Poetry: PASS WITH CARE by Sophie Klahr
A delicate sonnet cycle, Sophie Klahr’s “PASS WITH CARE” trembles lightly as an inviting hand, stuck out the rolled down window of her car. Here is a road trip so softly lonely that you can’t help but want to hop in.
[ PASS WITH CARE ]
for /after Walt Whitman
Pass with care says the road says do not pass
Every photograph I take of ruins
is with you in mind Agony orchard
gasoline comfort Seeking some being
in these arced hours No other cars mirage
to punctuate fences beyond fences
long syllables of wires or their absence
Any living creatures beside cattle
“I but use you for a minute, then I
resign you, stallion” The CD skipping
“What / What / What is less or more than a touch”
A kind of marginalia to the land
that I listen to over and over
Can I say how empty this country seems
~
Can I say how empty this country seems
Land struck Twisted fertility needs time
for its soul to catch up to its body
and I am complicit There: horseheads of
pumpjacks nod bleak nods over the oil fields
Beaks heavy in the stripped miles I struggle
This country empty of us and porous
and beloved and how I’ve neglected
the sky in what I have tried to tell you
Let me tell you By god it was so blue
The wind moves like an animal inside
the grass beyond my wheel I don’t know if
I understand how to see myself home
but I’ve gathered all these pieces to me
~
So, I’ve gathered all these pieces to me
like bones that might have breath leaned back into
each length On the dashboard: eucalyptus
seashells stones I do want to have a home
It snowed in the town where I woke today
but I still haven’t seen the rain in months
and the earth mutters on holding itself
erosion the origin of sweet talk
I’d like to report “I will put Chaos
into fourteen lines” I’d like to report
passing No Whiners Diner in Roswell
cattycorner from The Caverns Motel
Can you hear me? I say into the phone
How often this question means giving up
~
How often this question means giving up
I ask a lover if they will write me
once I arrive in ________ I won’t they say
that’s just not the kind of person I am
A woman is even more a woman
when she sleeps alone and even more so
in a bed not her own (I think often
of being chopped into little pieces)
I am weary with being a woman
so clearly a woman woman seeing
America white Jewish sober queer
woman seeing America O I
met my 5 year old trans cousin last week
He knew himself so well it made me weep
~
He knew himself so well it made me weep
or was it me that I was weeping for
In the shade of a rest stop, a trucker
and I standing on the pavilion watch
as the fenced land it seems we have each been
staring into is split by a line of
dogs After the fourth it no longer seems
like a dream dogs glimpsed beyond the barbed wire
becoming fact The trucker wears a hat
bearing the name of who he believed would
make America Great Again Seeing
the dogs we turn to one another strange
awe making us light at least this we shared
It’s not something I would want to forget
~
It’s not something I would want to forget
I lift a wounded snake from a dirt road
I have always loved believing I could
save things until the spring I trapped raccoons
two kits one hurt by being tangled in
tarp strings I spent all afternoon cutting
away from its body Set the kits up
in a live trap for their mother’s entry
the point was to keep them a family…
Three nights she came to take them from the cage
A fault in the latch kept shutting her out
she tried piss fur flesh ripped she left a trail
It fills me with shame to say this and still
it’s a story I have to do justice
~
It’s a story I have to do justice
there was a badger hole beside the house
I saw my hair woven into a nest
behind the lath a wind slammed the door hard
then opened it quiet as a mother
petals of an altar’s yellow roses
like chiggers that lit up beneath my skin
whenever I ran The memory was that
of someone fleeing I’ve not said I want
to be alone I’d like a passenger
Perhaps you have become my passenger
by reading my worn car’s door flung open
and here I will leave it open for you.
Do not pass says the road Pass with care the road says
Sophie Klahr
Sophie Klahr is the author of Meet Me Here At Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016). Her poetry appears The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and other publications. Originally a dancer, her interdisciplinary work includes creating scenic texts for theatre and choreography for performance works. She has no permanent address. sophieklahr.com
