Heron’s Tale
She came to the railing
above me and let her grief
rain off the bridge—
a waterfall
of long silvery spears
I mistook for fish.
I raised my beak and
swallowed them whole.
*
I was hooked but
never sated. I placed
myself along her path
again and again. Some days
her grief was minnows,
some days, bees. Once, a large
speckled koi rolled from
her hair and landed at my feet.
Still, I hungered.
*
I followed her home.
In my eye she saw only her
own grief mirrored.
She dressed me in his clothes—
Thursday, the red bowling shirt,
Sunday, the fedora, the craft
store moccasins. She gave me
Camels and weed to smoke.
We read Baudelaire in bed.
She healed, I hungered.
*
The gravity of our connection
grounded me.
When leaves changed,
we burned them. Flocks
of embers drifted skyward.
Home
My father waits
on the other side of death
where the weather is always
chili today and hot tamale.
I’ll go to him
when I’m done here
so he can tell me again
about that cow—the one
that jumped over
the barbed wire fence
and was
udderly destroyed.
Order of the Surplus Sisters
A tree is screaming full of birds
full of birds screaming
in the convent courtyard nuns
with flapping habits streaming
habits flapping feet slapping
running past the bird teeming tree
and you
wondering
where is she going with this
I am going nowhere
at a fixed point in time
I am passing a poplar tree
full of invisible birds singing
loud singing inside my head
inside a memory
birds are singing inside
a convent wall in Florence
the two of us passing
hand in hand (as is our habit)
passing outside convent walls
while inside birds are screaming
where in the past spare daughters
are donning the habits
of unwanted daughters
where in the past
excess family are given living
back to God.
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Celeste Oster’s poems have appeared in various journals, including Thorny Locust and Tiny Frights. She lives in Overland Park, Kansas.
✶
Paul Herman’s father was a painter, and he began painting as soon as he was old enough to hold a brush. When he was a little boy, his mother assisted Pietro Annigoni with the Montecatini frescoes, and Paul sat cross-legged on the church floor, piercing the master’s drawings with a nail to transfer them to the walls. He believes that if one is careful to get the tone right, one can take liberties with the orthodox rules for colors. An unexpected use of color surprises the viewer and introduces a liveliness into the work that can make a common subject newly interesting. Paul is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on Rembrandt, and, as a result, learning to paint all over again.
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