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NO SMALL DEATHS BY CASSANDRA ROBISON

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TABLE OF CONTENTS No Small Deaths ................................................................................................... 5

A Transient ........................................................................................................... 6

Mignon ................................................................................................................. 7

Kite ....................................................................................................................... 8

Walking in Theirs .................................................................................................. 9

Banishing the Cats .............................................................................................. 11

Rightful Places .................................................................................................... 12

Punch Drunk ....................................................................................................... 13

Remembering ..................................................................................................... 14

Cloister ............................................................................................................... 15

June 13, Sunday morning ................................................................................... 16

hunt .................................................................................................................... 17

Erie ..................................................................................................................... 18

Cataract Sky I ..................................................................................................... 19

A June Rain, Florida 6 p.m. ................................................................................. 20

In the Children’s Hospital, St. Louis .................................................................... 21

Vigil .................................................................................................................... 21

Railing ................................................................................................................. 23

J. Alfred’s Staircase ............................................................................................. 24

713 ..................................................................................................................... 25

Chalk................................................................................................................... 26

Winter Warblers ................................................................................................. 27

Cover photo: Vertical Barn by Jude Dippold

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Acknowledgements:

No Small Deaths, published by Clapboard House, 2010

Erie and In the Children’s Hospital, published by Imprints (2009, 2010)

About the author:

Cassandra Robison was born of Swedish heritage in Jamestown, New York. She

was educated at SUNY Fredonia, the University of Arizona and Walden

University (B.A., M.Ed., Ph.D.) and taught creative writing and other subjects at

the College of Central Florida, Ocala, for ten years. Her poetry textbook Heart’s

Craft: Modeling the Masters (Pearson Longman, NY: 2012) is co-authored with

Suzanne Keyworth. She has previous two chapbooks, Leaving the Pony

(Finishing Line Press, 2008) and Tundra Heart (Pudding House Press, 2009). Dr.

Robison lives in Florida and upstate New York.

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No Small Deaths

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NO SMALL DEATHS South Florida, 2007

West in the Glades, wildfires rage.

Dark smoke rises, and snakes across

scorched earth. It seeps into human places

on South Ocean Drive. Where in reply,

yellow warblers suddenly fall from the sky,

perch dazed upon café chairs

or wing blind into glass high-rise condos.

An ashen silence palls. It’s Mother’s Day.

We chat about such things as can be said.

You tell me about this bird madness.

Then sip your tea. What else is there to do

but pray for rain? In a season of fire, of drought

and small deaths that sear our landscapes?

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A TRANSIENT

I awake thick with sleep to a bleak soul who has travelled across memory and returned, a dark thing. She hangs shroudlike around me all morning. By afternoon, coffee and cats chase her away. I realize I have been dodging her all my life.

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MIGNON

I. On the last day of her life, the calico cat

lay down in cool oleander shade;

asked no mercy of me or the world

but took her last breath quietly,

her elegant bones transposed

into earth. She was like

the others—

a cat who knew her way home.

II. She lay dead by the door

gold eyes wide in death

where she had come calling in her late hour.

Full of the day, I did not hear her

though I’d been attuned to her dying

all that week.

I let the oleander hold her now,

the sun unstain her bones, the crepe myrtle

unfurl its tenderness, the chameleons

poise upended—no weeping here.

Only a profusion of wild tiger

lilies, blood orange.

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KITE

The cattle egrets become one white kite

soaring 1000 feet above the snow

of childhood, swinging in great arcs,

each a mirror of the changing wind

—far below the string holds taut.

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WALKING IN THEIRS

I. Hers

My kind mother repeated the adage not

to judge others unless I walked in their shoes.

Still I remember that worst year of her life

when she marched into the most exclusive store

in town and bought herself dangerous shoes:

Crocodile high heels with pointed toes

in which she clicked down hallways, her hips

angry, focused. But later – after all

her losses: kidney, teeth, husband, home—

she took to wearing black vinyl slippers

year round, a defiance.

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II. His

My sister said, you’re just like our father

who always assumed he deserved the best.

I don’t know if that’s true. Anyway,

the best was not us. That was clear.

When I was small, he wore determined brown

leather shoes as he made his way in the world

He had suede mocassins for Sunday mornings

Sometimes he wore green, waterproof boots,

knee high for walking in fields or fishing

in my grandfather’s boat that chugged them out

to muskellunge depth and back again, rich with fish.

In the end, I recall those slick black Florsheim

shoes he wore the day he never looked back.

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BANISHING THE CATS After their daughter died, they moved South. The wife shut the once pampered cats outside on the long screened porch in Florida, overlooking Crystal River. My father himself banished from the normal world by illness—pled for their return. She did not relent. At first the two cats sat side by side, noses to the glass door. Later they slunk off to windowsills. The great gray Persian stopped grooming himself, had to be taken twice year to be shaved. When stepchildren visited they would sit and pet the cats in the forbidding heat or turn a cheek to her and find cold skin on skin. One could say her heart shut in grief, but chill was in the bones. The father slept alone to the end; the cats soon followed. And in this end was only blankness. What is at work in the simple things held back? A renegement of touch, the closing of doors?

