O, You Can Walk on the Sky? Good.

by Faye Kicknosway

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

b. 1936

Poet and visual artist Faye Kicknosway was born in Detroit and raised in Los Angeles. She earned a BA at Wayne State University and an MA at San Francisco State College.

Kicknosway is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including Mixed Plate: New and Selected Poems (2003), Who Shall Know Them? (1985), and All These Voices: New and Selected Poems (1986). Her work is also featured in the feminist poetry anthology No More Masks! (1973).

Threading together psychological narrative with mythic violence, Kicknosway’s poems reveal a filmic attention to the transformative possibilities of light and shadow. In a review of All These Voices, poet Jason Schneiderman observes, “Kicknosway challenges the dominance and trustworthiness of narrative in her poems of fragmentation, offering up constant revisions of where the gaze should fall.” Who Shall Know Them?, her book of poems engaging Walker Evans’s photographs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Kicknosway’s other honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She lives in Honolulu, where she has taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa under the name Morgan Blair.

(from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/f...)

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Job's Coffin
is a constellation
near Sagittarius. Sagittarius
once used it
as a shrimp boat. He kept
his mortgage
under the bunk.
All the cockroaches
had feminine names
and could not
be killed. The shrimp could,
and were.
But they didn't bleed. He did,

every morning, from the belly.
He dreamed he was a cockroach,
got into trouble
over the copyright,
and would've 
gone to jail
only Jesus saved him
by turning him into
a candle
and shoving it up
a Greek's ass,
where he crawled 
to the Greek's stomach
and at second-hand food
until Easter.
He woke up - lit,
and wondering,
"Where's the blood?',
a very Catholic thing to do, and saw
there are no stars,
only fish
in the constellations
of the sea.

*

One window. One eye. Yours. In the water.
With the fish. They are silk. The water is
a dream, a door to leave by, to wake from.

Boat. Mud globe floating
in the form of two people
never touching. What are stars? Paint me one.
Us knives. Use kisses.

Friendship means eat. Sailors
know that. They catch it with hooks. With
fishnets that disappear, easy
as winking, into the sea.

*

Afternoon becomes a map of the world. It shrinks
when you blink and becomes
a hold in the air. A face in the air. Darkness.
The world is a cliff, maps have edges too, like
your face, especially near your smile,
if you smile. Do you? Tell me of
the ocean. Where is it green? Only

in fishes' dreams? Or in their eggs? Or in
your eyes when you steal and ask for more?
A room with strange tapping. It's the priest's

tongue cut off and waiting to be buried.
Quickly, quickly, before it finds more
stamps, before it learns more names
to put in its boxes. Pretty boxes,
all in rows with nowhere
to go and nothing to grow. Water them well,
orange man. Dream your floor is a door
to the ocean. It is. But I won't let you in.

*

A dark place, some fish bones on
a plate. The sound of someone walking.
The sound of someone eating. Listen to the feet,
listen to the teeth. It's the same noise.
Nothing makes sense. Go to sleep

for months at a time. Sell your feet 
to the ocean. To the mermaids in the ocean. 
Tell them they aren't lonely. Tell them
they aren't real.
Look at yourself in the morning. Use someone else's eyes.
Wide open. Be upside down. Be a gun.

Water can not blossom nor break. It is not
wooden. When you hit it, it splashes.
The stars, the stars, they are pond flowers
and you are one of the fish beneath them, looking up.

*

This is the middle. The kitchen is full
of mice. Dutch mice in wooden shoes with
tulips in their coats. They don't like
ice cubes from the refrigerator, hand-
written letters or luke-warm coffee. They
think they're you.

Questions come from bones. Bones are
rocks and rocks are mountains and mountains
are where time goes when it doesn't want to play
anymore. Break it open - time - and you'll
find a mountain. Just like that. And in
the mountain, a rock, only
it's you in your bones.

Bones are chains and the way people 
get caught in one another. Chains, bones,
and fishnets. And tongues. A tongue can become
a boat if you blink long enough and go south
far enough. A boat to catch people in

*

This is the middle. Be careful. You'll find
a mountain here. Break it open. Don't ask questions;
they turn your tongue to bone. Blink,
don't cry. The wood here is very old and what
is buried in it has been buried here for thousands
of years. Your tears could wet it, wake it. Wood
is the shape of ancestors.
Be still.

