{"id":4871,"date":"2014-07-19T07:00:28","date_gmt":"2014-07-19T07:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sporkpress.com\/?p=4871"},"modified":"2014-07-19T07:00:28","modified_gmt":"2014-07-19T07:00:28","slug":"two-self-portrait-poems-caleb-curtiss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/2014\/07\/19\/two-self-portrait-poems-caleb-curtiss\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Self-Portrait Poems || Caleb Curtiss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Self-Portrait as a Photograph of my Father<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today, the seedpods on the Milkweed<\/p>\n

growing along the road between the airport<\/p>\n

and the place my grandparents will die<\/p>\n

began to open themselves, imperceptibly,<\/p>\n

as if each were the beak of a baby<\/p>\n

crane at the first change in pressure that comes<\/p>\n

with their mother\u2019s circling descent. I saw them like this<\/p>\n

from the window of my father\u2019s Buick, saw each<\/p>\n

one of them pass us by, their cracked<\/p>\n

mouths and eyeless heads, and said<\/p>\n

nothing. Soon, after watching my father stand<\/p>\n

in unsteady synchrony with his father,<\/p>\n

I will lift myself from the davenport in the lobby,<\/p>\n

and head for the patio where I will stand at my father\u2019s<\/p>\n

left hand, his father\u2019s right, and I will smile<\/p>\n

for the camera, not noticing how the seeds on the silver<\/p>\n

maple behind us have nearly matured. How some<\/p>\n

have already detached themselves from its branches,<\/p>\n

have begun their slow, spinning fall.<\/p>\n

We smile these facsimile smiles, lips taut<\/p>\n

over straight, white teeth, because we feel<\/p>\n

a sort of pressure in the air: something that tells us<\/p>\n

that we are mortal, that we will be here<\/p>\n

forever.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Self-Portrait With My Dead Sister<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is a girl and a boy sitting on a curb<\/p>\n

next to the ocean somewhere in Oregon<\/p>\n

where the rain, which has just stopped, has caused<\/p>\n

a mud puddle to form in the foreground, just in front<\/p>\n

of the boy\u2019s white shoe: his pants<\/p>\n

are blue, his jacket is red, and he is not<\/p>\n

smiling at all, which I think<\/p>\n

is what makes her faintly upturned lip<\/p>\n

look so much like a smile.<\/p>\n

Never mind that these people were real,<\/p>\n

that one will grow up and keep on being real,<\/p>\n

while the other will grow up and be dead.<\/p>\n

Never mind the brusk presentation or presumptuous<\/p>\n

implications the speaker in my poem employs:<\/p>\n

he should be excused on account of his grief,<\/p>\n

and frankly, it\u2019s probably for the best<\/p>\n

that we ignore him and just stick to the facts. For example,<\/p>\n

the boy is nearly five years old, which makes the girl<\/p>\n

nearly seven years old, which makes it nearly 15 years<\/p>\n

before she drove past a stop sign and then,<\/p>\n

didn\u2019t do anything ever again.<\/p>\n

Despite the fact that here, she has just<\/p>\n

pulled her legs into her chest, has just set her chin<\/p>\n

on her knees, turned up the corner<\/p>\n

of her lip, and here it seems as if she could,<\/p>\n

for a moment, break through the artifice of time,<\/p>\n

the static nature of her disposition, and say something<\/p>\n

utterly irrelevant, something<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t pretend<\/p>\n

to understand.<\/p>\n

____________________<\/p>\n

Caleb Curtiss<\/strong> is the author of<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us\u00a0<\/i>(Black Lawrence Press, 2015). His writing has been published in, or is forthcoming from,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>New England Review<\/i>,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>The Literary Review<\/i>,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>DIAGRAM<\/i>,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Green Mountains Review<\/i>,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>TriQuarterly<\/i>,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Passages North<\/i>,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Ninth Letter<\/i>,\u00a0and elsewhere.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Self-Portrait as a Photograph of my Father \u00a0 Today, the seedpods on the Milkweed growing along the road between the airport and the place my grandparents will die began to open themselves, imperceptibly, as if each were the beak of a baby crane at the first change in pressure that comes with their mother\u2019s circling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}