Rooftop Poetry Club - Naomi Guttman

Naomi Guttman

Bio:
Naomi Guttman was born and raised in Montreal, where she attended Concordia University. In 1991, her book Reasons for Winter won the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry and was short listed for The League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, as well as an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Wet Apples, White Blood—her latest book of poems, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the spring of 2007. She teaches English and creative writing at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

Poems
from Wet Apples, White Blood
McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2007
Ordering Information

Because thrift is not always a virtue

Today, behind the golf course, where no one goes,
by the abandoned barn, its hand-made silo boarded
like a pirate’s eye, I stole them in bunches,
grabbed branches, bent them down, ripped
green wood, leaving shreds and a snow of petals.

Each May I opened the screen porch
of my parents’ house to sleep in that smell.
I haven’t forgotten the deep violet taste
of walking home in the dark with a new boy
holding hands and laughing while my neighbors
slept in faded rooms and the lilacs
the lilacs, leaned their cool faces
toward us, a thousand panicles, night-pulse of bloom.

Why we have lived so luckily

When on quiet mornings you see us oiling hinges
or pushing a slow broom along the porch’s wide boards
see us stop our work to gaze down at the delicate lake—
we are searching for the answer.

You want to know what will happen?
You will twist us in sheets and set us in dirt
or burn our bones to gravel.

Don’t count on keeping the house—

Last summer’s shingles wear silver in the rain
that trickles down the chimney and cracks the brickwork.
Soon a vinegar must will seep from the eaves.

Do you think we will live forever for you?

Remember the tin-lined closet—even there
mice leave messes in Grandmother’s linens,
stitched in the thick letters of girlhood.

ULTRASOUNDS

Subrosa, amoroso, single shiver of my flesh
restless shadow, flicker spirit, silhouette caught in a flash.

Tough muscle, tender echo, tissue goblin, holy ghost
little skiff in brackish waters, tethered to the braided mast.

Hieroglyph homunculus, a percolating pulse of flame
ambiguous circumfluous, I do not even know your name.

Horses thunder, trains à banjo, throbbing bone and humming thrum
mysterious celebrity, you’re coming home, you’re coming home.