Tag: Jeanne Wagner

Three Poems by Jeanne Wagner

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Because My Memory Began Too Soon

        Adults rarely remember events from before the age of three.
        It’s a phenomenon known as ‘infantile amnesia.’

                ―Queensland Brain Institute

I’m the one who’s cursed with remembering it all.
My first sight, the light bleeding through the blinds.

What I felt, what she felt, in the moments after birth.
We were a woman in pain, turning towards the wall.

Memory, the attic that enters you, is never cleaned.
Memory is like furniture you can’t take back.

The light, when it flowed, was like milk for the eyes.
I knew myself only as the seer then, and not the seen.

*

Birthstone

When I was thirteen, everything was a metaphor―maybe
half a metaphor, the other half still a riddle in the heart.

Money, another metaphor, was everywhere in our house.
Scattered in kitchen drawers and on countertops.

In discarded dishes where we kept those unwanted coins
we call change. “Take what you need,” my mother said.

Who knew what I needed the day I went to the neighbor’s
auction and found, displayed, a pair of amethyst geodes.

Stones with smaller stones gestating inside of them.
I thought it must be what they meant by a motherlode.

Stones sliced open like soft Anjou pears, exposing their litter
of lilac crystals. Shards of purple light rising like stalagmites,

or like the glistening booty tumbling from pirate chests
in comic books, their lids agape, their gems laid bare.

Someone at the auction must have driven up the price
that day. Must have loved them as much as I did.

How eagerly I shelled out my two dollars and fifty cents,
innocent of whole new anxieties heading my way.

Over dinner, my father told me I was an easy mark. A girl
who’s taken advantage of―who splurges on the first

garish rocks that come her way― unpolished and raw.
The day after the auction, I had to knock on our neighbor’s

door and beg for my money back. I had to learn even
beauty can be a commodity: can be mounted,
carved into facets, twisted around a finger or delicately
broached, those little gold prongs pinning it down.

*

A Thousand Doors

Who said, The day opens with a thousand doors?
An image conceived by some compulsive smiler who
springs from her bed each morning like a startled doe.

Someone who doesn’t wake slowly, as I do,
a half-forgotten dream roving up my shins.
The door a stage mother ready to steer a sleeper

like me into the troubled world. Tell me the image
of a thousand doors isn’t the nightmare you’d get
from being forced to watch that old game show,

the one with three doors, repeating in a perpetual loop,
or those scenes from old movies where the Nazis
or the Stasi are beating down doors.

Or that photo of a bombed-out building,
its one remaining door opening onto empty air.
And then there’s the door I almost overlooked,

the one in the Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas,
The way it reveals a lone courtier standing
in a slender flag of light, the only one seeing

the room from the rear, as if in freeze-frame,
because we know time stops for a second
whenever you open a door. Or close it.

That man in the back of the room reminding me
of my father in those sweet childhood goodnights
of ours. How he stood in the door light

as it framed a silhouette of a round head,
ears with small, furled tips, his slender form
familiar yet otherworldly in the dark,

lingering there long enough to show me
that there is only one safe door in the world.
And I left it long ago.

*

Jeanne Wagner’s book, One Needful Song, was the winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize. She is also the author of four chapbooks and three previous full-length collections. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review. A retired tax accountant, she lives in Kensington, California.

Three Poems by Jeanne Wagner

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The Homing Instinct
         ―Princeville, Kauai

The guide tells us Laysan albatross look
the same at seventy as they do at seventeen,

Except to another albatross I think, but stop
short of saying, not wanting to spoil

the exception which proves the rule, every
rule a law made to be broken, a law

much like gravity, which is why all good
escape artists want feathers on their arms.

I envy migratory birds, the way they navigate
the same sky I always want to get lost in.

The albatross chicks waiting, solitary, a little
sullen, resting on their snug circles of dirt.

The first story always one of place, of hunger,
or being hungered for, like their prey,

squid or krill, or the eggs of the flying fish
with their built-in longing to break into sky.

The albatross almost became extinct because
women wanted feathers in their hats.

But how lovely I felt at seventeen when I wore
my new hat to Mass, the feathers all dyed

that pink we mistake for innocence, and me
just sitting there, barely dreaming of flight.

*

One Person

Peter Sellers said, I do not exist. There used to be a me,
but I had it surgically removed.

We laugh, yet who doesn’t feel pain remembering some
layer of skin

flayed by a casual remark, and afterwards the air, without
even a breeze, raking the spot raw.

We are always one person, no matter how many times
we’ve been effaced.

See how even the moon suffers its monthly mutilations.
This goddess of a sphere

left like a slice of lemon peel garnishing an empty plate.
But now a whole new moon

floats over the dawn redwood in the frame of our skylight.
Who else will ever see it,

the nexus of this place, these seconds, with these eyes?
Who will ever know you as I do?

*

After a Stroke, the Doctor Asks Me to Describe the Cookie Theft Picture

         ―The Cookie Theft Picture, a cartoon of a retro family
         in the kitchen, is a common diagnostic tool for aphasia.

She looks like my Fifties mother asking me to turn down the heat.
Our leg of lamb, forgotten in the oven, was beginning to overcook.
A boy is reaching for the cookie jar, the stool slipping from his feet.
The girl lifts her hand. The boy starts to fall. His falling overlooked.

My mother overcooked the leg of lamb, her body helpless on the floor.
This mom is drying dishes, ignoring the water cascading from the sink.
The girl lifts up her hand to her brother, but I’m not that girl anymore.
This isn’t my dysfunctional family, but I keep searching for some link.

This mom is drying dishes. The overflowing water a symbol of tears,
Every kitchen is an engine room, is a hearth, the heart of the home.
My dysfunctional family must be at it again; the meaning isn’t clear.
I fell on the kitchen floor, where once I found my father, already gone.

Every kitchen is an engine room, but I long for the heart of the home
where once my Fifties mother kept asking me to turn down the heat.
Falling is a family trait. Like gravity. Something I’ve always known.
This boy, he just keeps on reaching. The stool slipping from his feet.

*

Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length collections: The Zen Piano-mover, which won the NFSPS Poetry Prize, In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press, and Everything Turns Into Something Else, published as runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize. Her manuscript, One Needful Song is the recent winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize. Her more recent awards include the 2020 Joy Harjo Award and the 2021 Naugatuck Prize. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review.