Portmanteau
Jaye Kranz
noun, figurative: a word formed by blending sounds from two or more distinct words and combining their meanings; also a transitive verb
Remember the stag
you felt sure you saw in halflight
wondering who would want to shoot it
broadside or quartering away
when all it wanted was to walk here
among the applehalves
my dog at the open door nosing zephyrs
wresting warm bodies from the cold
& you might not believe in ghosts
as if we can all agree on what exists
between a clear night & this dew
between fate & what was only
staying in motion,
between coming closer
felling a tree
patience
& what was just
the applesfalling.
What is the distance
between the orangeseed we planted
& the grapefruit that grew there?
Between you handing me the peeledripe fruit
& me wondering if the tree still lives, still sways
in that garden
that seemed to garden forever.
There seemed to me only three gardens then:
mine, yours & the one you’d take me to,
bags of stale bread
to feed the ducks, readymade for the lovers, the gardenlovers
the ducks, the ducklovers
& those who would soon
breakapart—
whoever made the bags having no idea
stale bread was your bread of choice, the bread you broke most
leaving loaves on your countertops
until they staled.
As if we remember the same things
or the same things remember us
I remember some of you—the way you
drove in a thunderstorm
like we’d washaway;
the way you traced your tools broad & black on the shed wall
to return them to their outlines.
But I never understood why, just after you died
you visited my friend but not me,
though you came once
stood on the porch outside my bedroom window
to teach me a mnemonic
for the order of planets,
unbothered that Pluto had ceased to be
the ‘P’ in your acrostic,
having proved itself unable—or unwilling?—
to be set apart
to clear its regions of neighbouring bodies.
I move with Pluto, now
& the halflight things
portmanteaus in porchlight
flicking in
& out
with the light sensors,
seen there in that tiny age
half-remembered half-forgotten
washed out by the full tilt of the sun.
JAYE KRANZ is a poet, writer and documentary audio maker. The recipient of an Emerging Writers Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, her work has appeared in The Monthly, Australian Book Review, short story and novella collections, with poems published or forthcoming in West Branch, The Florida Review and Frozen Sea. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Tom Collins Poetry Prize.
