Six Poems by Carlie Hoffman
Carlie Hoffman is the author of When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023) and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. She is the translator of Weiße Schatten / White Shadows: Anneliese Hager (Atelier Éditions, 2023). Carlie’s honors include the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review poetry prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award and her work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Boston Review, New England Review, Jewish Currents, and other publications. Carlie lives in Brooklyn where she edits Small Orange Journal and is a Lecturer of Creative Writing at the State University of New York at Purchase.
November Morning on Graham Avenue
The neighbor is playing Chopin again.
I keep the curtain closed. My favorite part
is already knowing the cold outside. Yesterday,
walking back from the store, sadness
flew toward me from a bag of leaves,
invisible sound so beautiful I could have
dropped my apples in the street and cried.
I haven’t had enough money or love of money
for a very long time. I put the coffee on
and open the encyclopedia to a confident age—
bombarded city with its chair in the sun,
piano glowing with people approaching
astonishment in a room from long ago—
where the dead go, they leave music behind.
The Wolves Ran On Through The Evergreen Forests
Little monster on my lap, your song is broken, unbearable,
and the roofs of this town grow invisible vines
toward a backwards story. I feel failed here. The wolves
are lonely, unable to reach God who is sneering
from the mountain’s edge. Together,
we peer at the frozen trees, unreflective.
I could snap
the root with my thumb, but instead,
I travel with you into
the greening history and when the downpour arrives
I am glad for the rain always happening
in the past. I am certain of the rose I carry
underneath language where music stops:
I am giving you a better brain.
I Will Give This Letter to a Worm
After Sarah Ruehl
Letter in the frothing field of cornflower & tiger’s milk.
Letter among forsythia & speckled trout.
Letter with misplaced brain, its telephone’s Delphic ringing.
Letter swimming haphazardly toward the albacore & blue fish & basking shark.
Letter stringing hawk moth to whalebone singing the Lord.
Letter’s weathervane of thunder snake & blacksnake & cottonmouth & sidewinder & cobra.
Letter hungry for ant lion, preying locust in sun.
Letter foxlike & bassarisk, resurrecting.
At the scene of disaster: fireworm, earthworm, shipworm.
No day is new in the name of the Lord who knows language
is a person-sized regret—no day is safe from news of me.
The Twenty-First Century
I watch the lonely wolves
button up
their twentieth century skins.
They wear history’s
violent beauty
like a mother
easing into her
warmest shawl.
Refurbished Eden
Horses neighing in the desert that never
ends. Strawberries from a boreal forest. Bonfire
in the garden where a pot boils for jam. Someone adds
the leaves to a century spinning a silence void of anger.
How a tongue can be a foreign creature thrashing
on its back like a toppled goat or sheep or foal. My father’s
mother hides their Russian in cabinets
among the worn-out spoons and sugar bowls. The language
cobwebbed, dehydrated stems peeking out from a sieve—
autumn crocus, peony, siberian lily. His mother
has firm views on everything: Here is the right time
to pick a plum. Dark is where the children go
to sleep. Basketball is American, which is good. In Liberty, New York
my father hurls his basketball at the garage door then ties
on his apron and enters his parents’ deli
to sweep away the raisoned bodies
of dead flies. His mother has firm views
on everything: Here is an honest man and a man
who is not. Here is how you grow a garden. My father
counts loose dimes and quarters for customers, pressing his hand
against their palms and the leaves sprout. He is telling
my sister and I the story again like potential memory.
He points his broom to the war, the camp, the soldiers
will order one of us to shoot the other. He holds his staff
like Moses in the garden—golden root, azalea, siberian lily.
Go ask Cain, he says. Abel’s already written down.
The Twenty-First Century
A girl’s mouth parts
in the middle of winter
as she turns her back on Bach,
then Heidegger, then returns
to Akhmatova
asking for the indefinite
which is the truth.