No Easy Light
by
Susan Sibbet
“What a gorgeous book of poems. Wide spaces and sprinkles of stars surround the most intimate details of life in kitchens and gardens. In No Easy Light, we enter a large world held together by a woman embracing time, the spaces between things and the things themselves: husband, animals, weaving, cooking, hidden chocolate, curries, french fries, sweet loneliness, waiting mothers and sisters, a father forever at sea, the missing daughter sent down the river like the baby in the basket lost in rushes and finally found.
No Easy Light is a playful, brilliant song to
life, with one woman's love the glowing circle around it all.”
— Susan Wooldridge
Susan Sibbet lives with her husband in San
Francisco in a flat next to Argonne Community Garden, with berry bushes
and fruit trees they planted more than twenty years ago. She was a Woodrow
Wilson Fellow and a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe/Harvard, and held writing
residencies at Soapstone in
Oregon and the Headlands Center for the
Arts in California. She has taught in the California Poets in the Schools
program in Bay Area schools for many years. Her previous books are Burnt Toast and Other Recipes and
Suspensions.
The Longing for Coffee
—the bitter
thick taste of it against the mouth
roof, the
knowing
back of the tongue.
The black steam
rising silently, damp
cup warming the fingers,
cheek,
bright, the bright—
eyes opening after weeks of rain.
The lashes stick with waking salt.
Veins and passages,
blood and
sound clear.
Light pulls me inside, and the taste
is the crumbling
edge from the acrid binding
of a book left hidden on a high shelf.
And after such longing, there remains holding onto
the departing
warmth, then only the cold and
remembered grounds.
Our Manatee Was a Younger Daughter
the plain one, left alone
among the tanks of bright-fringed
polygala,
the proud anemone, phallic orange.
She was the silent one,
even her waters
quiet around her. Turning slow
behind the glass, she
was white-skinned
in the darkness, a moving cloud
like some whole
imagined earth,
that blue marbled globe whose beauty
we never saw
until we left her.
Turning soft, nuzzling,
paddling against the deeper dark,
she was
alone in a corner tank
too small for any companion,
though even the
blank-faced shark and rude-
lipped bass had company behind their
glass.
When I first saw her,
she seemed to be looking back,
watching,
floating in the midst of lettuce leaves.
But toward the end, after
nights and years,
she turned away, sinking without motion.
and we
hurried by, heading for the door,
all the echoing hordes of us.
Now when I pass that corner, that tank
is busy with small bright
fish, rock caves,
and empty of her beauty.
I miss her heavy grace.
