Two Poems
Elizabeth Loudon
Bayou
Beneath pines that breathe with the wind
my daughter bends to a blood-red rosette
moist as a baby’s mouth that opens and shuts
in the washes of sleep.
She tells me how the sundew survives,
sucking on brackish water that seeps and ebbs,
rich in the proteins of fire ants and flies.
Pelicans plunge past the boat launch
where we ate our sandwiches,
backs to the warmth of splintery wood.
Herons steer inland to perch one-legged in trees.
I’ll be gone the next day
and already regret tugs at my sleeve.
In just twenty years – time enough
to raise a child or bury a dog –
the sparkling dregs of this swamp will be submerged
and my own meat melted to root and branch
to feed the damp.
Spears of spent light show me the way
of the long flight home, east into night.
I tear through time, slumped
against old bones and specks of sand
as the plane flies over frost-baked fields,
each cell carrying the imprint of dawn and dusk
to nudge me awake on the turning face
of the earth. Yoga is said to help.
I unlatch my spine and fold
around the afternoon’s soft centre.
My hands graze rough carpet
as I tongue threads of uncombed hair,
then rise and spring like a starfish,
arms flung wide: the way I stood
on the empty beach of the Gulf, my girl
beside me and my face tipped up, as if
I could swallow each diamond of light
and hold it, hard.
Anywhere But Here
Do you remember how you refused
to recite the pledge of allegiance?
How they led you to a map of the world
to show you a lesson or two
and told you to point
to anywhere better than here,
and you placed a finger on my own home town,
where once I lay beneath apple trees
wishing I’d been dumped on a motorway verge
and carried away by strangers?
That night Arctic lights
pulsed down into New England dark.
I pulled you onto the roof of my old blue Chevy
as if three mere feet, your own sweet height,
could lift us to the edge of a galaxy
and we could touch the swarm of stars.
Beyond the curve of the earth
lay a winter-bare land where caribou
fattened by Chernobyl
drank from the melt of glaciers
and a startle of swans skated off ice.
Beyond the swans, horses.
They saw it too.
If we just hadn’t looked,
had stayed true to the maps,
their regrets and revisions,
if we’d stayed warm under firelit quilts,
telling stories of horses that come to our rescue
and swans who are nothing but girls
who want to go home,
how easy our lives could have been,
yours and mine. If nobody had told us
that all it takes is stepping outside in the dark
to see the far side of the world.
Elizabeth Loudon has published fiction and memoir in the Gettysburg Review, INTRO, Denver Quarterly, and North American Review, amongst others. Her debut novel, A Stranger in Baghdad, will be published in spring 2023 by Hoopoe, an imprint of the American University of Cairo Press. Her poetry appears or will soon appear in South Florida Poetry Journal, Lily Poetry Review, One Art Poetry, Blue Mountain Review, Trampset, Southword, On The Sea Wall, and SWIMM. After 25 years in Massachusetts, she returned to the UK. She lives in a small market town and teaches English to refugees.