Amy Debrecht

Poetry by Amy Debrecht

The Eaters

By mid afternoon, the melon set out on the back step
has been tunneled through by scores of ants, bees,
flies and gnats, working in diligent and oblivious hunger,
dodging the seeds as if they were hurled to earth like meteors.
Even a few pill bugs have fallen into the gorge,
a cavern large enough for a large man's fist,
or the broad pad of a bear's paw.

Such devotion to the flesh rewards these eaters
with endless sweet caves.
They must buzz and gnaw without thinking
they'll ever reach the end
of this spongy pink world,
undisturbed by hand or swatter, not overturned by foot.

It seems they will eat themselves crazed,
fall off the rind, reeling
from the melon's middle,
fly crooked circles home
to sleep off the feed.

For a Winter Death

For father

The birds have flown from our white yard,
they've learned we have no seed.
We whose hands could not hold you
to this wintered hungered world,
but neither have we taken up
the grain to sift between our fingers
as you would have wanted.
Instead we awaken from the long cold,
count our losses in the half bare trees,
the bulbs that do not flower.

Father, you might remember the spring
we watched the robins hatch in the red tree.
It was a season of endless want.
Did you ever see one of their peach pit throats
not strained upward with an open beak?
And once you lingered too close,
the mother swooped down on you,
a flurry of wing and brown breast.
In the cool grass lay a fledgling,
its bowels in a heap, fly-worked and steaming,
and the stopped blue gears beneath.

You pass your winter with a still heart,
our hearts as stale and dark as closed rooms.
We stumble onto spring,
surprised to see the redbuds
have insisted, despite our insignificant death.
This is air we can breathe, light we can feel.
We will look for the moon-
face of the hibiscus, the berry patch
ripe and rising to be picked.

Newborn

For Joan

So the red world flowers again,
makes bones and eyes from that soil
like pearls from a sandy mouth.
In the middle of the day,
you catch yourself thinking of its face,
a flower opening upon its first gold sky.
What will you call it when it crowns,
this morning glory pushing mad
through the weeds?

Soon you will breathe
under a circle of masked mouths,
a reservoir as round as the world.
Home again, bearing the child like a trophy,
remembering how we begin.
You are dazed at the potential in your breasts.
You could feed the world,
or at least that small rooting mouth-
yours now.

3-Wheeling

My cousin-fearless,
her perfumed hair
flipping wildly in my face--
bears down on the pedal,
as my arms hold tighter
the oval of her waist,
and the dull gold fields
of November blur by.
The cold is fierce at this speed,
stinging my eyes to tears,
bringing the blood to my cheeks,
and I bury my face in her shoulder.
She shrugs me off,
leans into the wind and the machine.
Despite the cries
(lost to the engine
zipping and the wheels
gripping frosted grass and gravel,
even the sheared cornstalks)
she is silent, scouring on,
taking turns on two wheels
off the trail in the woods,
and now the brittle branches
are at our faces
with little whips and pricks.
I fear she will never stop,
but drive me deeper into the woods,
With nothing but a crescent moon
to see by,
and an owl
questioning the cold stillness.

But above the treeline lifts
the red scarf of a cardinal's wing,
all around is the stark beauty
in these naked oaks.

For Jeffrey, Who Wanted a Sunset-on-the-beach Poem

My friend, the sun does not set over this water,
so there is no pink globe that seems to descend
right into the sea, like a silver dollar slid into a pocket.
I can tell you though, there are long-winged
brown pelicans with fish-bloated throats
sailing overhead in single lines,
sandpipers running quickly, quickly from the water,
pecking and drilling for tiny clams that come up with the tide,
and disappear again with a burrowing foot
once the water recedes.
One morning early the water came rolling in rough,
embedded the hermit crabs in a wall of sand.
We dug and plucked them from their beds, peered in
as they pulled their fat pincers back in the ear of the shell.
I found you a sand dollar imprinted with a 5-tipped star
among scores of jellyfish washed up,
ghosts of bodies that once drifted over thighs, unseen as ghosts.
I found you a mermaid's purse-that small black womb
out of which a skate had birthed itself and shimmied off
into the wide bright sea.
I can tell you the gulls grow tame
and hover in close for crackers and bread.
I can tell you, too, the sun's pinks do reach,
do creep faintly over the water's horizon
at dusk from that other sky.