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A SELECTION OF POEMS Reading the Obituaries Now the Barbaras have begun to die, trailing their older sisters to the grave, the Helens, Margies, Nans—who said goodbye just days ago, it seems, taking their leave a step or two behind the hooded girls who bloomed and withered with the century— the Dorotheas, Eleanors and Pearls now swaying on the edge of memory. Soon, soon, the scythe will sweep for Jeanne and Angela, Patricia and Diane— pause, and return for Karen and Christine while Susan spends a sleepless night again. Ah, Debra, how can you be growing old? Jennifer, Michelle, your hands are cold. The Blue Water Buffalo One in 250 Cambodians, or 40,000 people, —Newsfront, U.N. Development Programme Communications Office
On both sides of the screaming highway, the world is made of emerald silk—sumptuous bolts of it, stitched by threads of water into cushions that shimmer and float on the Mekong's munificent glut. In between them plods the ancient buffalo—dark blue in the steamy distance, and legless where the surface of the ditch dissects the body from its waterlogged supports below or it might be a woman, up to her thighs in the lukewarm ooze, bending at the waist with the plain grace of habit, delving for weeds in water that receives her wrist and forearm as she feels for the alien stalk, the foreign blade beneath that greenest of green coverlets where brittle pods in their corroding skins now shift, waiting to salt the fields with horror. Summer Sapphics Maybe things are better than we imagine if a rubber inner-tube still can send us drifting down a sinuous, tree-draped river like the Wisconsin— far removed from spores of touristococcus. As we bob half-in and half-out of water with our legs like tentacles, dangling limply under the surface we are like invertebrate creatures, floating on a cosmic droplet—a caravan of giant-sized amoebas, without a clear-cut sense of direction It's as if we've started evolving backwards: mammal, reptile, polliwog, protozoon— toward that dark primordial soup we seem so eager to get to. Funny, how warm water will whisper secrets in its native language to every cell—yet we, the aggregation, have just begun to fathom the gestures. For Lucy, Who Came First She simply settled down in one piece right where she was, in the sand of a long-vanished lake edge or stream—and died. —Donald C. Johanson, paleoanthropologist When I put my hand up to my face I can trace her heavy jawbone and the sockets of her eyes under my skin. And in the dark I sometimes feel her trying to uncurl from where she sank into mudbound sleep on that soft and temporary shore so staggeringly long ago, time had not yet cut its straight line through the tangle of the planet, nor taken up the measured sweep that stacks the days and seasons into an ordered past But I can feel her stirring in the core of me, trying to rise up from the deep hollow where she fell— wanting to prowl on long callused toes to see what made that shadow move, to face the creature in the dark thicket needing to know if this late-spreading dawn will bring handfuls of berries, black as blood, or the sting of snow, or the steady slap of sand and weed that wraps itself like fur around the body. Rondeau: Old Woman With Cat Osteoporosis (one of life's indignities) is such a splendid name for the disease— all those little o's, holes in the bone where the rain gets in, rendering a crone like me defective, porous as swiss cheese. I'm riddled at the hips and knees, roundsided as parentheses since my shrunken spine has known osteoporosis— and my extremities have shriveled into lacy filagrees, breakable as glass on stone. Naked at the window ledge I drone to my sleek, supple Siamese: osteoporosis. On Learning, Late in Life, that Your Mother Was a Jew Methuselah something. Somethingsomething Ezekiel. —Albert Goldbarth So that explains it, you say to yourself. And for one split second, you confront the mirror like a Gestapo operative— narrow-eyed, looking for the telltale hint, the giveaway (jawline, profile, eyebrow)— something visible that could account for this, the veritable key to your life story and its denouement. It seems the script that you were handed long ago, with all its blue-eyed implications, can now be seen as something less than candid— a laundry list of whoppers and omissions. It's time for something else to float back in from theology's deep end: the strains, perhaps, of A-don o-lam, drowning out the peals of Jesus the Conqueror Reigns, inundating the lily and the rose, stifling the saints (whose dogged piety never did come close, God knows, to causing many ripples of anxiety) and you're waiting for the revelation on its way this minute, probably— the grand prelude to your divine conversion, backlit with ritual and pageantry But nothing happens. Not a thing. No song, no shofar, no compelling Shabbat call to prayer—no signal that your heart belongs to David rather than your old familiar, Paul. Where do faithless virgins go from here? How do they decide between these two competing testimonies to thin air, when both of them are absolutely true? |
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