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The Priest
(for RB) The priest is sick – so says The doctor, writing a prescription From her office in the old hospital. The priest takes the lithium, his Hands shaking, hides the bottle In the carved stand next to his bed. At night, he reads the classics, While his thoughts, frail as moths, Flit across the dry page. Once he wrote short stories, Now he writes: buy butter, Get food for the dogs. His friends Call the answering machine: Where are you? Please call me. The priest moves from the pantry To the living room, carrying the fine Books he once read, before his eyes Blurred and his voice turned to tin; Before his illness danced him like A marionette down the walk To get the mail. The priest has seen the crucifix, And he knows: God isn’t in the lithium, He isn’t with the doctor – He’s here, moving from room to room, Down that hall where The priest kneels, rocking Slowly back and forth. Eventually, they’ll find Each other and sit Together in the cool garden, One talking for hours – The other listening. |
Corsage
The gift was from my grandmother. Every Easter, by my place at breakfast, there was a gardenia corsage. My grandmother would smile at me, and straighten the cushions of her high brocade sofa. I would pink the corsage on the jacket of my pink silk suit, and watch myself and my new beauty in my grandmother’s mirror. I could see her curtains blowly faintly in the sun, and the crème colored vanity where she sat earlier that morning surrounded By her make-up jars, nail polish and fluted glass bottles. Once I sat there, and shook her swan powder puff all over me, hoping some magic would fly out, and make me as beautiful as she. I didn’t know then, how she drank and wandered up the dark street in her nightgown. At 14, I knew I would never be that beautiful. But every Easter, there was always that gardenia corsage, and my grandmother telling me how fragile it was, how I shouldn’t touch the smooth white petals. Keep it in the icebox, She’d say and I’d leave it there: cold, white – beautiful. (a revised version of the same poem from Imagining the World, l998.) |
The Current
(For Peter)
When Peter was a baby,
grinning for the camera
in that long white nightgown
Mother always dressed him in,
She’d tell us:
He looks like aunt Ruth,
My great aunt who used to hide
liquor bottles in her suitcase.
One day of her unhappy life.
she walked out into the sea
and drowned.
I was 8 then, the eldest,
believing every story I heard,
convinced that my great aunt
could somehow travel forward
and infect the life of my new brother
who had her eyes.
When I heard him cooing
over his mashed potatoes,
I knew I had to put myself
between that current
and the water reaching him.
For years afterwards,
at Christmas, or on his birthday;
I wrote him funny stories:
his father waltzing over the stone terrace,
his brother & sister doing the tango
across the wide front lawn, and
his mother tap dancing
in front of the dishwasher;
where the worst that ever happened
was somebody trying the rumba
at the end of the dock
where the waves splashed only
slightly beneath the wooden boards.
(Published in an earlier form in Imagining The World, 1998)
(For Peter)
When Peter was a baby,
grinning for the camera
in that long white nightgown
Mother always dressed him in,
She’d tell us:
He looks like aunt Ruth,
My great aunt who used to hide
liquor bottles in her suitcase.
One day of her unhappy life.
she walked out into the sea
and drowned.
I was 8 then, the eldest,
believing every story I heard,
convinced that my great aunt
could somehow travel forward
and infect the life of my new brother
who had her eyes.
When I heard him cooing
over his mashed potatoes,
I knew I had to put myself
between that current
and the water reaching him.
For years afterwards,
at Christmas, or on his birthday;
I wrote him funny stories:
his father waltzing over the stone terrace,
his brother & sister doing the tango
across the wide front lawn, and
his mother tap dancing
in front of the dishwasher;
where the worst that ever happened
was somebody trying the rumba
at the end of the dock
where the waves splashed only
slightly beneath the wooden boards.
(Published in an earlier form in Imagining The World, 1998)
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Wonder Woman
Wednesday night and I’m making strawberry Jell-O to have tomorrow when I come home from the hospital after the surgery. What are you doing? Lucy asks when she calls earlier. Making Jell-O, I say, bringing the phone into the kitchen, where I stand with the surprisingly solid small box, a giant strawberry on the front. I mix the red powder with water, pour it into the glass dishes on the counter. I try to tell Lucy how I feel: Whenever I make this, I feel like the heroine of my own story: Plucky Girl, Warrior Queen, the one you always put your hopes on. I love it, Lucy says: how’s the Jell-O? A little less shaky, I tell her. (from The Six o’clock Siren, 2009) |