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RIGHTFUL PLACES

My aged mother sits in bed in a blue room, lamp on, rolling her thumb and forefinger. A tiger cat on her lap. Today she forgot her mother’s name, yesterday the way home from her daughter’s house just across town. This is the house she’s lived in 30 years; she says those years jumble like the jigsaw puzzles she laid out on the table night after night, twirling pieces in her hand, until she found their rightful places. Years have drained. She is already moving on to the next place. She has left her daughters here on the mooring, Waving— So short! she’d say.

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PUNCH DRUNK

It’s the first great snow up near Buffalo,

when my sister says, call me crazy,

but I always love the first one

if not the others. We laugh.

It’s true. How we do love the first one,

the one who left us blitzkrieged,

stripped and bare. For the rest of our lives

we lean punch drunk into memory.

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REMEMBERING

A shudder of warblers settles on the tree,

feathers its branches, disappears into green,

and then the splendor of voices from hidden places.

A gust of wind unleashes them into air

like shards of stained glass, sun on their wings.

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CLOISTER for Vicky

As a child, my sister secreted herself

in that sacred space where lying on its cold

altar stone, she was sanctified.

Her face remained mime, her doll’s eyes

stared blank and wide as they skimmed

the wrecked world her parents made.

So it went all those cursed years

until the day a door swung wide:

to our surprise,

she stepped out whole and beautiful.

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JUNE 13, SUNDAY MORNING

The sweet jasmine snaked its way up porch screens

overnight, tendrils longing. The morning breeze soothes

them; they pretend to sleep. The yellow curtains breathe

in and out; a mockingbird on a branch tries out a dozen songs.

the orange cat marvels at filigreed light. A scent rises

from a lifetime past, a strong child who knows her way home.

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HUNT Two hunters move into a clearing amidst black branched trees and a field crisp with snow. Even in the sepia music of old film, I can hear their boots crunch. They lean against a fallen tree, shotguns butt first into earth. They smoke Pall Malls. The grandfather’s face below his plaid cap smiles but the son in law’s eyes narrow. Even a stranger—surely a daughter—could see the first man has made peace with his life; the other will soon be gone.

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ERIE

a summer cottage on Lake Erie

near Portland on Route 5, a dirt road winding behind

the long grape fields with their gnarled limbs coveting wire;

miles and miles of plumbed rows far as a child’s eye can see.

The walk from lake to cabin a quarter mile through giant trees

that swayed and rustled like weird monks, those leaves lullaby

a low chant: There is a place on the edge of the world

where quiet children become fey arbors.

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CATARACT SKY I

They brought her a glass filled with ice

but no food; her kidneys were shutting down,

just as the nurse had said, whispering

in her ear: This is how it happens.

And she had nodded, I think I can

finish this. And so she did, died there

in the Swedish hospice room stiff skinned,

gray swaddled, pale as winter sky.

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A JUNE RAIN, FLORIDA 6 P .M .

smells of grass and crepe myrtle, the porch

screens honeycombed, the scorching day

washed away. For a spell

the wind chimes sway like jazz musicians;

a fat fist of cloud gives way to grey.

Even a fine day can be too hot,

the steam of it too much.

But it is swept aside in a rush of rains

like this one, eaves dripping.

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IN THE CHILDREN ’S HOSPITAL , ST . LOUIS

She lies on her side as required, balled

up like a fist, soundless, her skull prettied

by a blue print scarf. All the parents, all

those witnesses are ushered out

but stare back through the glass from the hall.

and wait. Just wait. Finally the needle hits

her spine. One wail punishes it, that’s all;

she stands up, refinds the jut of jaw

where her courage lies. Ahead of us in the hall,

she straightens her glasses with a hand so small.

VIGIL

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On her last day, her father carried her

to the cool brown sand at Long Point. In a row

of stiff backed beach chairs, the aunts vigilled

with folded hands, stared out

into Lake Erie’s anemic waves.

On that solemn afternoon,

when the child asked for drink, her father

held a jelly jar glass to her lips, one small

sip of grape juice, her favorite.

It left a bruise there upon her lip.

And that was all. One smile washed

across her pallid face like a mercy.

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RAILING

The jasmine tendrils found the balustrade of wrought iron trellis overnight, entwined themselves in sinuous grace halfway up already. Even when we can not see they are reaching out for something that does not move: an image, a dream, a strong hand.

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J. ALFRED ’S STAIRCASE

our great grandfather built the apartment house

from the ground up, nail by thoughtful nail.

each child remembers the sleek bannister,

the way it held us as we swung around the corners of our youth.

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713 for Larry

A pole bean green house with yellow trim, six apartments, three to a side, each with long side porch, built 1922 by the old Swede. I grew up there in 713, where every morning I heard the shuffle of my relatives rising on the floors above and below. Behind a long ravine stretched into a garden, wet with artesian springs, ripe with wild unfurling ferns. In the afternoons, the sun danced to the southwest corner and we cousins would sit on the steps of the lower apartment porch. Hushed there by dandelions, lavender Iris, rising along the wall. How little we need, really, the smell of damp ferns, a niche of garden awash in light.

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CHALK

An August day, a young girl hunches down on a cement sidewalk. She is wearing blue plaid shorts, her blond head bent in meditation: she draws with blue chalk. The color of cornflowers fills her nails, couches under them as she presses down. It is hot but the sun’s heat is sweet

beneath the silver maple branches

as they draw own shapes in shadow and light.

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WINTER WARBLERS

The winter warblers arrive early, skittering in the trees at the yard’s edge trebling notes from deep in the lodge pine and pin oak. The forest is stubble yet year after year, those birds return.