Two Poems

by Sara Sams

THE FIRST BOOK OF RITA IMOGENE

1930

There’s a cold pail by my feet

            when lightning’s shucked

from roof to cow to thumb—

            makes me buzz

near how licking hail does:

Now me, all quiet-like,

            and the door stuck

just as pitiful to the barn,

            which course starts up shaking.

What a rapturous priss of a storm

we’re in, her grand finale

            as frantic as a whooping

cough, akin to engine failure,

            —how when I dance

my limbs’ll tremble as they loosen,

then wilden, then let

            a small bundle of intimates out

to who knows where.

            Cows don’t like this. A cow

likes routine. So I make biscuits,

though what milk I have

            is scorched.

It’s three months from here

            my sister goes, too young

to know it. When they lower

her—sound like a cast iron

            slung to the back of the rack—

the selfsame tremor

            finds me. My body

hums

            out after her,

through the hinge.

PROPHECY AFTER THE DEATH OF A DAUGHTER

First spiraled mint and knock-kneed peddlers,

then her small face, bright as a city not yet built.

Then the candy resting on her tongue

like a stone, the rud rud of a wagon wheel,

a particle of dust in my eye. Then three fathers’

worth of trinkets, their future value resting not

on material or use but on their distance past

so many rolling hills of time, so long

before the great unsettling. But first,

her skin stretched like a too-still pond.

Now my foot on a puddle, pushing down.

Now a burial and a hinge and me falling off.

A wife unwilling to distract herself with God,

the voice beneath the puddle.

Now the wife gone. Next, a long time on the same ground

that took my neon girl; the echo of a word

I know but never learned. Then white fungus

growing too fast beside me, as if sprouting from

my cheek. Soon, the pure white of a star and a pain

in my temple. Soon, a collective upturning

of bellies. Soon, a new museum

and, beneath the stairs, a photo of

a shadow of a boy— right where

the boy had been. Soon

a woman with pond-colored eyes

will visit, say it had to be.

Does that make this a prophecy?