Two Poems by Anna V. Q. Ross

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Heaven Knows

Some days, you wake up

and the light in the field is like swimming 

or moving through clear fog, is something that pushes

back—not startling but steady pressure,

the wall-to-wall world cruising your skin.

Up ahead, a goldfinch flickers, and what is it

that you can’t remember? The years ago No!

you said to that boy in a Dublin bar

before stumbling down a flight of stairs to be sick,

the slick surface of the bathroom mirror

slapping you back from the brink 

of a different bed in a different country 

(just like your mother chose)? But why

should it always revolve around a man?

What about the aria you could’ve sung louder 

at the audition, the letter from a famous poet

you never answered? Maybe the garage

would be less cluttered with broken sleds

and old TV sets, the workbench a sinkhole

of socket wrenches and drill bits. Maybe

you’d be a neurosurgeon with a yacht

and a coke habit you’re thinking you should quit,

but not yet. Maybe your mother would be happy 

she’d left home. Maybe she’d stop calling you

the reason she could never go back. 

Maybe not.

Behind the barn, the grain silos rise,

grey columns braceleted by darker iron rebar

like the necks of enormous, rust-streaked

prehistoric birds. The grass around them

needs mowing, but now it’s starting to rain.

You should have known that would happen.

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Hypothesis

Suppose you give up fear.

Suppose you go out into the back yard

white with the first snow of the year

and let the five black hens, 

who press their cluster of spiky red combs 

against the chain link gate, out of their pen,

knowing that somewhere nearby

the sharp-shinned hawk is circling.

The iridescent green on their feathers 

flares in reflected snow light. From inside 

the house, you watch as they go about 

their scratching, quick-beaked, in the bare earth

beneath the hydrangea sheltered

by the eaves of the garage.

Suppose that later, when a phone call

or some kitchen task has distracted you, 

you hear the first chitter of their alarm 

gutter, then rise. You open the back door

in time to see the unmistakable white

and brown-flecked breast, the curved,

attentive head and dark-backed wings 

of the hawk as it lifts off the porch railing.

Suppose its claws are closed.

In the kitchen behind you, the radio denounces.

People are marching, have marched, will.

You hear them.

Suppose you give up fear. 

Beneath the porch, the five hens 

turn their heads toward you—

first one eye, then the other.

They ruffle gusts of flakes 

as you herd them back into the pen.

There, in the laying box, you find 

two brown eggs, smooth and almost warm,

which you carry, one in each hand,

back inside the house.

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Anna V. Q. Ross’s second book, Flutter, Kick, won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and forthcoming from Red Hen Press in November, 2022. She is a Fulbright Scholar, a Mass Cultural Council fellow, and poetry editor for Salamander, and her work appears in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere.

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22 August 2022