My Poetry

In The Apple Tree, the title poem in this collection, Catherine Arnold explores the cost of emotional repression, of feeling trapped in a code of silence and invisibility. The poems that follow dive into the experience of a woman gradually discovering her creative voice, becoming an artist and learning to embrace the world of color and touch.

In vivid, lyrical language, Arnold explores what it means to leave behind a set of inherited rules that distrust the physical world and shut down the power of wonder and spontaneity. She considers the price of freedom, what it means to feel like an exile, and the nature of maternal love; many of the poems are addressed to her daughter.

Receipt for Lost Words is a mother’s attempt to understand a world in which her child does not, cannot, speak. It’s an accounting that Catherine Arnold renders in breathtakingly moving, spaced-apart phrases, little gasps of insight into a parent’s heartbreak, bafflement, and isolation: “Nature now   is what I see     through glass.” And, if we hold our breath through desperate parental denial and efforts to “word the silence,” we release it when Stella—the one who cannot speak—makes her presence known: “the strong     unhurried length    of me / I am Stella.” The spare, sensual language of Stella’s point of view stuns—as in this description of her father: “a big    thirsty shape / the hum of him.” What emerges is a new sense of the world, a magical and fairy-tale shift in which “. . . everything / that seemed to matter     before / has been forgotten.” Catherine Arnold has accomplished nothing less than the embodiment, in words, of wordlessness. A moving receipt for what has been lost.

—Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, judge of the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and author of Girl as Birch and Opinel

Horse  

My feet land on the ground     unsteadily  

so that each step unsettles me    even  

the central notion    of my spine    forgets itself 

before I mount    I am aware of the light  

before I mount    I try to take it in   the great warm compass of the animal  

sweet fermenting center    it is    against the partial collapsing  

staggers of the light    the only forthright thing  

the whole dark shape    a solid and  

an opening. 

Or should I start here?    Mama lifts me high    through the light  

higher still    then places me in front 

of her    so that    I inhale her with the coil of the animal    together. 

I rest against her    the animal against me    pressing my legs  

to the breathing hide    the commotion  

has receded    the sun lies down    in my warm and necessary flesh  

and then   we begin to move    Mama’s arms around me    crossing    bracing

I feel my body    and it is whole

I am arrested    blinking    in this new sensation    I let out  

a small starting     sound  

of recognition 

and when the horse moves    forward in the first instant    I find  

that I am already    accustomed    the rising    stirring    falling  

falling back    into the original 

I can recognize the heat    of the sun    the leaves gliding by  

my smoothing face    it is all  

as I assumed it would be    I have assumed it all 

there is a woman walking    beside the animal  

pleasant voice    syllables washing    in hair swaying  

in the ease of the sun 

He is there now too    running alongside 

I hear his voice    lower than the others    I can say  

his name too    purchase the shape of him    with my voice 

Dad-e-da    a big    thirsty shape  

the hum of him.  

When he touches me    he gives me his weight  

the certainty    of his grand voice  

he appears    above me    his face dividing when    he smiles

I am sitting on    the back of the horse    the warm moving back 

the tightening and slackening  

in the hinges of my hips    the rhythm beating  

through the pressure    of the hide 

I see clearly    I see my own unliquefied    extremities 

the length of my arm    ends  

in a hand    the length of my leg    ends  

in a foot    it is demonstrable  

and for this rare    uncompromised    moment 

I am secure    I cannot be deposed 

I am 

all the strong    unhurried length    of me 

I am Stella.  

Acknowledgement: This poem first appeared in The Cincinnati Review 

To read my ESSAY, The Painting of Nell