The One Right Touch

Katharine Coles

In her collection The One Right Touch, Utah poet Katharine Coles explores the sometimes delicate, sometimes sinewy workings of relationships between men and women. Lovers, spouses, brothers and sisters, as well as fathers and daughters are represented here as Coles speaks to each in all their complexity.

The collection includes the prize-winning poem “Sex As A Trope” as well as a longer work entitled “Provisions,” which is made up of ten small poems under the headings of “Hunting,” “Cultivation,” and “Gathering.” The sections interweave the stories of the speaker hunting with her father as a teenager, attending a party as a young woman, and envying her neighbors late blooming roses as an adult. The three stories combine in an elegant, gently haunting flow of memory and image. Coles’ poems evoke the beauty of the natural world while on their way to capturing the strange grace of human relationships.

A sample poem from the book

Before Parting

Neither of us can guess if they’ll hurry

dusk along, those clouds that have loitered

all afternoon over the rooftops. From our window

the row of backyards appears, and one by one

sparrows lift from the trees and abandon

themselves to wind. No empty cupboard

sends me out in this weather to market,

but a restlessness, the storm,

and your notion of apples

completing a white bowl, candlelight

adrift on their skins. On the table, only that

lies between us, between our two knives

parting the meat; and after dinner we watch

every other moment the sky open

into fragile light. For those short illuminations

we hover near the window. We want each other

to believe that distance can’t change us.

The sparrows also rustle, nervous,

returning to the eaves. When we pass them

over each others bodies, our hands hesitate

as they never have, as if we considered

for the first time, what might happen

to anything that leaves our fingers.