Anna Bachtle, Ed Ochester
Of course she’s happy
in the kitchen
whose stone and metal
have been worn out by her flesh.
She’s smoothed the clean linen
for fifty years;
in fall she laughs like a slice of moon
as she peels warm apples
into the battered colander in the sink.
The heavy cloth, the scent of fruit,
are comfortable things.
She is no appendix to her daughter’s world.
Unless you escape in time,
she reviews forever the ancient pennants
on boats vanished from the river,
her first man’s name,
the umbrella trees she saw one time in Kingston.
Seemingly content with chores,
with trees beyond the window
spinning familiar cycles,
she unfurls the wash like banners.
Surely her work is useful.
She earns her keep.
She tells her daughter’s world as it runs
straight tracks toward its future,
“I am useful,
I am still here.”
Demeter, Waiting, Rita Dove
No. Who can bear it. Only someone
who hates herself, who believes
to pull a hand back from a daughter’s cheek
is to put love into her pocket—
like one of those ashen Christian
philosophers, or a war-bound soldier.
She is gone again and I will not bear
it. I will drag my grief through a winter
of my own making, refuse
any meadow that recycles itself into
hope. Shit on the cicadas, dry meteor
flash, finicky butterflies. I will wail and thrash
until the whole goddamned golden panorama freezes
over. Then I will sit down to wait for her. Yes.
Among His Effects We Found a Photograph, Ed Ochester
My mother us beautiful as a flapper.
She is so in love
that she has been gazing
secretly at my father
for forty years.
He’s in uniform,
with puttees and swagger stick,
a tiny cork mustache
bobbing above a shore line of teeth.
They are “poor but happy.”
In his hand is a lost book
he had memorized,
with a thousand clear answers
to everything.
Starwork, L. S. Asekoff
If we are lucky
there will be time to imagine
how the dead might admire
this halo of cities but for now
we must follow the directions
one hand leaves for the other.
As in conversation sparks fly upward
so allegory takes wing against the wreckage of the night,
the swan song of a sun in its solitude.
In whose interest do they labor, we wonder,
these silhouettes of desire
cast back at us by the orphaned event?
& when no man remembers his mother or father
what can measure our loss—techné
as telos? At the vanishing point
where the mullah who fed his master’s gold bird
gives way to the Sand Reckoner
sifting grains of light
lip service is paid to the names
once strange to us—problems of navigation
that leave us all in the dark.
And Where Were You, Len Roberts (for 8/15/09)
for my father, R.R.R. Frenck-Mohawk, long dead in Cohoes, New York
with your teepee and Lucky Strike
signals of smoke, when she cornered
me in the hallway, cold as a rat
she smashed with the broom handle
till it broke and began
with her small fists?
And when I disappeared under the bed
behind the long black dress of the closet,
when I turned into words at the kitchen
table, bologna, mischievous, fluorescent,
when I grew faster than the parti-
colored flash cards, a quotient, a divider,
a remainder, then a continent, yellow
Asia, brown Australia, mysterious blue
South America and castanets clicked in my fingers
and my heart grew claws that scratched to get out,
where were you, wooden Indian deader than
the Chief who stood outside Bernie’s Cigar Shop
all nicked and carved and scuffed
with just one good eye left to look out
on Ontario Street and the swirling ice-floed Mohawk RIver?
Where were you, dream catcher who floated
above my black bed with the red coal living
at the far end of your every breath,
my dark man, my ten crooked fingers with five rings
and five diamond chips, five gold initials
that told everyone but me you were just another drunk,
dirty hands on her white, white breasts,
dirty cock in her silk-satin cunt,
stupid half-breed thinking you could fuck
her white gloved and polka-dot dress and rows
of neat teeth and still be free to peddle bread
in your Golden Eagle truck’s
eighty-miles-an-hour snowdrifted toads throughout the Adirondacks
where you grandfathers ate bark.
Dumb, long-dicked, alcoholic, pock-marked,
malarial-ridden, purple-hearted Indian, where
are you now I’ve grown big and strong
and am ready to bloody my hands with the bitch?
Passing Through, Stanley Kunitz
—on my 79th birthday
Nobody in the widow’s household
ever celebrated anniversaries.
In the secrecy of my room
I would not admit I cared
that my friends were given parties.
Before I left town for school
my birthday went up in smoke
in a fire at City Hall that gutted
the Department of Vital Statistics.
If it weren’t for a census report
if a five-year-old White Male
sharing my mother’s address
at the Green Street tenement in Worcester
I’d have no documentary proof
that I exist. You are the first,
my dear, to bully me
into these festive occasions.
Sometimes, you say, I wear
an abstracted look that drives you
up the wall, as though it signified
distress or disaffection.
