Written by
Jennifer Reeser |
Moscow ballet at seven in the evening.
You look at everything. You lay your cheek
against my shoulder, smoothing down my sleeve,
the Russian blizzards somehow less than bleak,
portrayed with whimsy on the backdrop screens
in dolloped watercolors as they are.
I ask if you know what their movement means.
You wish our situation not so far.
And everywhere, the audience defies
convention and conformity, some dressed
as though they had been made to improvise
at the last minute, some in black-tie best.
You’re happy, in new satin, having run
your fingers countless times from hip to hem –
Anastasia, whereas I am anyone
in tan, beside a jade and garnet gem.
With clarity and ease like these a-stage,
comparison with any else in life
seems but the smart annoyance of an age,
scissors beside a blunted paperknife.
“Sit up. Pay close attention. Sugar Plum
is dancing with such dignity,” I tell
you, half-disheartened, when I hear you hum,
you know Tchaikovsky’s symphony so well.
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Written by
Jennifer Reeser |
Yellow makes a play for green among
the rows of some poor farmer's field outside
the Memphis city limits' northern edge.
A D. J. plays The Day He Wore My Crown,
not knowing it entices into tears
this woman never once disposed to travel
the holiday before. My children squander
unleavened bread brought forth from Taco Bell.
What sacrifice of mine could be worth mention?
Enshroud it. Christ's is death enough to mourn.
Casino Aztar, Blytheville slide from view,
their souvenir and deli stations yielding
to miles of scrub-packed, newly-cultured meadow --
the man beside me rushed at the expense
of all around him.
Gripped by sentiment
at being once again in this, the country
his innocence absorbed, he sings the songs
of artists prone to praise the great Midwest,
prodigal farms and wheat. My eyes are burning.
An eighteen-wheeler whip has somehow managed
to drive his truck straight up a grass embankment
which rises to an overpass ahead.
It lingers there, a sacrament of chrome,
as I make peace at length with pink crape myrtles,
white baby's breath in bloom, whose counterparts
have two months past surrendered back at home.
How long were they bent down, exhausted, jealous
for what could not be theirs, before they fell?
And did the lilies of Gethsemane
cry out with all their strength for God's relent,
or were they sweetly mute as these I see?
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Written by
Jennifer Reeser |
Whether the clouds had abandoned Geneva that evening
no one can say now, but what I remember are roses
bruised at their edges, and china cups yellowed with age.
“I am too sick of interior vapors,” I told you,
“Find us a corner of sunlight, and hammer it down...
Tell me again I’m so lovely the insects won’t bite.”
Do you remember it, Victor? A time before pleasure
turned into sacrilege hungry to threaten the dead.
So many secrets you whispered -- but I, like a child
drawn to myself, hale and hearty to hear my own weeping,
bored by your ghost stories, left you both late and too soon.
Sunshine deserted or altered the tops of the grasses
subtly, with each changing breeze, as the shadows required --
dark, but not black, like my hair; and you claimed that each instant
some auburn-browed woman appeared, I re-entered your mind.
Later or sooner, our futures will enter it, too.
Now, though, it seems hope’s a difficult vision to conjure;
what you imagine of beauty so lodged in grim trivia
even the sentences spoken inside it are dark.
Mourning will fade, though, I know -- like your Ingolstadt nightmare.
Bells will resound. I will come to you. All will be well.
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Written by
Jennifer Reeser |
We’re through, we’re through, we’re through, we’re through, we’re through
and – flanking, now, the edges of our schism –
it seems your coldness and my idealism
alone for all this time have kept us true.
Credulous I and hedonistic you:
opposed, refracting angles of a prism
who challenged sense with childish skepticism –
and every known the bulk of mankind knew.
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Written by
Jennifer Reeser |
Fold this, our daughter’s grave,
and seal it with your kiss.
For all the love I gave,
you owe me this.
Inside of me, she had
your lips and tongue, my air
of grimness, thin and sad,
with your thick hair.
Inside of you, I trust,
she was a simple mesh
of need and paper, lust –
potential flesh.
And there was such pure song
in life begun from you,
I held the dead too long,
as women do,
but leaving like you did,
when only I could feel
the biding, body, bid
of what was real,
she’s put out with the cur,
the garbage, heartache, cat.
Promise you’ll sing to her.
You owe me that.
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Written by
Jennifer Reeser |
Imagining you’d come to say goodbye,
I made a doll of raffia and string.
I gave her thatch hair, and a broomstick skirt
of patchwork satin rags. Around each eye
I stitched thick lashes. Such a touching thing
she was! That even you could not debate –
impassive, undemanding and inert.
Yes, surely she’d cause you yourself to sigh.
Around her breast, I sewed a loden ring
to guard her cotton heart from being hurt,
then sat down in the fabric scraps to wait,
between the rafters and the furnace grate,
needle in hand, and never so aware
no craft on earth is master to despair.
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Written by
Jennifer Reeser |
I’d buy you a Babushka doll, my heart,
and brush your ash-blonde hair until it gleams,
were Russia and our land not laid apart
by ocean so much deeper than it seems.
I have an oval pin, though -- glossy lacquer
hand-made in Moscow, after glasnost came,
with fine, deft roses on a background blacker
perhaps, than history’s collective shame.
I’ve done my best to compass you with roses:
the tablecloth, the walls, the pillowcase,
the western side-yard only dusk discloses
briefly, in Climbing Blaze and Queen Anne’s lace.
May they suffice for peace when you discover
your love is not enough to turn the earth.
I dream I saw a handful of them hover
against my pane the morning of your birth.
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Written by
Jennifer Reeser |
What would I do without your voice to wake me?
Cor ad cor loquitur, I’m loath to know.
Kitsch operas sound, unhesitant to shake me,
The sheers undrawn, the heavens hardly showing,
My camisole askew, of lace-trimmed black –
Not red, not white; not passionate or pure.
I raise the volume, and the voices crack—
Vanilla scores: accessible, obscure.
But what would I do without your certain voice?
Disjecta membra ... I am loath to think.
This negligée is sable, but my choice
If black had been forbidden, would be pink:
The blood of ballet satins, quartz, the lover,
That cut from which I never could recover.
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Written by
Jennifer Reeser |
I wish I could,
like some, forget,
and never anguish,
nor regret,
dismissive, free
to roam the street,
no matter how
the visions meet.
Remembrance is
a neighborhood
where convicts live
with great and good,
its roads of red,
uneven brick,
whose surfaces –
both rough and slick –
spread out into
a patchwork plan.
Sometimes at night
I hear a man
vault past the fence,
and cross the yard,
my door chain down,
and me off-guard.
He curses, threatens,
pounds the door.
I’m wedged between
the couch and floor,
ungainly, barefoot,
limp and pinned,
scared of the dark,
without a friend,
with only one
clear thought, that I –
like him, like you –
don’t want to die.
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Written by
Jennifer Reeser |
Send your army home to their wives and children.
It is late. Your soldiers are burdened, thirsty.
Lock the doors, the windows, and here in darkness
lie down beside me.
Speak of anything we possess in common:
ground or law or sense. Only speak it softly.
Spiders crawl the crevices. Violent voices
ruin their balance,
and they’ll fall – intuit – upon our faces,
where I fear them most. But you’ve heard this terror,
and my midnight phobias always move you –
cause to remain here.
Leave a light still burning, in some far wall sconce.
Tuck one rebel end of the flat sheet under.
Turn away, self-ruled, to remind me even
Sappho was mortal,
even Shakespeare, writing of cups and spiders
in his winter’s tale. Send your tin men home, then.
Once I asked your reason to stay. You said,
“Because you’re still with me.”
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