The Poetry of Sarah Blackman

“In a civilization or a family no one knows what comes next./Not the protozoa. Not the whelk./ When we rise, washed smooth, we pat each other/because we are surprised to find each other/more or less unchanged when the whole great night/has been battled through, when flames have consumed/the alphabet up to but not including the letter A.”—Sarah Blackman

Speculative Friction

By Claire Bateman

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—October 2019—Poet Sarah Blackman is the Director of Creative Writing at the Fine Arts Center, a public arts magnet high school in Greenville, South Carolina. She is the co-fiction editor of DIAGRAM and the founding editor of Crashtest, an online literary magazine for high school age artists and writers. Her poetry has appeared in The Missouri Review, APR, Gettysburg Review and The Laurel Review among many other magazines. Her books, Mother Box and Hex, were published by FC2 in 2013 and 2016 respectively. 

Melancholia; A Fantasy
By Sarah Blackman

Somewhat famously I had a long and happy marriage.
He was a poet and I kept a garden blooming,
spears of Mexican lavender, walkways carpeted with mint.
One thing led to another and he died.
I cannot describe the shape the house takes
without him in it. It is something like a boat,
empty, hitched to the dock by a fraying line.
It is something like if that boat had a crab-pot
tucked under one of the plank seats,
forgotten last season by a man who fishes for the sense
of the deep cold space beneath him. I can almost see him—
the falling sun wicking though his hair,
his thighs tense against the boat’s gentle yaw.
Without my husband the house becomes more referential.
Each window down the gleaming hall warps in its own reverie.
It is as if in the crab-pot in the boat at the dock,
which is itself falling off the edge of a shabby island,
are the skeletal remains of a turkey neck
gripped by the empty shell of a crab,
gripped by the empty salt-crusted claw,
gripped in its greed—It is something like that.
Nobody looks back. The boat will split at its seams,
the shell return to water where it will float, animate
with trapped air, and seem in final fury to clash
against the bars. For a long time, I pitched on the boards.
My life, which I assumed I would burst
against my palate, bobbles on clear water.
Suddenly, it tugs, goes under. The pallid thread
I carry balled in the back of my throat sings out,
cuts the crests of the waves. 

(First Published in “The Missouri Review.”)

My Father’s Wedding
By Sarah Blackman

When given the gift of sleep
I salt it away. Sleep-seeds as creamy
and inviolate as avocado pits
wedged in the space between
baseboard and mattress
where they will not sprout.
I have done this since childhood.
Eventually, I will have enough pits
to grow a forest, a blue place,
glamorous with shadow, where I will stand
and gaze with that particular vision
that sees the trees and between the trees.
The near fog of moss, and farther
where the deer beds, where small lives—
so huge in their moments—burst
into starling clearings
with what is either great ferocity or joy.
This will be a realm without me.
I will have nothing to do
but continue to encounter.
In my adult life I have been a person
seen in strips—like a vision spliced
by the salmon stippling of birch bark,
like a forest passed at high speeds.
But I have seen my father.
My father’s sleep-seeds, pips from long pods
he collects and holds in his hand,
grow into seascapes. Open and empiric,
bare to his clouded eyes which search
the horizon and delight each time
in coming back around to sand.
The woman who will marry him
plants a series of caves. Geodesic, thermal,
one glisters with amethyst, lips to another
rife with adamite, opens into hallows
of fire-shot opal—a kingdom of minerals,
even the careful ochre outlines of a people
leaving themselves behind, ensuring
they’ll remember at least this kill,
at least this hand. I imagine how they will sleep
the rest of their lives together.
Both made of vast interiors,
both dappling—through salt,
through the passing of clouds,
through shoals of fish daring open water
or stalactites casting long shadows
out into the brilliant surf.
I imagine the country-side, heavily wooded,
and how the tides will sound
from underneath a linden tree.
The thick leaves hush in the breeze
(themselves a form of time)
clotted with a huzz of bees,
sounding, even in this distant place,
much like returning water.

New Myths for the Republic of Family Life
By Sarah Blackman

A prevalent myth of the Republic
is that we will rise refreshed, washed

smooth by the nervous tongue of the ocean.
That, even when we do not sleep

and instead burn all night with the tinkering
flame of burning paper, we will rise refreshed,

washed smooth by the nervous tongue of the ocean,

in love with each other, patting each other
on the cheeks in our great delight.

In the Republic, all life comes from the ocean.
Life putters around on the fringes of the ocean

somewhat at a loss. There is no schedule, yet.
There is nothing to be late for.

When will clocks be invented?, wonders life.
When will Spanish omelets or brooms, serial novels, romantic love?

In a civilization or a family no one knows what comes next.
Not the protozoa. Not the whelk.

When we rise, washed smooth, we pat each other
because we are surprised to find each other

more or less unchanged when the whole great night
has been battled through, when flames have consumed

the alphabet up to but not including the letter A.
What a surprise to discover that someone did invent the broom.

It must have happened while we were consumed
with one another. It must have happened while we slept.

Without language it is hard for us to say
exactly why we are so angry and so in love.

“A A A A A ” your father and I say to each other.
“A A A A A,” we say to you.

(First Published in “The Kenyon Review Online.”)

To order copies of Claire Bateman’s books Scape or Coronolgy from Amazon, click on the book covers below.