Don’t take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it’s time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I’m passing through a phase:
gradually I’m changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.
My Mother Asleep, Leonard Cohen
remembering my mother
at a theatre in Athens
thirty
thirty-five years ago
a revue by Theodorakis
those great songs
she fell asleep
in the chair beside mine
in the open-air theatre
she had arrived that day
from Montreal
and the play started close to midnight
and she slept through
the mandolins
the climbing harmonies
and the great songs
I was young
I hadn’t had my children
I didn’t know how far away
your love could be
I didn’t know how
tired you could get
if there are heavens my mother, e.e. cummings
if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses
my father will be(deep like a rose
tall like a rose)
standing near my
(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see
nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my
(suddenly in sunlight
he will bow,
& the whole garden will bow)
The Frog Prince, Anne Sexton
Frau Doktor,
Mama Brundig,
take out your contacts,
remove your wig.
I write for you.
I entertain.
But frogs come out
of the sky like rain.
Frogs arrive
With an ugly fury.
You are my judge.
You are my jury.
My guilts are what
we catalogue.
I’ll take a knife
and chop up frog.
Frog has not nerves.
Frog is as old as a cockroach.
Frog is my father’s genitals.
Frog is a malformed doorknob.
Frog is a soft bag of green.
The moon will not have him.
The sun wants to shut off
like a light bulb.
At the sight of him
the stone washes itself in a tub.
The crow thinks he’s an apple
and drops a worm in.
At the feel of frog
the touch-me-nots explode
like electric slugs.
Slime will have him.
Slime has made him a house.
Mr. Poison
is at my bed.
He wants my sausage.
He wants my bread.
Mama Brundig,
he wants my beer.
He wants my Christ
for a souvenir.
Frog has boil disease
and a bellyful of parasites.
He says: Kiss me. Kiss me.
And the ground soils itself.
Why
should a certain
quite adorable princess
be walking in her garden
at such a time
and toss her golden ball
up like a bubble
and drop it into the well?
It was ordained.
Just as the fates deal out
the plague with a tarot card.
Just as the Supreme Being drills
holes in our skulls to let
the Boston Symphony through.
But I digress.
A loss has taken place.
The ball has sunk like a cast-iron pot
into the bottom of the well.
Lost, she said,
my moon, my butter calf,
my yellow moth, my Hindu hare.
Obviously it was more than a ball.
Balls such as these are not
for sale in Au Bon Marché.
I took the moon, she said,
between my teeth
and now it is gone
and I am lost forever.
A thief had robbed by day.
Suddenly the well grew
thick and boiling
and a frog appeared.
His eyes bulged like two peas
and his body was trussed into place.
Do not be afraid, Princess,
he said, I am not a vagabond,
a cattle farmer, a shepherd,
a doorkeeper, a postman
or a laborer.
I come to you as a tradesman.
I have something to sell.
Your ball, he said,
for just three things.
Let me eat from your plate.
Let me drink from your cup.
Let me sleep in your bed.
She thought, Old Waddler,
those three you will never do,
but she made the promises
with hopes for her ball once more.
He brought it up in his mouth
like a tricky old dog
and she ran back to the castle
leaving the frog quite alone.
That evening at dinner time
a knock was heard on the castle door
and a voice demanded:
King’s youngest daughter,
let me in. You promised;
now open to me.
I have left the skunk cabbage
and the eels to live with you.
The kind then heard her promise
and forced her to comply.
The frog first sat on her lap.
He was as awful as an undertaker.
Next he was at her plate
looking over her bacon
and calves’ liver.
We will eat in tandem,
he said gleefully.
Her fork trembled
as if a small machine
had entered her.
He sat upon the liver
and partook like a gourmet.
The princess choked
as if she were eating a puppy.
From her cup he drank.
It wasn’t exactly hygienic.
From her cup she drank
as if it were Socrates’ hemlock.
Next came the bed.
The silky royal bed.
Ah! The penultimate hour!
There was the pillow
with the princess breathing
and there was the sinuous frog
riding up and down beside her.
I have been lost in a river
of shut doors, he said,
and I have made my way over
the wet stones to live with you.
She woke up aghast.
I suffer for birds and fireflies
but not frogs, she said,
and threw him across the room.
Kaboom!
Like a genie coming out of a samovar,
a handsome prince arose in the
corner of her bedroom.
He had kind eyes and hands
and was a friend of sorrow.
Thus they were married.
After all he had compromised her.
He hired a night watchman
so that no one could enter the chamber
and he had the well
boarded over so that
never again would she lose her ball,
that moon, that Krishna hair,
that blind poppy, that innocent globe,
that madonna womb.
I Go Back to May 1937, Sharon Olds
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
