The Poetry of Mary Kaiser

TO FREDERICK GREENE, SALEM, MASS July 30, 1821 I trust you are keeping well. Over many weeks’ travel through difficult country, I have carried your last, which I write upon verso. Yesterday began sultry. I sought relief in the shade of a forest. Following a clear-running creek, I came to a spacious river basin, beside which were the first chimneys I had seen for a week’s time. Brother: if you happened on a settlement shining like a net of pearls, soil so compliant every sunbeam drove home a fruit, where to stand in the road was to know proportion, to walk among apple blossoms loosened all your grief, and the settlers offered assurance and release once you spilled your sins, laid down your name, gave up relations and any hope of tasting a woman’s lips, would you make this trade? Yours ever, Isaac.

DREAM OF THE CIRCULAR SAW Beside a river at the flood, a mill wheel spitting tongues of flame. Two great doors stand open: threshing time. Under rafters swathed in cloud, no wheat. Elms, stripped, arrayed in spokes on a floor clean as Ohio's prairie, wider. By its order—circle in a square— I knew the celestial city. No miller, no foreman, only another wheel, toothed, half sunk and the trunks striding to meet a blade that neither bites nor pulls, but spinning, waits for its fodder. And I saw our ruin is deliberate stepping in time to be sliced, mortised and fitted square into one of the mansions already laid out in that city, waiting for boards.

HE CONSIDERS THE SPIRAL STAIR Would I, if they scattered once across the sky— half, gibbous, slipper, full—call her panoply a moon? Old Adam in me needs to fix every face, though it never settles, with a name. From below, it’s a folding book, pages’ rhythm suited to an ankle’s bend, but as I climb, treads fan into orbits, tilting to receive. They stab— then spindles loosen and align, a silk cord, grass snake at noon. What eye can't parse, the ankles comprehend. Now against a sapling that twists and presses, its border must cave or swell. If yours go up, how can mine fold back? Landing’s sudden retrospect: what seemed a penal ring was always pitching higher along the crescent where candlelight won't bend. Against this stave I step to a new air, one I wouldn't know from the blackbird's, his red flash across my cheek and gone.