J’ai fait la magique étude du bonheur

← v6n1, Spring 2007

—Rimbaud

When my mother said, If I had a gun

I’d shoot us both, I remembered

his body, fluid with grace,

his sun-in-a-wheat-field hair.

Stoned hippie preaching on love—

he must be God, I knew,

and I followed him from his table

in the Telegraph café

to his mattress on the floor.

All night he moved like water over me,

in me, and I was full of joy,

high school girl with my ankh necklace

and spiky rhapsodic poetry.

So when my mother said, If I had a gun,

and made me show the blood

to prove he hadn’t got me pregnant,

my life slipped off its grassy banks,

dived beneath the currents of a lazy, sunlit river.

To an old friend: never mailed:

It’s raining. You must have snow.

I would love to be in Colorado.

The week last summer in the mountains—

alone, writing all night

in my padded flannel shirt

at that rickety little desk, hot water bottle

clutched against my stomach—

Eternity opened its doors.

I could wander around all my life

with my green pen and dorky notebook.

Yet as I came down the hill that last day

to where the shuttle stood waiting,

I remembered the statue

I saw once by a hearthside in Dubrovnik,

carved wood, a saint holding the city

cupped in the palm of his hand.

I would hold my family cupped in the palm of my hand.

Right now my youngest son, nine,

sleeps on the floor in his ‘nest’—

sleeping bag, comforter, blanket, and pillow,

his thousand Legos spilled around him.

A shaft of sunlight

slants down through the pecan trees,

bronzing the azaleas. At eight I knew,

though none can see God and live,

every dust mote in the light

through the windows of my mother’s house

was God. At ten as I got in the tub

I’d carefully lower my foot,

expecting, like Christ, to walk on water.

I was Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego,

who stood with the Lord in fire

and were not consumed.

Might as well confess,

all my life I have walked with radiance.

So I wonder, seeing this sunlight,

Why do I not let myself speak with angels?

memory desire family

Ann Fisher-Wirth

Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of two books of poems: Blue Window (Archer Books, 2003) and Five Terraces (Wind Publications, 2005). She has also published two chapbooks: The Trinket Poems (Wind, 2003) and Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll (Drunken Boat, 2005). In 2004, she won the Rita Dove Poetry Award from the Salem College Center for Women Writers, received the Poetry Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as a poetry fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission. She won a 2003 Malahat Review Long Poem Poetry Prize for “Olaus Magnus, Carta Marina ,” the first section of the book-length poem “ Carta Marina .” Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Connecticut Review, ISLE, Solo, Feminist Studies, RUNES , and many other journals, as well as online and in numerous anthologies. She has been awarded residencies at The Mesa Refuge and Djerassi, both in California. A Professor of English, Ann has taught as a senior Fulbright lecturer at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Uppsala University, Sweden. She currently teaches at the University of Mississippi. Her academic publications include a book, William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature (Pennsylvania State, 1989), and numerous articles on American writers.