“The South is an imaginary place where real things happen.”
— poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
Austin Araujo is a writer from northwest Arkansas. He is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University where he received an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems are published in or forthcoming from Shenandoah, Memorious, The Rumpus, Four Way Review, and elsewhere.
On this edition of the Poets Weave, Austin reads "Within Earshot of 1991," "Patience, and "Aperture."
Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Austin, what poems have you brought for us today?
Back On Her Feet
Akin to the wings of a fuel-depleted plane
in the midst of an emergency landing, catching
nothing but wind on her way down, her hands
can’t stop her as she slips on the twilit and dew-
drenched grass at the bottom of the hill.
The moonlight turns her tumble
into a mostly-seen and well-heard mistake
like an actor tripping across the stage
as the scene blacks out. Her nights
swell with cigarette smoke and she walks, convening
with wave after wave of ants who trail behind,
holding court over those lonesome bugs,
fearing, then getting, now, her collapse in the wet
Ozark dark. Let her inside. Let her
be instead the dozing blue jay
who sets down her wings and carefully
shuts her eyes. Whose head twitches with ease
at any twig’s break and tumult. Whose brow
refuses to corkscrew as if she could grow a future
tense in sleep. Who could fly from danger
when needed. But she looks more troubled
in rest than out of it. Like a string section
awaiting their return from the quiets
written for them. Holding out for when
they can finally again lift their instruments
to their chins and play. Which is really what
my mother’s doing down there, with the ants,
cozying up next to them, on the ground
and beside her: a stone standing
so tall it could mark a tomb
but doesn’t.
The Window
All the work that needed doing,
the one task before us, was unscrewing,
loosing the thick, broken curtain that blocked
the one window in my mother’s living room,
hermetically sealing us in darkness,
cutting off outside sights and noises,
and convincing us to never venture,
but now, with the curtain felled,
lets the light finally in, sofa suddenly
awash in our more particular sight
and the window, now open, lets us
gaze out, gains us perspective onto the yard
and the neighbor’s horses across the way
who meander from one toothy bite of clover
to the next, morning mist falling
upon their manes, breath softly poofing
condensation out their muzzles. We can see
all that from up here, on top of the hill,
in the house my parents tried to own
for their children. And if we take
our gaze up a little higher, past the horses
and their barn, past the meadow
deep in its late-summer preparation
for the coming frost, we can see
the modest height of the Boston Mountains
and, tucked away between them,
the White River sluicing hikers’ feet
of some mud with a score of cicadas
and crickets and laughter and the whinnies
of horses and water singing loud and long
enough to hear from here, echoes chasing
sounds as if reaching out from the ground
like a hot spring or zinnias in bloom.
Reading
How he reads the paper, his frail
then firm exhalations gliding along each word,
breath dancing a sentence’s waltz
and driven spin just below my ear,
swaying in the quiet of a house
otherwise buried beneath the din of my thoughts.
The labor of my own reading is silent,
corralling all of these book’s voices in my head,
refusing to let any out into the pasture
of the room while his tongue’s soft percussion
clicks in time with the folding
and unfolding of his brow. Each comma
gives him a chance to suck in more air,
the noise of which sends my attention
careening from the page, away from its castles
and systems of magic, and toward his measured
gasps that move me between fascination
and disgust like the sounds of a loud chew.
The muscles in his face must twitch then stiffen
out of habit. No. He has only made
this practice of meeting the printed word
recently, turning the newspaper’s box scores
and block quotes into speech, morphing his voice
into music not his own but in his key.
My father blowing quarter notes
into this pasture, this field, this meadow,
while the farmhands in my skull sigh
at what seems like wasted work: keeping
the boy and his wizard inside the fence.
Watching Him Cross
What desire brims in him—so late in spring
this initial crossing. The river a stillness.
My father stuck scaling reeds. Mud anchoring
his boots. To pass time, he reads the stitches,
his jeans. Maybe, he says them aloud,
moves his lips, and whispers like he will to bless
his children each night. Our arms, small allowances
of light, will be crossed, too. Eyes closed, like his.
He will not tell us of the cities along the way—
the story will start at the river, then, suddenly,
Texas—like how my chest might begin to betray
me with cough, and his hand will arrive honeyed
with Vicks VapoRub—but not yet, but already
aching: now distant river: strawberry:
Driftwood
The rain, slow wet procession,
marches along her arms until
it reaches her hands which stay
loosely bandaged now that
every cut lingers, band-aids
like ships passing each other
on their way to and from the port
called pain, each cell a sailor
patrolling the deck called skin,
heavy with the ordinary worry
of the sea-shook, squirrly
with hunger since the last time
she had gauze pressed to her body
daily: stomach split open
as a summer melon,
blood pushed past its meager
dressing as her boy peered
between bedroom door and frame,
dropping his gaze upon then into
her wound like an anchor
through the torpid sea
upon which ships pass
one after another, their paper
prows falling apart in the water.
You've been listening to the poetry of Austin Araujo on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.
