Stolen
I set out milk in yellow bowls
for the high-tailed cats,
dusk coming.
House in the shadow of the mountain.
When I was seventeen
I wrote a paper for my lit. professor
Yeat’s “The Stolen Child”
Goethe’s “Erl King.”
Cold cheek, brown teapot.
Shiver like a ribbon of cracking ice
or the flicking tail of a deer.
Words a bent spoon
digging through the soft black
chalk between worlds.
I delayed my fruiting
blossoms unblossoming.
A girl of a mind to be stolen.
The cats return and dip their faces.
I hear the owl’s wings
after night falls like an iron
off a high shelf.
Nothing is coming now, except
what has always been coming.
How much of me is still here?
• • •
As a Child in the 1960s
Africa, the Amazon, the North Pole, the island nations
of the South Seas, and the affronted moon
were distant and safe
in imagination.
We learn. The tree bends to small wounds,
cracks under the ax.
We’ve smelled the white pith, the clean sap
so much sweeter than blood. Animal deaths
are more difficult, the almost person almost there
in the dropped body. I have to wonder
if what I call the “almost”
is what will break us. Dear earth,
ice-skinned, dirt-skinned, skin of grains and fungus
pebbled-pored and salt-haired, whirling ball
in your private game,
our uncouth soliloquy
will soon end. The Greeks believed
the dead are haunted by their lives
bread and meat, smoke from the fires
on feast nights, the sound of bees,
water lapping on the shore,
a lover’s kiss—
What you gave us.
And we built monuments in stone, on paper,
in the invisible world.
We taught generations with the blaze
of genius in our eyes—in our best eyes—
I am one of your breaths, Earth
one of a billion billion
hoping for death unleavened by memory.
I would say be kind to them—
our children’s children—
I would say that if your caves were ears
if volcanoes were red-hot hearts
if a soft rain meant sleep now,
my lovely, peculiar creations.
But I can’t say nothing.
• • •
Margaret Diehl is the author of two novels and a memoir (Men, 1989, Me and You, 1990 and The Boy on the Green Bicycle, 1999, all from Soho Press) a chapbook of poems it all stayed open, published by Red Glass Books, 2011, as well as poems, articles, and book reviews in many publications. She works as a writer and editor in NYC.