Elise Paschen: "Cicadas"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Elise Paschen’s “Cicadas,” which appears in the just released Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue (Volume X, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. I invite visitors to read additional poems, “Moving In” and “Hive,” by featured-poet Paschen in the current pages of VPR.

Elise Paschen is the author of Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts. A new collection, Bestiary, which will include the poems in VPR, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in the spring of 2009. Her poems also have been published in New Republic, Ploughshares, and Shenandoah, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies, including Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America; A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women; Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, and The POETRY Anthology, 1912—2002. She is editor of The New York Times best-selling anthology Poetry Speaks to Children and co-editor of Poetry Speaks Expanded, Poetry Speaks, Poetry in Motion, and Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast. Elise Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

CICADAS

Forty years ago this night (a whir now
with the cicadas’ never-dying thrum)
inside the rambling family beach house,
you slept, the stone sleep of an eight-year old,
until the sirens wrenched the house awake.

Years ago, trains freighted cattle in cars
headed to the Chicago slaughter yards,
but your Uncle Charles, a meat-packing heir
and bachelor, who owned this once-estate,
stabled his Jersey cows behind blue-tinted

glass, providing milk for his weekend guests.
Our rented house, built on the site of grass
tennis courts, remains flanked by aging sycamore,
hemlock. A map displays the summer gardens,
Rabbitry and Ornamental Bird Pond.

That night your mother had declined the offer,
made by a friend, to take the children out
for ice cream treats. Instead, she tucked each child
safely in bed. The crash of waves lulled you
to sleep, but then you heard the sirens racing

down Red Arrow Highway. The speeding pickup,
chased by a police car, killed instantly
the young mother and her two children
crossing the road for ice cream. Their car radio
drowned out the police car’s alarm.

We search for sleep, but the crescendo
of the cicadas, clustered in the leaves,
swells and distends, a train that never reaches
its destination. An Amtrak train blasts
its horn while the cicadas clatter on.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.