Selected Work by Michelle Holland

The Dream of Perfection Wanting

To my right, and following me as I walk,
the executioner lolls against the drippy castle walls,
wearing a wife-beater glaring white t-shirt
and my father's smile.

The aisle to the throne appears to lengthen
as I lead my skittish horse along the plush red carpet
The queen, regal and waiting
motions me forward impatiently.

There is no one on my left.
All the courtiers, including the jester
are talking among themselves,
talking, I know, about my horse.

He is a white Arabian endurance horse,
perfect conformation,
open chest, long combed mane and tail,
wise brown eyes.
He steps high, showing off the line of his legs.

I know, though, that I must be careful
and swift in my delivery.
The queen smiles as I draw near,
the candelabra beside her casting
her thin hands in shadow,
sinister and wanting.
She wears my mother's engagement ring.

I wonder where my mother is,
and look to find she is the queen,
and has been all my life,
demanding perfect white stallions
and impeccable grammar.

I lead my horse to her and hope
she doesn't notice
the flaw in my gift.
I bring him to her, his right side parallel
to the throne and my queen,
and say, "Here is what you wanted."
and, "Isn't he beautiful?"
She doesn't reply, or if she does,
I am not there to hear.

I disappear.
I see the jester take the lead
And turn the horse around
His left side reveals the deep dent,
like a car door crushed.
Every time I dream this dream,
I escape before the flaw is found.
I do not stay to see my queen's disappointment,
Or the executioner frown.

Horse

Years flew. A lightning strike of college, marriage,
children lost and daughters gained.
I forgot the broad back of my novel horses.
Their large hearts beat for my return,
smooth muzzles nickered, hidden
behind work days, car payments, skinned knees,
and laundry, always laundry.

Well past the romance I left to books,
from the west a dark horse traveled.
Out of the years that slept,
a love I only knew from reading rose,
and a chance to ride, to know a tall roan appaloosa.

Though the romance is a lie,
there is no easy connection no matter the love,
between rider and horse.
Fear rose in my weak legs;
years after thirty I wanted to be brave.
My horse, older too, knew;
his large dark eyes laughed,
and we grew to ride together.

In this middle age, I live smell of leather,
the rhythm of the lope, the confidence
I remember from summer years lost
in the stories of horse, now my horse.
We ride into early mornings,
and back from my childhood dreams.

Separation

For Sylvia, Remembering Your Birth Day

Hardly here at all, the habit to breathe barely
learned, more easy to forget, easier still to lapse
into the quiet of no language. Silence is rarely
missed. A tempo slows without notice. Something taps,
calls you to be still, return to wherever
you came from, and hide behind a milky window,
when your hands were not hands yet, (but all I can imagine) forever
pressed against the moment before your making, so
swift and sudden. Once, you were not even a ghost,
not even a stray twinkle in anybody's eye.
Now you've come to my party with red streamers, lost.
Your fists curl around open air, you breathe a sigh.
My heart has lost your rhythm. You will have to make your own way.
Your new, solid body settles apart from me, as if you might stay.

Heart Beat

I'm looking for your heart
under bags of Sacrete hauled
one by one out the of the back of the van.
Where is your vulnerable heart?
Afraid maybe to announce love for anyone,
especially our teen-age daughter
whose anger and love know no bounds,
her room never clean enough,
her demands too loudly spoken,
her need for your acceptance screeching
from every pause in her excited voice.

I find your cowboy heart
like a postcard sunset against mountains,
heading out on our big, spotted horse,
or in your adobe stories stacked in the sun,
and in the strength of your long wiry arms
that hold us all against wind and gritty dust.
When I put my head to your chest,
the beat is slow and persistant.
The rate of the marathon built your heart,
the stoic, in-for-the-long-haul momentum
you have given our life -- so deep under geologic layers,
or packed into the mortar and brick of recent memory.
Come on, I'm telling you and myself --
we've got too many years to go
on this heart trip,
let's fall together into a single beat.

Breath and Line

A story he won't tell
rests among the colorful nights
of frog catching with flashlights
and Tequila on Nantucket.
He leans away from us,
boots up, spurs still on
just to irritate the dog,
and he'll go on about coyotes,
their sly games out on the east mesa.
He'll go on, nod his head with stories.

I hold the story he won't tell.
He'll lean in and describe
his red converse sneakers, his feet
up on the hospital bed,
as I passed through stages of labor,
as he read a Brief History of Time,
as we birthed a baby we could keep,
call our own.

That's the story he tells,
apart from us,
across the room rocking,
grey felt cowboy hat back so his face animates the humor, the distance.

He doesn't share our first hospital,
the yellow flimsy paper robe over his T-shirt and jeans,
the white rippled mask across his face,
the rocker he sat in next to the incubator,
his face so much younger,
setting his eyes on this other frail baby.
Distant eyes he focused past
the decision we made,
past me, my arms empty at my sides.

The story is about his hands,
and how he took our daughter
careful not to strain the intravenous lines,
the oxygen tubes, into the slow deliberate love
of his elbows, his arms,
his shoulders caught vulnerable.
No one was looking.
He held a baby
he knew we had already let go,
took his right forefinger and outlined
her brow, the line of her chin,
as if tracing the path for a story
he would never tell,
to etch her lines,
to find how she belonged to him.

How brief the story we never tell each other,
so a part of muscle and meaning,
that she will always be that small
breathing, reaching for his finger
as he outlined her existence,
and let her go.

