Monika Cassel


Sightlines

It is Monday,
the sink is full of dishes.
I am thinking about which letters

will solve this puzzle. I am thinking
about how my dog presses her side against my legs
when she comes to me for comfort,
how in her moment of need

I feel her muscled strength.
She smells like toast,
as dogs do when they’re young.

Long strands of her coat
stick to my pants.

*

Later as I walk the dog
a car taps its brake lights, passing;

they briefly paint the wet street
with a streak of pink.

*

I keep listening
to Monteverdi’s “Beatus Vir” on repeat
because I want to feel how the phrases of counterpoint

melt over and over into new chords.
Light filters through today’s sheet of clouds.

I am thinking of how traces of things persist
—or don’t—
after they have left.

*

I keep looking at a photo my cousin took
of our ancestral home, shining butter-yellow

in late winter afternoon light. Patched snow.
Stone swags on stone façade, carved wood brackets
under the oriel. The beech tree halfway up the slope

where it was planted one hundred years ago,
its smooth and shining bark. Home,

seat of the family linen business, summers where cousins played
around the small stone-ringed pond.

*

In Fux’s The Study of Counterpoint,
the teacher says, You must try to remember
whether even in childhood you felt a strong natural inclination
to this art and whether you were deeply moved
by the beauty of concords.

The student answers, Day and night,
lovely melodies seem to sound around me.

*

I can stitch my seeing to any vessel,
but that doesn’t mean everything’s hollow.
In fact, the opposite is true.

*

Passing my daughter’s bedroom door last night
I remembered the sound of her voice
and her arms firm around my neck

in the years when I’d kiss her after singing the lullaby
where the mother shakes the tree
and pleasant dreams fall down.

Last night the door was half-open
and Phoebe was reading in bed:
As I passed, I asked, do you want a hug goodnight?

She looked up, said no. I could not read
her expression. I called my goodnight
through the crack. Goodnight, she said.

*

When is reaching touching?
To reach is to touch, says Susan Howe.

*

I transfer the lines of an old photograph
onto a piece of linen. Stone façade

and wooden oriel brackets, rows and rows of windows,
their stone lintels, the young beech.
I stitch a border of oversized flax flowers

around the house. I am embroidering
the outlines of my ancestor’s bodies. In the group of figures
I trace as they stand before their home,

the faces are indistinct:
on the day the photograph was taken,
the sun must have been bright.

My great-grandmother is a child. Her face half-obscured by her hat
but the features still seem familiar. She nestles
against a young woman in white—cousin
or governess—who holds a closed white parasol.

Two boys in sailor suits flank the little pond;
each stands with a foot propped on its round stone rim.
I embroider flax flowers for the faces of the adults;

for my great-grandmother’s face
I embroider a blank.

*

Laundry, bills, dishes,
vacuum, bathrooms, kitchen.

Stitches, minutiae of my days,
and shining thread. When did I want it,
this women’s work?

*

My great-grandmother painted watercolors,
started as a girl, never stopped.

Four hang on my kitchen wall:
bouquet of bristling lupines, soft poppies,
blurred foliage over a background of yellow wash;

wooded mountain scene
from her Moravian homeland.

Brick farmhouse, thatched; and lane
bordered by poplars, both
from the Baltic lowlands

where for decades she lived
before bombs took her house.

During the second war and the lean years after,
she traded her paintings:
poppies for brown coal and coffee,
poplars for bacon and butter.

*

In winter the trees in western Oregon all wear cloaks of moss.
The moisture makes the trunks glow green.
The green even starts to touch the light.

The trees stretch their fingers into the sky
and the air tastes soft

as my dog crunches the stick she has found
until I urge her on again: she always wants to take, carry, consume.

*

Phoebe is opening mail, brochures
fanned out across her bed. Grass-green,

flax-gold, brick-red, grey,
white, cornflower-blue. One shows dorm-room layouts

from a birds’-eye-view.
A few responses are still pending.

*

My mother taught me to embroider, brought back
shining cotton thread from visits to her mother—
—Perlgarn floss and little linen doilies
trimmed with lace and marked with designs to follow:
cross-stitch flowers, evergreen branches,
paisley swirls and flame-tipped candles.
I sent the finished paisley piece back across the ocean.

