Deborah Ager

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Field Notes for Grieving

I’m coming to the end of the line, my mother said. The house began to breathe on its own. Certain times are so filled with grief that you don’t feel the axe in your arm. My mother tells me she hears “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I ask her where the music is because there’s no radio, no TV, no phone. She points to the groaning air conditioner. In a dream I’ll have that night, choppers land. I’ll rise inside them. They’ll take me to the faraway Montanas where the world dissolves like powder in a glass of water.

Rowing Past Blood Run

More than fifty duels took place in the first half of the nineteenth century at Blood Run, a nickname for the Maryland dueling grounds near the Anacostia River.

The haunting follows the dueler
who lives—the curse of a steady hand.

Anacostia River, a hymn. Anacostia
River, an oath. River, a slumber

in June’s damp heat. Crickets sing
of fifty ways to die, their unbroken thrum.

Our little boat. Once, ships cruised here.
Their hulls shed seeds from abroad.

Those plants sigh. My fingers ripple water—
river sweet and dark, velvet creek,

drops of the duels rushing underneath,
those men alive to me and dead.

Deborah Ager’s writing has appeared in The Tablet, The Week, and MSN and been featured on public radio’s Milk Street Radio. She’s founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine. Many poems first appearing in the magazine have been honored in Best American Poetry and Best New Poets and on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. She’s received writing fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and others.

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