LITMIR.BIZ

      Long After Lauds

      Poems

      Copyright © 2019 Jeanine Hathaway. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Poems from The Ex-Nun Poems. Copyright © 2011 by Jeanine Hathaway. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company LLC on behalf of Finishing Line Press, www.finishinglinepress.com. All rights reserved.

      Slant

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-8928-4

      paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-8929-1

      ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-8930-7

      Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

      Names: Hathaway, Jeanine.

      Title: Long after lauds: poems. / Jeanine Hathaway.

      Description: Eugene, OR: Slant, 2019.

      Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-8928-4 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-8929-1 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-8930-7 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Poetry. / American poetry—21st century.

      Classification: PS3558.A746 L66 2019 (paperback) | PS3558.A746 (ebook)

      Manufactured in the U.S.A. 07/17/19

      For Charlotte, Beatrice, and Sadie

      MAKING IT UP UNDER WATER

      (creation myth)

      This world’s born from a trench, hot vent

      in the depths. A bio-luminous bacterial

      ballet, gravity free. Play begat jellyfish:

      no bones, or brain, or blood. What in the

      squid circulates is copper; a scrape seeps

      not iron red but blue. Blood and tentacles,

      the beginning of friction, sting, and ink.

      DISAPPOINTMENTS

      The gruff curator expects more of us, a tide

      of schoolkids maybe after a long ride, bus rowdy,

      to his makeshift sea lab, tanks cleaned. Terms

      on the white-board wall color the language

      of mollusk, cephalopod, sea star, anemone.

      Only two of us show up, ambling along the beach,

      our glasses smeared by sea spray and drizzle.

      The man, heavy, bewhiskered Navy vet, bad back,

      decides to withhold more than he’ll teach. “Go on.”

      We’re free, hands on, to poke inside the tubs.

      Your fingertip sinks down a sea star’s arm;

      tube feet feel their wet way up to the foodless air.

      My fingertip nettles an anemone, pink petaled

      succulent, friction in the barbs. Stinging

      nematocysts, they poison inedible me.

      The curator from his stool across the lab grunts.

      I head for the sink, touch nothing but soap and

      scrub. All he’ll hear from here on: a woman

      his age washing, not clapping, not the brilliant

      applause he’d spent the morning setting up for.

      ICHTHYOLOGY

      Hacked and sliced, a pile of salmon halves

      rots in the parking lot at the river’s mouth.

      Orange and silver dinner for crows, part

      installation, the Coho stare into tires, truck

      bumpers. I stare into them: their bones

      fallen combs, tails feathery, curling to

      clumps. Flies swarm; the buzz is glued

      to the asphalt. Not swimming, no flop or

      fight—the meat’s gone out of the argument.

      I shovel them back into the river.

      Let whitewater tear them apart. Make private

      the shame of this flaying, pick them clean,

      inarticulate. A spiny silence lies below a hook.

      Let even their bones be as useful as prayer,

      those fine lines that some would call the catch.

      BEFORE ENTERING

      “–5–6–7–8, and 1–” The dancers drum onstage

      from the wings where they were before the downbeat,

      that pre-historic moment, bandaged and flinching,

      calloused, split, grinning—the tick-swish of soles

      on bare wood; their presence shifts how light leaps

      off the watch of the ex-nun’s date. Such sound

      bodies. Their backs, extraordinary overlaps

      of muscle bound to bone. Contract/release,

      land masses, ice floes break up, tectonics.

      India ramming Asia there, under the scapula,

      Himalayan scapula where legend says Doubting

      Thomas spread the Gospel, a martyr in the shadow

      of Everest or these wing-boned backs. It is

      good news, the teaching: The dance does not begin

      on the downbeat. You’re already dancing

      on the “–5–6–7–8, and–”

      you enter with history. Getting comfortable,

      the ex-nun tilts her chin, lowers her shoulders

      barely covered by rose silk,

      once covered by a white wool scapular, that

      strip of habit worn between gown and cape.

      Her hands flat under it, thumbs tucked

      into her belt. Her body still, if nothing more,

      her presentation inspired by—what?—a long

      tradition of women, given. Diamonds now

      at her ears and throat, hands, ungloved yet

      folded. She understands medieval Eckhart’s prayer

      that God should rid him of God, as she could not at 25,

      longing never to lose the idolatry,

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