This month for Poetry 365 we’re highlighting the remarkable debut collection from poet Eleanor Chai. In Standing Water, Chai takes readers to a small Paris museum where she encounters a bust of Japaneses dancer Little Hanako by sculptor Auguste Rodin that triggers painfully complex memories of the mother erased from the poet’s life since her childhood. Described by Mark Strand as “a masterpiece,” Colm Toibin declared, “The last poems of the book are outstanding, chiseled and perfect, line by line by line. Standing Water is a great achievement.” So don’t miss this hauntingly honest debut, sample the opening poem below, and make sure to stop back next month for Poetry 365.

Opticks

This is her descending

glance captured

in a hidden photograph

taken when I was

an infant and Mother held me

at arm’s length. I look back

for her, unsurprised

still questioning why she doesn’t return

my gaze. Her eyes

fix a spot between

her face and my face. For the infant

there is no distinction.

Her disaffection stains the intimate

objects found years later

among her things of everyday:

a thimble embroidered with a single petal.

A slim gold watch–stopped.

Brushes held to

dry in a bamboo roll. A tiny lime

and fuchsia dress sewn by her

hands for my hundredth day.

His wedding band, scarred

a muted gray. In the gap between us

a vacancy swells and bellies

the air where her eyes avert mine

to slide off where? I wish I could see her

engage and ignite

these traces of the ordinary,

the minutely particular

totems of our daily life: holy.

In an old dream, I plot a little boy’s flight.

Like a fighter pilot, I drop

a homing device back in time to spy

into the landscape of my infancy

before she turned her face away–

before my need was extraordinary.

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