*

Morning. The water bleaches
silver where the sunlight touches it. Wake up. Wake
up. The fish are calling you, are asking
for your daily garbage, for their 
daily food. Funny prayers from the other side

of the mirror. There's your face and it is
morning.
Your face could be a fish.
You don't really see it; it's your imagination.
There are no fish.
Only the wooden boat all around you. Close your

eyes. The boat flashes silver
as the sunlight touches it.

Angels. Dream of angels.
Angels falling from sea gulls' mouths into
fishes' mouths. Eat the fishes and become filled
with angels. Angels are bread moving in your body,
from your body, into fishes' bodies.

Pretend you have black hair. Pretend you are
a radio. Look out the window. Watch the air
turn into afternoon.

*

I'm dreaming of you. I'm making up songs
about you. Your name is close to the sand,
the hollow in the sand
still warm
where your name came off
and dug toward the water.

Always water. As though you were a tree
or a plant, something wooden.
The afternoon sun

makes you thirsty. If you drink too much, your feet
will swell and root. A coffin and a boat
are the same thing as a tree.

It is unbearable.
There have always been too many connections, too many
holes to touch, to fill. Even in your own body,
especially when it's out of its wood,
when it's walking or
sitting.
Change sand to air. Wake up in the morning with special
words in your mouth and change blood to water.
The salt will kill you, will give you visions, will
kill you.

*

The moon is a technical note.
The moon glows terrible. Is a fish eye. Is mud.
Travel by boat to its edge. Cut off a slice. Easy.
Chew it, wax. Candle wax and holy water. Your birthday
on Thursday.
Wake up.
The light bulb is a stone. Is wax flowers. The ocean sand
breathing.
I think you've gone crazy. You've been at sea
too long; it's the wrong habit. Like pretending.
The light bulb is not the moon nor is it mica nor is it
me. Riddles and nursery rhymes. Sickness from the mind.
Wake up.

*

Undated. You learn to tell time by the moon, by
the footprints on the moon. There is a legend
among a southwest people that when footprints
injure the moon, the earth will be injured too.
Footprints make holes, disturb the grandmother
inside. She is old
and very angry.

*

A riddle is a kind of hole.
A hole is what happens when you op-
en your mouth. Be careful of people you like.
Of rooms in houses where people you like talk
to one another.
Talk to me.
You're always in my mouth.
I think I'm empty. Which box am I?
A window box? A kleenex box? A pencil box? 
There are always twelve correct answers to every
question. Twelve ciphers that spell
your name perfectly. Like black hairs on a belly,
or a cigar, or a dog on a bow.

There is no water. A riddle can be a well
but the tide is usually out or the water table
disturbed. A riddle is never full. It has an open
end where the question mark fits. It's usually
for children or for stones that move in the night.

Stones that move in the night. I turn, look at you.
They're your eyes, your tongue.

*

with gills in his cheeks
and rings on his toes
and rings in his cheeks
and gills on his toes
the ocean boy on the front porch
beckons

beckons
without a knock from his fingers
or a whisper from his mouth
without a whisper from his fingers
or a knock from his mouth
you
to come into
his body

the room sings in your ears with the sound
of the water/changes
in your ears to the sound
of your breathing
your breathing is the water/the water
is your breathing

you enter without arms
without legs
without eyes
how deep it is/how deeper
it becomes

*

Treachery by a friend
indefinite delay

what is beneath - sorrow, burial
what is behind - wonder, enchantment
what is above - treachery, victory
what is before - hidden enemies, danger
yourself - a pleasure voyage
your house - delay constant indecision 
the outcome - three times you try, once

you succeed; it is impermanent.
Much discouragement, a feeling
of error.
You tie your shoes, ready
to go somewhere. Before the changes, 3 days.
After the change, 3 days.

*

First, he tells you it's his food
you're eating. He can not share it with you any 
longer; you have had enough. He sits very

close to you, watching your fingers,
your mouth. You are dying, he says, soon you will
be dead and the food, which is his food, will only 

rot in your body. It does you no good to eat it;
you are dying. There is so little; it's wasteful
that you eat it when it is his and he needs it.

*

Your arms are apple tree branches. Their fruit is so
heavy; everyone hears the sound it makes in the air.
You keep very still, hear them listen,
turn toward you as though you were their food.

Very still. But it ripens, and the sound in the air
is so pleasant.

