Written by
Fleda Brown |
She reads, of course, what he's doing, shaking Nixon's hand,
dating this starlet or that, while he is faithful to her
like a stone in her belly, like the actual love child,
its bills and diapers. Once he had kissed her
and time had stood still, at least some point seems to
remain back there as a place to return to, to wait for.
What is she waiting for? He will not marry her, nor will he
stop very often. Desireé will grow up to say her father is dead.
Desireé will imagine him standing on a timeless street,
hungry for his child. She will wait for him, not in the original,
but in a gesture copied to whatever lover she takes.
He will fracture and change to landscape, to the Pope, maybe,
or President Kennedy, or to a pain that darkens her eyes.
"Once," she will say, as if she remembers,
and the memory will stick like a fishbone. She knows
how easily she will comply when a man puts his hand
on the back of her neck and gently steers her.
She knows how long she will wait for rescue, how the world
will go on expanding outside. She will see her mother's photo
of Elvis shaking hands with Nixon, the terrifying conjunction.
A whole war with Asia will begin slowly,
in her lifetime, out of such irreconcilable urges.
The Pill will become available to the general public,
starting up a new waiting in that other depth.
The egg will have to keep believing in its timeless moment
of completion without any proof except in the longing
of its own body. Maris will break Babe Ruth's record
while Orbison will have his first major hit with
"Only the Lonely," trying his best to sound like Elvis.
© 1999, Fleda Brown
(first published in The Iowa Review, 29 [1999])
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Written by
Andrew Marvell |
My love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixed
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.
For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrranic power depose.
And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant Poles have placed
(Though Love's whole world on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced,
Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.
As lines (so loves) oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.
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Written by
Norman Dubie |
In seventeen hundred, a much hated sultan
visited us twice, finally
dying of headaches in the south harbor.
Ever since, visitors have come to the island.
They bring their dogs and children.
The ferry boat with a red cross
freshly painted on it
lifts in uneven drafts of smoke and steam
devising the mustard horizon
that is grotesque with purple thunderheads.
In the rising winds the angry sea birds
circle the trafficking winter ghosts
who are electric like the locusts at Patmos.
They are gathering sage in improvised slings
along the hillsides,
they are the lightning strikes scattering wild cats
from the bone yard:
here, since the war, fertilizer trucks
have idled much like the island itself.
We blame the wild cats who have eaten
all the jeweled yellow snakes of the island.
When sufficiently distant, the outhouses have a sweetness
like frankincense.
A darker congregation, we think the last days
began when they stripped the postage stamps
of their lies and romance.
The chaff of the hillsides
rises like a cramp, defeating a paring of moon . . . its
hot, modest conjunction of planets . . .
And with this sudden hard rain
the bells on the ferry boat
begin a long elicit angelus.
Two small Turkish boys run out into the storm--
here, by superstition,
they must laugh and sing--like condemned lovers,
ashen and kneeling,
who are being washed
by their dead grandmothers' grandmothers.
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