LONG AFTER LAUDS
Poems
Jeanine Hathaway
Long After Lauds
Poems
Copyright © 2019 Jeanine Hathaway. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Poems from The Ex-Nun Poems. Copyright © 2011 by Jeanine Hathaway. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company LLC on behalf of Finishing Line Press, www.finishinglinepress.com. All rights reserved.
Slant
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-8928-4
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-8929-1
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-8930-7
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Hathaway, Jeanine.
Title: Long after lauds: poems. / Jeanine Hathaway.
Description: Eugene, OR: Slant, 2019.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-8928-4 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-8929-1 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-8930-7 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Poetry. / American poetry—21st century.
Classification: PS3558.A746 L66 2019 (paperback) | PS3558.A746 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 07/17/19
For Charlotte, Beatrice, and Sadie
MAKING IT UP UNDER WATER
(creation myth)
This world’s born from a trench, hot vent
in the depths. A bio-luminous bacterial
ballet, gravity free. Play begat jellyfish:
no bones, or brain, or blood. What in the
squid circulates is copper; a scrape seeps
not iron red but blue. Blood and tentacles,
the beginning of friction, sting, and ink.
DISAPPOINTMENTS
The gruff curator expects more of us, a tide
of schoolkids maybe after a long ride, bus rowdy,
to his makeshift sea lab, tanks cleaned. Terms
on the white-board wall color the language
of mollusk, cephalopod, sea star, anemone.
Only two of us show up, ambling along the beach,
our glasses smeared by sea spray and drizzle.
The man, heavy, bewhiskered Navy vet, bad back,
decides to withhold more than he’ll teach. “Go on.”
We’re free, hands on, to poke inside the tubs.
Your fingertip sinks down a sea star’s arm;
tube feet feel their wet way up to the foodless air.
My fingertip nettles an anemone, pink petaled
succulent, friction in the barbs. Stinging
nematocysts, they poison inedible me.
The curator from his stool across the lab grunts.
I head for the sink, touch nothing but soap and
scrub. All he’ll hear from here on: a woman
his age washing, not clapping, not the brilliant
applause he’d spent the morning setting up for.
ICHTHYOLOGY
Hacked and sliced, a pile of salmon halves
rots in the parking lot at the river’s mouth.
Orange and silver dinner for crows, part
installation, the Coho stare into tires, truck
bumpers. I stare into them: their bones
fallen combs, tails feathery, curling to
clumps. Flies swarm; the buzz is glued
to the asphalt. Not swimming, no flop or
fight—the meat’s gone out of the argument.
I shovel them back into the river.
Let whitewater tear them apart. Make private
the shame of this flaying, pick them clean,
inarticulate. A spiny silence lies below a hook.
Let even their bones be as useful as prayer,
those fine lines that some would call the catch.
BEFORE ENTERING
“–5–6–7–8, and 1–” The dancers drum onstage
from the wings where they were before the downbeat,
that pre-historic moment, bandaged and flinching,
calloused, split, grinning—the tick-swish of soles
on bare wood; their presence shifts how light leaps
off the watch of the ex-nun’s date. Such sound
bodies. Their backs, extraordinary overlaps
of muscle bound to bone. Contract/release,
