Cleveland Heights Field Notes

You'd be surprised at the wildlife here:
I saw a red-tailed hawk
pluck a rock dove from the facade
of Heights Medical Arts
and fly up Fairmount with it.

During the blackout
of course people came outside
lit candles, talked on their porches.
All up and down my street we could hear
the usually drowned music of conversation
and in one house - singing.

The rink is frantic on Sunday afternoon
with girls in long skirts
and hockey skates assaulting the turns,
masters of the cross-over and the sudden,
ice-showering stop.

Barbara and I are sitting on the curb
in front of Tommy's.
It's mid-summer, and two beat cops
chug down Coventry
parting waves of revelers
staying their course
to Hampshire and back.
Barbara has toured and approved my new place.
"You always pick the greenest, leafiest streets,"
she says, "You'll enjoy the rain there."

I'm suddenly afraid this will be
our last, long conversation.
But it isn't. A year later
we are standing in front of Barbara's house
admiring the mail carrier:
his leather bag, his knee socks
and the long, grey ponytail
snaking down his back.
"Only in Cleveland Heights,"
Barbara says.

Meredith Holmes /Copyright March 2005 .

For Art’s Sake Only

We will learn to paint.
It will take years just to mix
the colors for clouds, water, milk,
and skin, which, you will find,
is very, very complicated.
In the studio, you will capture, in conté crayon
the mysteries of folded cloth,
skinny old men in codpieces,
and ample, gazing women.
You will learn perspective – a bag
of magic tricks that makes highways
and telephone poles vanish completely.
You will learn how, with a wand
of charcoal to set bowls on a table
and one foot in front of another.
Now we go outside!
In the plein air, you must forget
everything and remember all
as you paint children chasing their tails,
the bridge and the mound
of blankets sleeping under it,
the delicious roundness of fingertips.
You will bathe stones in both
morning and evening light.
You will discover all these
live their own lives, separate
from you, and forever unreachable.

You’ll love dance!
It’s all about you! You alone,
bare feet together, pointing
east on a smooth wooden floor.
You stuffed into a freight elevator,
caught like a kite in a tree,
or swinging like a bell, down the street.
You listening, teaching your body
to listen – arm by hip, by heel.
Your body will become fluent
in a thousand languages – some thought
to be lost or dead –birds in the ivy,
a struck match, clean rags
ripped lengthwise for bandages,
a newspaper moved aside
like a theatre curtain, to reveal
a face with a story to tell,
stones shifting in the bed
of a fast-running brook.
Your body will translate everything.
Your body will do all
the thinking for you.

Finally, we will learn to write,
beginning with fiction:
“Dear Aunt Trudy, I love
the argyle socks you sent.”
Eventually, you will mean it
And Aunt Trudy will believe you.
In this class, you will never stop reading.
One minute you’re lying on the floor
in the living room. It’s summer
and you are bored, or hiding,
or thinking about a root beer float
and you roll over and pick a book
off the pile next to you.
It’s The Last Flower by James Thurber.
You gulp it down, and the next one, too --
Islandia – then the Screwtape Letters
and “Snowbound,” and some 1945
Life magazines, and Green Mansions.
Soon you’ve devoured the whole stack,
and you’re still hungry.

Certain things will be painful
until you apply the cool compress of words:
the smooth, identical caves of coffee cups
hanging above the kitchen sink,
sudden rain, and the way your sister
stands, ankles kissing,
and peers into the refrigerator.
The minute you get the knack
of sitting down and writing every day,
your characters show up
at the front door with a lot of luggage.
They push past you and take over the house.
One night, very late,
you come downstairs for some hot milk.
They’re all sitting around the kitchen table,
playing cards, smoking, drinking Pernod,
reading Dashiell Hammett
aloud – and laughing.
You stand there in your pajamas,
feeling awkward, until one of them
stands up, scraping back the chair
and asks you to dance.

Meredith Holmes / February 2006