*

I keep studying histories
and reading photographs. I am stitching again,
thinking of light, of the sun
on the faces of the family grouped before their home,

standing still because the photographer told them to. Even the dog
sits at attention next to the matron at the left. The shutters

are angled against the afternoon. I select colors,
mountain-pine and lupine-blue,
to embroider tiny curtains.

*

In The Study of Counterpoint,
the student assures the master that his interest in music
has nothing to do with any thought of gain.

*

My mother sends me a book,
published 1901 but stitched—with typed title page
and table of contents—into a newer binding.

The pages are slightly water-damaged,
the last few torn at one corner, soiled
with what looks like ash:

papers from an archeological society, with a note on the flyleaf
penciled in my great-grandmother’s hand:
rescued from the rubble of our home.

*

The dogwood is blooming again
outside my daughter’s window.

On sunny days the light in her room
turns pink. Last year
she painted a watercolor for my mother:

four veined dogwood petals each,
darkening at the margins,
the slender brown branch,
tips of budding leaf.

*

Old now, my mother has taken up drawing again.
For my birthday, she sends a pencil sketch
of my childhood home, its yellow paint,
white trim, pale curtains,
clouds of trees. In the foreground,
patches of flowers: white asters
and her favorite red peonies.

*

Fux writes, I would rather be understandable
than seem eloquent.

Are you not aware that this study
is like an immense ocean?

How much care and foresight
must he who would enter upon this art employ
before he dares to decide.
For musicians and poets are born such.

His student, speaking of
his strange enthusiasm:

I think I no longer have reason
to doubt my inclination.

*

Come look at this, Phoebe says tonight:
she’d stopped on the way home
from the studio, lodged her phone somehow
in the chain-link fence of the schoolyard,
hit “record.” She’s at the other side
of the field, dark figure in the corner of the frame,
tiny, pressing against a pale lit square. Running
her hands along the wall, she dances, slow,
against its plane, headlights flash from passing cars
as she turns, extends, again and again.

*

To make the embroidered house,
I traced lines from two photographs

taken from different angles,
struggled with perspective. Just when I finished,
my mother showed me a sketchbook
from her mother’s teenage years.

Already in her churches, hayracks,
castles, half-timber houses, such a sure hand for drafting,
eye of the architect she became.

*

Phoebe asks me to teach her
how to hem a pair of jeans.

I take a photo
as she bends her head toward the machine,
hands slowly feeding the fabric.

A mistake: Mama! she says
though just the other day
she’d complained I never take her picture anymore.
I can’t win! I say, and she agrees

but her voice is light.
My machine’s thread tension isn’t working
and I have to undo a row of her stitching.
We re-pin the hem, I adjust the settings,
she sews the cuff again.

When she finishes, the length is perfect:
Thank you, Mama! she says,
turning in front of the mirror
after I show her how to clip the threads.

*

Susan Howe defines the stitch:
A single pass of a needle

made in sewing. She writes,
my looking-glass hands.

*

In Mannheim, between Rhine
and railway station, on a street lined

with blocky postwar buildings
built over acres of wartime rubble,
my grandmother lived for 36 years

in an apartment filled with family relics.
Through the entryway smelling of granite
and four flights up in the tiny elevator.

Below her balcony the brown placid river
and barges carrying coals. She played solitaire,
sometimes bridge,

seemed to contemplate things
from a certain distance. After the war

she designed new factory buildings,
but before she bore her children,

she too painted landscapes. I never knew.
A secret, now she’s dead,
I reach to touch.

When her hands got too stiff, she also gave up knitting.
In the evenings she sat in her green chair, waiting.

photo: Anna Yarrow

Monika Cassel’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, The Common, Denver Quarterly, Diode, and The Georgia Review. Her translations from German have been featured in Deep Vellum’s Best Literary Translations 2025 and Poetry Daily. She was awarded Poetry Magazine’s 2024 John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation and her manuscript Rehearsal for Future Hungers was a finalist with River River Books. She lives in Portland, OR, is an assistant poetry editor for Four Way Review, and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.

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