Three Poems by Keetje Kuipers

Yardwork

Every weekend I give you chores:
rake, fill feeders, give the grass a mow.
My body, too, is told to work, while yours—

lush and flowering on all scores—
is asked to wait for what mine might grow.
All week long I do my brand of chores,

priming the flesh’s barren moors
with needled prescriptions designed to sow
these unnamed seeds that are not yours.

Making love some evening might restore
us to our freer former selves, though
touching could be one more chore

of prodding hands I’ve learned to ignore.
Now the nurses peck my limbs like crows,
discouraging my body’s urge for yours—

I resist planting and can’t bear play. But more
than plotted cycles, this I know:
Some things can’t be fixed through faithful chores,
my body failing to work apart from yours.

Glassblower’s Glossary of Flaws and Defects

Small parison, slack and heavy bauble,
I breathed you into being with my want,

my belief in your fragile form I’d thought
to coax to life with pinpricks and prayers.

From my belly’s furnace, I imagined
pulling you whole—beveled, and thinly

gilded with meconium’s sharp-scented glaze.
Within my body’s medicated light,

your molten form grew rivets and grooves, frit
coloring and clinging to your lucent bones,

lengths along which you might someday be touched.
When you refused conjuring, I carried

for months a dullness in my mouth, still not
knowing I had burnt my tongue on desire.

After My Shower, a Bee at the Window

She crawls against the pane, belly-dragging
her reflection below wings poised for flight.

My own mirror fogged with steam, I lean in
for a look: It likes to tell me I’m young,

but without the wink and nod of glass, I
know my body is close to learning some

new thing about itself. This was to be
my poem of transformation, for which I

find I can’t now see beyond my toes. She
asks, Where do you go when you’re not here?

As if my vision will uncloud and I’ll know
the name my body’s longing to become.

I cup her in my hand where she buzzes
like a chainsaw before I lift the sash.

Keetje Kuipers’ third collection, All Its Charms, is forthcoming in 2019. A former Stegner Fellow, her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest and faculty at Hugo House, Keetje is currently at work on a novel and a memoir.