dylan

In the room the heat pipes just cough
and the country music station plays soft,
and I cannot find the switch to turn it off,
so when the film projector jams
I am too late. That sad burn-and-peel
of the home movie lives I once knew—
my first two-wheeled bike ride,
my sisters and I leaping into a pool,
or, before my time, Mom and Dad’s
after-wedding dash to a green car
tailed with stringed cans,
all in a faded Kodachrome field.
The celluloid has bubbled and smoked
away and broke, leaving me
to wander white blaze with whirring fan.
How strange as each dawn the sky
turns blue and I’m reminded of the dead
cold mornings when I used to pray
for the earth to let me go.
Now I pray I will have all the time
I’ll need, before I’m found again
in the tiny wood-paneled rooms
of the old house on McKinley Parkway
as those old pipes cough and clank,
where country music plays soft, twangy
and sweet on an old radio somewhere,
and when my mother brings me
some tea my grandmother
will stand in the doorway and ask
if I am hungry, do I want something to eat,
while there in the living room,
where the TV is forever on,
in the light cast by a reading lamp
my grandfather makes
his way through a newspaper
without a date on it.

Tomatoes

After Stephen Dobyns

I’m on a parapet looking down
at upturned faces and voices
rising like feathers in an
updraft. I am afraid of heights but know
I will fall, and in the knowing my fear
is singed, my will is a skeleton bound
by silver twine, on my cold wrists
there are bracelets, inlaid turquoise with silver
hammered thin by a Hopi in Arizona,
a boy whose face is wide and soft, who blinks
each time the small hammer strikes.
I once had a girl, once lived in the gray
cosmos of her cigarette smoke, her
dark-paneled room, her gold-brown eyes
and face so finely wrought,
like porcelain. The way she brushed
her hair down across
her scapula and vertebrae left me
weak, I thought I might turn
to a feather and drift away.
She had a friend whose name was Paige
who had a mother who did away
with herself on the summer solstice,
four bottles of pills while sitting
in a chaise lounge by a thicket of
tomato vines overgrown and unkempt,
the red planets so full and heavy,
and Paige said every day
that August she ate them
with a pinch of salt,
she said they tasted
like nothing, nothing at all,
like air, she said.

Lemonade

In the small kitchen
on the white table
lies a single
lemon. I am riding
a bicycle
on the stairs
coming down,
bumpity bump,
but the cycle
grows small
and then
it’s a pretzel
between my knees.
Nothing is ever easy.
I am thirsty.
I go to the lemon
and screw it open.
It has
a plastic cap.
I drink
and drink.
Cold, sweet, and tart.
I will never quench
this thirst.

October Travels, Wind River Range

For Bill Henderson

Last night, in our nylon tents,
we were tempted by the wolves again,
their howls curling around
our camp. This morning I knew
our trip was over.
We slouched along the valley
toward our cars, in our heads
some eternal progress we’d amassed
in the cold nights. We were like ravens,
picking at traces in the dust and leaves,
a different language left behind, straggling
forms in a fog, now barely on the ridge.
We learned this and walked.
The wolves were silent.
Then to the west, a thin slot
appeared, a pale blue swath, then gold light
illuminating, our bodies walking
away from the wolves.

Blue Haze, Goodnight Moon

Black smoke courses along the blank hills,
there is a crack that runs the length of it.
Shouts in far-off dusk, I park. The engine ticks.
Early night heat, late September. Soon the leaves
will collapse their canopies, like so many
umbrellas. Then the summer of fire
will no longer burn my lungs
or clot my eyes, those plumes
stretching from the west.
Upstairs, the kids are asleep, white noise
the shape of a running fan, night light burning
their room gold from within,
a glistening cocoon.
Ten o’clock. I tip-toe in, listen to their sleep,
gaze at their shadow features.
It is like drinking cold water from a well.