the question of address
I know you were there
in the time I passed
through spent
in places and time you
coming near me passing
away. I know we spoke
worked alone or together
in a room or outside
while the day while year.
I may have written you
or spoken
more silently in time.
What was your voice?
Was mine? I remember
some of you and some of you
I don’t but mostly I
don’t write or speak
to you anymore.
I write these poems.
I put you in here.
The places we were
are still as vigil. I open
a window slight hear
the traffic come inside.
the question of address (poem for a scientist)
you the ideal for what I want
to tell you, you
receiving beyond reception.
I make myself
present to you
(trying to keep thinking)
Sometimes you’re someone. Some times
’re someone else Some times
some things surround .
(The kitchen, where I fell in love with you in love with a widower and his three-year-old son and making me acorn squash with sheep's milk manchego and some other fall vegetables, how I went home to New York and knew on the north side of Houston walking west past a small garden on a wet day with a former lover that I was waiting for you, which I did, happily through the winter, though it may not have looked anything like waiting to me or anyone else.)
This letter misplaced is wrongly dispatched
(thinking is self ish takes me a long time)
the question of address (poem for a scientist)
Nietzsche saying all philosophy is autobiography, by error.
Or Keats the reverse "Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses."
And science tries to erase you from it but cannot;
(Your life in it, your hours at the lab, your slow laptop borrowed from your mother from her psychology department running and crashing the hours of analysis, the method you used nearly obsolete by the time you finished the writing, shows the history of your funding, your advisor's relationship with you and with his department, your perfectionism. The time spent cooking, making wedding cakes, spent on the shady shore of a small lake with me on Sundays, spent taking pictures of birds in a nest, spent in and out of trains and cars and airplanes to see me, your mother, your brother and his daughter. Everything you felt obscured in science's passive voice. Science obscured it. You obscured it. But the work is yours. Your work to make it yours.)
(I am in it, too, how I hated it, waiting for you at the window of your lab at dusk, throwing sticks at the window lit with you measuring reagents and mixing media for your yeast cultures to grow in, your unwieldy anxiety about starting and finishing, how we could not go anywhere because of it, how you were never done; but also loved it, being let in, the big oak door, Yale's old stone castle of an environmental biology building, to your brilliance, the warmth and light in the messy piles of papers and stacks of jars of coffee growing mold, waiting for you there, and all it gave me access to, in my wool sweaters and leather shoes, my tidy intelligent face and well-kept hair, passing unnoticed into the libraries of the academy their dark and bright wood.)
(I am there but no one would recognize me, nor am I the subject of your work or object of it. Here you are.)
If you were here, I would have told you everything I could say
a gift and what I extracted
lost, little bright fragments propositions
something like texture
a life with without you
addressed in terror
What else could I have written? :
the question of address (elegy 4: suburbs)
some questions never leave the garage the basement
the hedges and other plants circling the house
the rock wall stratifying the small hill in the back yard
between oaks and wax begonias
a house can be a place you never leave
it can be the hatch door to the basement
the bare construction of stairs
a place to carry a bicycle up or down
a machine no more beautiful than complex
the asphalt path outside domestic enough
a thin layer slowly shaped by roots as dirt would be
as the oaks grow summers come and go
tracking back and forth that route between basement
garage past plantings past a screened porch
a neat lifetime of things the cared-for cars
every license plate marking state and time
lost aesthetics of childhoods grown quite old
the small secret half-room a ledge under the stairs
still possible to climb into a house within a house
a room within a room stooped ceiling short table
the time passed there half-outside half-inside a family
the question of address (elegy 5: mill city)
orange clawfoot tub
bathroom sink in the kitchen
dentures in a plastic deli tub
linoleum
fifty-year-old gas stove faulty pilot
percolator coffee
toast crumbs
Polar diet soda orange dry
window full of cactuses
refrigerator magnets the American Southwest Alaska Catholic holy places
rounded edge of green beer refrigerator
galley kitchen tight and dark
Tom’s trying to tell eighty-year-old women how to wash dishes
the glasses I took the pots and pans
once no one lived there before the stuff was gone
the washing machine and dryer
took three old cousins to take it out
a few steps down the cellar stairs
back up the stairs and out the kitchen door
the dirt floor basement
stacks of sheet metal and the tools to work it
Cut once measure twice
burnt out old apartment towards the back
had linoleum had windows had a family of cousins living in it
before they moved upstairs
wet burnt dirt and oil smell
Ballentine green can
bright sharp yellow smell
cigar smoke
it’s naptime
hating naptime
Kelly green suit for Sundays and holidays
old leather chair hard red leather
I take a birthday cake towards it
you don’t have to if you don’t want to
Ballentine green cans made into a prop plane hung above it
brass bent into model tall ships on the table next to it
how to never move all day
shelves and lost shelves of frog figurines
big jars of hard candies all taste like mint like fruit
I aspirate one once lay on the couch with the knot of it against my spine until it is gone
the pictures of the cousins the grandkids the big eighties high school hair
a white ceramic cat a candle never burned smells like wax roses
one room in the back I never go in
one room in the back the old things are in
dungarees swim suits sweatshirts from Cape Cod
above-ground pool round and cold
sharp and bad smelling grass the roaming dogs of the neighborhood the city dirt
the sidewalkless road the crumbling asphalt the hedges torn through by a small tornado
the bird bath out front the porch the stairs to the second floor
the cousins the motorcycle on the front sidewalk the hot vinyl seats
the poison ivy in the lattice shiny and green
the bedroom a dark place dark wood and worn down dark red woven mat on the floor
when I sleep here I sleep in the bed too
spiral curl of carved wooden banisters
spots in the tiles of the ceiling
I watch TV from bed eat a piece of gum all the way through
do you want to go to 7Eleven now? //Is it time yet?
I get sick when we are downtown lie in the bed while the people are talking in the house
the dresser where the things are lipstick the jewelry I am given
the blue glass votive light the Virgin
the mid-century photos
Peggy Ann
in nurse’s whites
John Joseph
an army mechanic
your father
with a radical’s facial hair
when it’s night the streetlight through the windows
the porch is there
the front door opens to the stairs the dark indoor stairs to the cousins upstairs
Aunt Jo’s, David Dodge.
there is not really a front door to downstairs, the entryway opens to the bedroom
we come in through the front the bedroom or we come in through the back the kitchen
there’s a key under the mat in the back
Katie Naughton is the author of the chapbooks A Second Singing (Dancing Girl Press, 2023) and Study (Above/Ground Press, 2021). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Fence, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She is an editor at Essay Press, the HOW(ever) and How2 Digital Archive Project (launching in 2023), and Etcetera, a web journal of reading recommendations from poets. www.katienaughton.com