The Audible and the Evident - Julie Hanson Hollis Summers Poetry Prize

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picking free a broken zipper,

      then spent another hour stitching in a new one to replace it.

      Arvo Pärt came on the radio; it was easy to keep going.

      Once I even sized and joined by hand six graduated leaves

      of gauzy fill when I might have paid little more

      for manufactured shoulder pads. Less and less

      does my vocabulary match that of the television selves.

      Less and less do I buy what they assume I have,

      not to mention what they sell. More and more they seem

      to speak and reach out to one another. I remember when

      the newsman sat alone and looked me in the eye.

      I might as well take one of the overlarge buttons

      from my great-aunt’s quilted box that even I have failed

      to find a use for and strap it to my wrist for a watch.

       My Job as a Child

      I spent my childhood filling things in.

      I spent my childhood thrown out on the rug,

      rubbing crayon on pages

      in big thin books

      until color spread to the edge of the shape

      where a black, pre-drawn line defined it.

      I loved the August rhythms

      in the action of the hand’s edge against the page,

      and the interruption:

      the crucial exchange of one crayon

      for another in the cardboard box,

      one of so many decisions.

      I used the point or, more rarely

      (and peeled of its paper), the side.

      I used short, quick, back-and-forth strokes

      or long ones running in the same direction

      or filled a circle from the center out

      like the iris of an eye.

      I applied greater pressure,

      leaning heavy over my work,

      or held my hand far away

      and made bright or dark be faint.

      There was the painstaking dotting-it-in,

      there were curly hair strokes,

      patches, zigzags, waves.

      Members of my household

      politely stepped over me.

      The books were cheap and quiet.

      One day an old friend of my mother’s

      came to stay with us and reminisce.

      I sprawled out on the floor at some remove

      from wherever they sat to talk, stuck

      like a far star is stuck to its constellation,

      and I colored along,

      drunk in my deductions . . .

      One.) Vi could remember my mother

      from a time before she had married.

      Two.) Vi had never married anyone herself.

      Three.) Vi was an artist.

      Therefore, for all of the days of her visit

      I listened to their talk

      as if any other action on my part

      would make it stop.

      And when one morning the story did stop

      and Vi broke in and said a thing

      that seemed to me abrupt and unrelated,

      There will be no more coloring books,

      I looked up for a clue in her face.

      After a pause the story simply resumed.

      A package came for me from Kansas

      a few weeks after that:

      pastels and paints

      and two sorts of paper, one slick,

      one absorbent. And I spent them all,

      imagining a life of it, one thick page

      after another,

      bottomless, bottomless.

      Soon only a smudged assortment was left,

      and so I slid out the coloring books

      and turned to a page

      that hadn’t been done

      and began filling-in, no less satisfied

      and no happier than before,

      for the whole endeavor

      was about texture,

      more than we might suppose,

      and less than we might imagine

      a project of fantasy, autobiography, or wish.

      The years have come,

      and some few memories so slight

      that they are hardly what they are.

      They are agenda-less and dumb.

      They don’t notice that I notice them.

       Improvisation

      or

       The Bluebird of Happiness

      A bluebird came to a post of the garden fence time and again last summer and, in doing so, brought disproportionate joy. It wasn’t a fencepost proper; it was one of seventeen six-foot poles rigged vertically as an extension to the chain-link fence to support a second, less substantial, tier. The bluebird preferred to perch on the pole mounted at a particular corner and reaching a greater height than the rest. Should that post become occupied by a second, less-frequently-visiting bluebird, the next-best option was apparently the pole mounted on the corner directly east of it, which had tilted a bit. I know there must be something sold at Lowe’s which might lend itself better to the beauty of the whole while at the same time making the fence appear higher to deer, but we already had a few of these poles lying around in the attic of the garage and so put them to use and bought the few more that were needed. It has taken all these years for the bluebirds to land on them. But then happiness is often discovered close by, even if on any given day it might not register as such.

      It’s January now, and the temperatures in Iowa are about what you’d expect. Still, there’s reason to go out. Just yesterday, having emptied the compost bucket into one of the bins behind the garden and having made my way back up the hill to the house, I stood near the side door, staring blankly at the aluminum siding, listening. What I heard was a simple choral accompaniment to the squeak of the gas meter attached to the side of the house. I don’t know why the gas meter squeaks this way—the original one never did—but this replacement unit chirps at regular three-second intervals. I never spotted the bird and so can’t name the species, but that note was deliberate, woven in, repeated.

       Deleted Poem

      It was good, but

      seemed not good enough.

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