Poetry

Spring 2008

 

 

Holly Posner

Ars Poetica

On vacation a woman gathers stones
from a dry riverbed: gray shale towers,
creamy siltstone, calcite tiled like dominoes.
Pressing her cheek to the ground,
she can almost hear ancient floodwater,
the grind of tectonic plates.

Back home, on her desk,
stripped of their desert setting,
the stones lack eloquence,
their lexicon now bankrupt.

How could such stoniness be forgotten?
Forgotten, too, how long it takes
each time to circle silence,
crawl back to the alluvial plain,
small hard words cracking open the heart.

 

Still Life with Metaphysics

Who knows how many angels can spin on a pin?
If we'll still need a haircut in Hell? — mysteries
medievalists worked on till dawn. Not us,
we're content to eat our toast, retire
with a pension and most of our teeth.
Our life une nature morte — still life —
more romantic in French, but in the end
it's the same dead duck on a table, minus
the cracked walnuts, unspooling orange rind,
cheese knife stippled with pewter light.
The domestic scene's always tastier on canvas.
Where's my umbrella? What happened to Disco?
Which one's the bride? And why was the minister miked?
These are the questions we ask ourselves
as we turn out the lights and climb the stairs
where, if we're lucky, we'll dream of angels
twirling on a bed made with hospital corners —
a Virginia reel with its allemande left, dosie-dos,
seraphic trumpeter calling the turns.

 

 

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