*

My energy is going, been spent
in nickels on telephone calls out of here,
telephone calls from so long ago
it makes my head ache
to think of it.
Couldn't stand the corridor.
Couldn't stand the bed.
Kept feeding those nickels in.
Anyone's voice
that answered.
Said hello

until I ran out of nickels.
Sat on the stool in the booth,
fished my finger
in the hole.
No coins.
Did it
maybe five times
a day.

Don't want to say
any of this.
Don't mean nothing.
Never has.

*

He must be fat
and healthy and twelve years old.
He must be happy
and laughing and twelve years old.
Catch him. Beguile him. Catch
him. Tie him to a tree. He has entered
a sacred time.
Give him nine months of eating
the roots of the tree, the earth around
the tree. Give him nine
months of sitting in a cage
buried in the root of the river. Nine months is
the time of wax
coming to the body. Nine months is
the time of whiteness
coming to the eyes
of the body.
Kill him.
Send his head in a sack to his mother.
Bring sticks for the fire. Give her parts
of his body. Let her dip her fingers in, let her
lick her fingers as she cooks.
Twelve is a sacred age.
Bring cups
and bowls.

*

music is in your bones
the music of feeding animals
 air
 water
music to grow your bones
 during the ages of your body.

final age
your body bends
music goes outside
 calls your bones to come outside.

body grows emptier
bones grow emptier
 animals
 air
 water
near where you sit or lay or stand

*

Heaven is lost. Someone before me knew it would happen; left notes
that it would
happen. Little scratches on trees in the backyard.
bare spots where the grass had died,
dead mice in the attic. Someone
sacred to the family, some fool no one liked
or wanted around, pushed

outside all the time and told to play
or do something useful. Someone
foolish and full of the blood of the family.
I saw the bent fence, the side of the house torn off,
the hole in the roof. Grandfather, Grand-

father foolish, always thinking you were a lady,
or sherbert, or May baskets, something pleasant and useful,
something comfortable, like
a lap, like Grandma's lap, always full of children and flowers,
fresh laundry and garden dirt. Grandfather,
Grandfather Rain, Grandfather Sunshine, 
 Grandfather Mud, Grand-
father Dust, Grandfather foolish. I would try

to call you back from that funny cardboard
they made of you, call you back from that funnier ground
they sewed you to, sewed you with cement seams
so you can't get out.

Heaven; couldn't anyone see it was getting lost?

*

I search for my grandfather
to ask the way. He is lost
and I become lost
looking for him.
He is the sky and it is very dark.
There is no sky when it is dark.
No sky.
It goes away
the way rain goes away
in the sunshine.
 He goes away
the way dust goes away
under my feet.
It goes away
the way my sweat goes away
what the day is evening.
 Grandfather,

how many seeds must I plant for you?
before you let me find you?
 Grandfather,
how many fires must I light for you
before you let me find you?
 Grandfather,
how many children must I nourish for you
 before you let me find you?
Why are you lost from me?
There can be no new songs,
no new ringing of the bells.
There can be no new circle

of our family
because there is no new circle
of light from the sky.
The air is dead,
everything is alien.
My body
is alien, has been stolen
from the earth that grew it,
has been stolen
from the trees that cleansed it,
has been stolen
from the animals that gave it strength.
Grandfather,
I have no tongue anymore; my fingers are numb
from prayer. I don't know who I am. The sky
has been stolen from me,
my secret eyes
 at the end of each finger and toe
have been stolen from me. The earth
is no longer sacred,
my feet walking the earth
are no longer sacred,
my body lying in the earth
is no longer sacred. The earth
has disappeared,
has been stolen into darkness.
I can not open my eyes anymore, grandfather,
they are not mine;
they have been eaten by the darkness.
I can not open my arms anymore, grandfather,
they are not mine;
they have been eaten by the darkness.
I can not move my legs to find you anymore, grandfather,
they are not mine;
they have been eaten by the darkness.
I can not move my legs to find you anymore, grandfather,
they are not mine;
they have been eaten by the darkness.
The darkness,
the darkness,
the darkness, grandfather.
You have gone into the mountain;
you are asleep.
Nothing wakes you.
You have gone into the mountain

and passed beyond the earth.
There is no bird
strong enough 
to fly to you with my prayer.
There is no fish
strong enough
to swim to you with my prayer.
You have gone into the mountain,
into the darkness
that does not move.