Tina Cane
Come Correct
Continue to verb Orlando urges me via early morning text
I’m trying I write back Continue to create he says as I get out of bed
raise the window shade
distance means the end of snow days
so I make a dozen snowballs and keep them in the freezer after lunch
I give my son a stone to tumble in his pocket for when we walk the woods
I call it his thinking stone instead of the worrying kind your thoughts are your own
I tell him as are mine
Pray here, you can ask for anything
whisper the trees but I have only enough reverence for words
looking down I see I’m knee-deep in leaves it’s hard to make out
where the yellows begin the ambers end
I wonder
how to teach my children to come correct why such words should stick
thick and metallic between my lips when I move to form them
These tongues
full of nostalgia my young student writes I love them I have not loved being so alone
Sometimes a notebook I tell him is just a notebook sometimes love is a butterfly
being crushed by a car
it troubles me
that worry can be a form of prayer as if losing sleep is a type of pleading
pleading a kind of church but I don’t pray and try not to worry much
Hold
for Nicole
Sometimes it’s a shock event in lieu of a total coup
an instance more akin to the slow overthrow of familiar systems
how the course of a day lapses into years
then breaks
I used to say The day is long Seasons pass back when Samantha
would have her toddlers in pajamas by four thirty in the afternoon It’s dark out
They don’t know she’d laugh and I ‘d laugh
across the phone line
which could have been a sea for how vast the distance felt treading February
as we were newer versions of our selves we ourselves hardly even knew
and now Nicole
has cancer
and yet appears more radiant than ever as if lit from within by the threat of death
she projects such a fierce desire to live I want to tell everyone about her
poems which she reads on the internet from her bed
which stun me
for the clarity I force upon myself by witnessing them
in the dark as my family sleeps phone aglow in my palm
shock of birds
shock of scans
shock of nodes
shock of breast-
less woman kind
at the end Nicole
always places her hand flat on the screen as if pressing it
against mine not to say Stop or to dispute my meaning
but to hold me in the feeling of her thought
When the Let-Down Was Good
There’s a sensation when the milk lets down so satisfying and specific
that to this day seeing my children eat well fills me with a comfort
that is almost molecular
similar to how I’m feeling the voice of Beatrice Dalle
right now raspy with the sound of something hard won as she reads on French radio
from Simone de Beauvoir’s Une Mort Douce her cadence the force of what
a mother’s death means among other things
Je dois m’organiser en consequence
Simone says meeting me in my car with my daughter and her friend
snared in traffic on our way home from school I’m gripping the wheel
like our lives depend on my total control of the vehicle bumper to bumper
between Dunkin Donuts and the State House
going only where the voice
of Beatrice Dalle leads me rough and lustrous as a gem slipping from grasp
to other dimensions of memory
somewhere else I once wrote
When I say I’ve been dutiful I mean I’ve been organized
meaning if I’m screaming in my head at the man texting
in the Camry in front of me to Just go! I’m really calling
for all the mysteries to make themselves known
and at once
but what I also want
is for nothing to fade for things to stay
golden as what I made when the let-down was good
Tina Cane serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she is the founder and director of Writers-in-the-Schools, RI. She co-produces the podcast, Poetry Dose, and is the author of The Fifth Thought (Other Painters Press, 2008), Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. Tina is a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets and runs the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread.