Rita Brady Kiefer

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Poet: Rita Brady Kiefer

Rita Brady Kiefer has published two full-length poetry collections—Nesting Doll, finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and Crossing Borders—and three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Face to Face (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Hunger Enough (Worthington, OH: Pudding House Press), The Crimson Edge (Goshen, CT: Chicory Blue Press), and Beyond Lament (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). The Ars Nova Group recorded "Like This" on Soundscapes. Her poems have been translated in Argentina and Spain. She has received awards from the Colorado Council on the Arts, Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute, A Puffin Foundation, and the Danforth Foundation.

Poems

Canyons

In the beginning there is a fault,
some new stream not knowing
its own force. On each side stones
rise from a turmoil in the clay.

For eons they burn, the water moves
so naturally no one sees
those rocks keep dividing.

Then one day: a canyon.

From Unveiling (Crimson Edge Chapbooks, Chicory Blue Press)

Like This

Don’t try to explain the miracle, kiss me
on the lips, like this, like this.
-- Rumi

Not the way father kissed mother
on the cheek, not in the front of the house,
no, in the back, in the bedroom, basement, in
those dark places, those under the earth
places no one can see, kiss me
across mountains when we are apart, kiss me
under sly sheets after the trace of a late shower
kiss me the sweet, sweet kiss of the glad-we-are-married
on the lips.   Once more.   Once more.   Kiss me
on the ear, not like the grackle or Canada jay
saying what’s on its mind, like the hummingbird
laughing at gravity.   Kiss me slow, not the way
aging bones explain marrow to each other
winter mornings.   No.   Slow.   Like a late June
two-step.       I know       I know: time is
the only kiss that lasts, but
just now — tonight — make me
believe the miracle of lips
like this                       like this

From Nesting Doll (University Press of Colorado)

Trying On Faces

for Alice

Your mother went mad at the delivery
they told her not to hold you
not to look at your missing face, the tiny blind lids
that could have belonged to some prodigal fish,
an oval membrane spewing mucous
where a mouth and nose could have cast a spell
over your mother.
            Six years later like fickle gods
surgeons are still trying faces on you.
This time they built you a voice box
but you shrieked two nights and days
before they found they had blocked those original ears,
            your only way to the world.
Across a hospital hall I lie
hardly missing the part of my body they have taken.
In my leisure robe I try on faces
until I am your mother standing over your sorry body
only two of us in the room
something sharp gleaming in my hand.
Over and over I read you
stories of magic wands.   I tell myself
this is what I am holding now,
I see myself casting a spell to wake you whole
or shrink you back, a tiny tadpole
silver and shining in the original sea.

From Crossing Borders (Meridian Noon Press)

Bristlecone Pine

In the beginning mad particles sliced their
trunks bare on the windward side, now
visitors count the annual wood rings on
the world's oldest bodies, my own aging
beside them on Mt. Bross near Breckenridge
where air thins at twelve thousand feet.

My native husband calls them character trees.
I say they wear the look of dissidents,
émigrés, these stunned trees
leaning like years - all the same way -
mavericks thriving on exposed plains.

Or old reruns? Look. There. A silhouette:
Charlie Chaplin leaving. And twisted
together, Sacco and Vanzetti tracking
Rosa Parks who juts solo trying to hear,
somewhere in those trees’ thousand years,
Benazir Bhutto, Malala and
Dvorak whistling a new world
no one has to flee

From Crossing Borders (Meridian Noon Press)

Campfire

(fancy is indeed less than a present palpable
reality, but it is greater than remembrance)
—John Keats

The air hangs damp tonight. And cold.
Under the tarp, even parched twigs or
logs we stack before dark shudder
no hope for a generous blaze
to warm by, only the gossip of
small tongues following one of us
from the city.

I want a bonfire to burn a conspiracy
of years, to separate faces
but here on the Great Divide
the thin oxygen dims our sight
and night-sparks distract
like wrong names flaming for attention.

All the past cuttings, the black and white ash.
Leave them here, you say, in Buena Vista.
(continued)

I ask what you see in the late embers.
You stare then venture ears! deer ears!
We laugh and the last flame loses.
Fancy. Something is ending.

From Crossing Borders (Meridian Noon Press)

Shadows

for Jerry

We stand at the edge
of the river clear as our intentions
looking for trout:
voyeurs, not fishers today.

You speak of silver lengths
that flash at you quick and bright
like meteors we watched
from the grass last week
only the blades between us.

I see merely shadows
at the bottom of the bed.
On this mountain pass
my lungs, wild beasts
trapped and struggling in their cage
fight twelve thousand feet
of thin air.

Tonight before our tent
separates us from the stars
we'll light a fire and
my tongue will wash you clean.

I love what the moon does to you.
You stand repeated on the ground.

From Crossing Borders (Meridian Noon Press)

Torn Photo

What were you wearing that day
he snapped the picture? Half
a century ago you tore your face from
the photo, the only trace: a slim arm
arcing your small daughter like a covenant.

Propped on the blanket the baby scowls
as if even then, she saw a pose
behind the lens: that man
who wanted you to give him a son.

The Egyptian Book of Dreams speaks of
a loss of face. In sleep
I look for the woman you canceled.
For years I could not forgive that tearing
(continued)
but now I am a woman
it is clearer. We are taught to veil our faces
to keep them from our daughters.

For years I’ve rummaged to find you
in things I buried the thin summer
you died: your letters in that black steamer
trunk, the velvet evening bag you gave me
for dress-up, a gold compact mirror cracked
in three, tucked in the folds of
an apricot silk you might have worn
as hope for your absent body that day.

And - wherever it is - the other part of that picture.

From Crossing Borders (Meridian Noon Press)

Grammar Lesson

All my life I’d been he, the pronoun
that followed a linking verb in all
seventh-grade samples, the object lying
under the slanted preposition.
I’d been the unaccented ending
our language calls feminine.
But I can’t talk the way they taught me
my voice box jams, threatens to go mute.
My tongue seizes words, flips them
inside out ’til they translate: life.

Think the field of female energy
a whole new word-mass exploding
like scarlet poppies tossing in the wind
spreading their messy seeds. Think
the changing of passive voice to active,
shaping the question mark to an imperative.
Soon every delicious letter would taste right
through female lips and I could be
intransitive or better still
what comes before the verb:
the word that shapes the meaning.

From Crossing Borders (Meridian Noon Press)

Lost and Found

Like the strand of pearls Mama tossed
across the room that night, little white
zeros spilling like years on the drain board
down the sink, into the Rushleigh Road living
room, bouncing to the frayed love seat
under the baby-grand she didn’t play anymore
through the hall to the bedroom armoire
that consoled the silks she’d stopped wearing.
The house rained pearls that night she slumped
on the bathroom floor, her five-year-old
counting the octagon tiles, trying London
Derry Aire in several keys to lull or wake
her. Next day we tried to collect them
in the live music box, some were
deliberately hiding, she said.

At my wedding and other choice times
pearls in each ear, at my throat
a single strand.

Mama, see, I found them.

From Crossing Borders (Meridian Noon Press)

Experts

River trips ruined through the binoculars
of the resident Audubon authority
her litany fating the birds
or hikes through canyons diminished
as the Guide expounds
confirming the stones
(in tenth grade biology
I wanted to be the amoeba
not diagram it)
and those literary priests
from their altar of truth
ordaining theory as history
we keep getting it wrong
experts don't name things
they stammer their love.

From Nesting Doll (University Press of Colorado)

Category:

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