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Rita Brady Kiefer

    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.

    Copyright 1993 Rita Brady Kiefer

    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

    Copyright 1999 Rita Brady Kiefer

    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.

    Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer

    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

    Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer

    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.

    Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer

    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.

    Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer

    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.

    Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer

    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. 

    Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer

    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.

    Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer

    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.

    Copyright 2015 Rita Brady Kiefer

    From Nesting Doll (University Press of Colorado)