Tiles

Traverse the shards of our heartfelt conversations.
Tip-toe, pivot, balance,
there is nothing for our outstretched arms
to reach for or lean on.

A layer, a veneer is underfoot -
the ceramic floor tiles burnished with fugitive pieces:
"remember when," and "I love you."

An exceptionally great concentration
of all the endearments accumulated over the years
of trying to connect, gleaned and assembled
create the pieces we walk on.

A map of our past promises
forms the path from the kitchen to the bedroom:
little words and phrases, a compilation
that includes the fury and pitch
of our collected intensity.
The measure of our relationship,
grouted and pieced together,
glares off each angled shard.

A point of view, an insinuation,
under our bare feet and callused heels -
we barely notice the cutting remarks anymore.

Every once in awhile,
I will look down and catch a glimpse of our past commitments,
our sincerest anger and love
and catch my breath. See the words fly from our briefest connection,
surreptitiously lodge themselves and join the path
we are compelled to walk,
as if we cannot notice ourselves,
too busy in the world of now and breakfast
to take any notice of what we have built our lives upon.

Arms

Contemplate the heft
of automatic weapons.
Imagine the open mouth of power,
the words spilling our constitution,
our right to arm ourselves,
to speak our minds,
to raise our flags or burn them.

I used to pack some bread,
the white variety and a thermos of Kool-aid
and head for the cemetery
in late spring, when I was twelve,
when the tiny strawberries grew
behind the oldest headstones.
Under the drooping hemlock
I'd feed myself and share strawberry sandwiches
with the dead.

White sheets crisp on corners,
hospital bed upon hospital bed,
reflect the passive marble
we may rest under or pray beside.

The Temptations rang out our innocent decades,
when sex was free and peace
just a flower child away,
before the end of a hurtling century
whose tombstone will read illegible
the country we lost to politics,
to war, to genocide,
to mothers, their arms empty of children,
buried just under our feet.

I unfold my arms out
open my palms to gesture embrace
and it's an angry hope, not ignorance that rises
from my belly, round
like the river rocks that lie
at the bottom of the dry arroyo.

Our country gathers in the wings of a dark raven
that spreads itself broad over the valley,
where the shadow of war is ever present.
The moon rises over killing fields
here and everywhere:
Wounded Knee, Gettysburg, Cambodia, Mogadishu,
Iraq, Hiroshima, Normandy -
places where we thought we could overcome
the marble heft of death with bigger, better arms.

Bifocals

The heat of every little thing that I want to control
rises behind my eyes, and there I am,
at a loss; the lists in my head
blurry as my vision lately.

I found out this morning my prescription
actually causes my view to blur.
The edges of things had gone too soft and supple,
so for two years I've been wondering where
the angles have gone, where
was the clear edge of the printed page?

I'll have bifocals in just seven to ten business days.
I'll have to wait to see well again, though
the optometrist warned me, my new prescription
might be difficult at first for my eyes
to become accustomed to.

The mountains are burning all around us,
a tumult of hazy sky and the morning smell
of thousands of acres of charring,
carried on the breeze (wind)
to our morning coffee, burnt toast.

Funny that seeing more clearly
will give me a headache.

I guess we're always waiting for something,
and waiting is always tied to potential
loss or gain, not stasis, like the wait.
Shouldn't this be the comfort,
the before it happens?
Before the shit hits the fan?
Before the yes or no?

Such a mundane and required part
of our human existence. Plant a seed,
and wait. Make a phone call, and wait.
Get dressed for a date, and wait.
See the optomistrist, wait to see.
And all that waiting, minutes, hours,
of anxiety, worry, hope, all evaporates
when the tomatoes are ripe and luscious,
the answer arrives, and the little black Fiat
pulls up in the driveway only a few minutes
after you expected, and off you go
to the senior prom, borrowed dress and all.

Time does arrive, doesn't it?
Inevitable. The clothes dry, the pot boils,
the wounds heal, the glasses make you dizzy,
but just for awhile. The answers arrive
one after the other, paced
not according to our desire at all,
but according to some random theory
of quantum physics and that simple
eye exam when you're forty-four years old.

The Songs from High Shelves

are where the true notes rest
and endings are interchangeable.

One bird in the hand,
or a wing on the rise of a clavicle
can lead so deftly to another.

Our connections remain
in our closed hands;
bird song rounded like sea glass
in our palms.

One by one,
let's offer each finger out
from our palms until
the smooth colors take light
and send song out in a melody.

The only way to connect
is to let go, reach
for the top shelf, grasp
what is there like the gift
that it is.

What's left is the weight
of something small in our hand,
and the fleeting wingbeat of freedom.

Michelle Holland is co-poetry editor of The Sin Fronteras Journal. Her poetry is featured in "A Gathering of Poets," at www.nmculturenet.org, and in the online literary journals, Feminista at www.feminista.com, and Lunarosity, at www.zianet.com/ lunarosity. Her poetry has been anthologized in Mirror, Mirror: Reflections on the Way We Look (Midmarch Arts Press), Shine on You Crazy Diamond (Sunstone Press), The Practice of Peace, and Written with a Spoon: A Poet's Cookbook (both Sherman Asher Publishing), and published in Puerto Del Sol, Manzanita Quarterly, Journal of New Jersey Poets, and Fishdrum, among other literary journals. The University of South Carolina's Palanquin Press published her first collection of poems, Love in the Real World, (1999). (most recent update: April, 2005)

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