Abstract
Decoding rivets
‘Wings appear over the trees, wings with eight hundred rivets’ – Robert Bly
Suddenly the word rivets lost its meaning.
Trivets came to mind, what you put under hot pans
to save precious surfaces from burning.
I have a silicone pair, open parallelograms
that let the oak table or granite countertop
show through. Can anything scorch obsidian?
Rivers came to mind, but in what landscape?
Even a pair of wandering albatrosses
could not shadow the waters and banks
of eight hundred rivers. No place to land.
My mother came to mind:
the eight hundred rivets per hour
she could spit from teeth to fingertips to drill bit
into the wings of Lancaster bombers – their cockpits
noses and tails, ailerons, massive bellies.
Every Lanc could fly two hundred miles an hour
twenty thousand feet above the trees.
Every metal belly could carry six tons of bombs,
deliver those bundles to boil the waters
of eight hundred rivers, demolish their bridges.
Don’t count bodies, theirs or ours.
Riven comes to mind. Shriven?
Guilt slides along the ground, slithers in the mud.
My dad was an infantryman, not an airman.
Closer to the whites of eyes. My mother
didn’t remind him of what he didn’t say.
© Nancy Mattson
Our Lady of the Dry Tree
after a painting by Petrus Christus, ca. 1465
Mary’s robes are red, not blue,
her hair wrapped in a woven cap
as tight as a baby’s caul.
She’s disappeared from the stable tonight,
leaving blankets and bedstraw still damp
with traces of blood and afterbirth.
Men scour the land for her and the infant
but their torches find only rocks underfoot.
Angel-wives have secreted her
high in the fork of a dry tree
whose branches part and open
to receive her, protect her
as she holds her child,
one light hand at his waist,
the other balancing one small foot
between her thumb and fingers.
Last week he floated in her womb,
stretching her skin with his limbs,
safe from the world-thorns
that will later – but not yet –
tighten round his head.
Hanging on the tree-spikes
are fifteen Gothic letters
carved in gold – all alphas,
no words. Stories have begun
but it will take her son’s life
and the stretch of eternity
to tell them full in every language
until a crown of omegas touches
above her head and renames her:
Virgin, Theotokos, Mother of God.
© Nancy Mattson