32 posts tagged “love”

The Girl Who Waits

(after Abbott Handerson Thayer's painting, Virgin Enthroned, 1891)

A mother with two children is strapped

on a cross of disturbed night

weary of midnight walks with babies

The soles of her slippers are thin

One child, the strawberry blond girl

offers her a sprig of rosemary

for remembrance, for waking up

but she is too tired to see

The daughter will wait patiently

for the mother's eyes to open

a sheet of ice cracking on the creek bed

in the early thaws of March

Lucy Simpson, revised 12/2009

432px-Virgin_Enthroned_1891_Abbott_Thayer

For Love
(Seattle, the Hiram M. Chittendon Locks, mid-September salmon run)

I understand these silver-sided beauties
streaking iridescent rivulets
     running back to Montlake Cut
where boats
     mechanically raise and lower--
     east to the lake, or west to the sea.
Earth of birth in the body inherent
     intelligence of instinctual emotion,
the salmon are leaping.

Each, one long sleek muscle
     gathers to hurl whole
into impossible air,
fling up and curve around barriers
     counter-balance against the current
          for extra push,

leap delirious
to ride the force of rushing, gushing
     water thrust against her,
to arc over the concrete ladder,

     a poor substitute for falls and rapids---
     but it works, best as man can make it,
          now, after all
     he's done to it.

She's slipped through bloody claws,
the fat-assed sea lion taking advantage of opportunity
     like any good market capitalist.
Airy sparks swirl
     a frothy blood-foam,
she's slid through his murderous teeth
while he chomps down on the flesh
of a less agile sister, her eye

on the prize of re-membering
the sight and scent of home.
Swollen with eggs, she knows
just where she goes, carries them
     in the basket of her belly
     to the stream where she was born,

green translucent light
filtered through pooled water.
She will hurl herself wantonly
     up any obstacle.

And I, though my belly no longer holds eggs
and the dream of babies does not drive me,
     would still leap off---
          or up---
the right available cliff
          for love
and hope to live through it,
     though I'd take the risk.

Upstream she'll die,
mottled and spent,
               and so will I
but there's this exuberant leap to execute
while bees drink wine from fermented fallen fruit
and September's golden blue sun glistens the water
     surface like liquid light on wrinkled silk.

Judith Roche

                Edge

The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odours bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

                    Sylvia Plath

The Toilet Bowl Man Wants To Sleep

(based on the Ti-D-Bol Man)

The bowl of his smooth white world

is a round-lipped bell krater

The sea is azure, cerulean

with hints of andradite garnet

The water is sometimes blue as a dead-man's eyes

His boat rushes round in spirals

but never goes down

to the place of shades and ferment

He fell in love with the moon

round as fresh figs

tan and glowing with a fragrance of olives

He desired to sleep

He hoped she would 

scoop him into her palm

rescue him from the bowl

“My world is too small

too clean

too blue

to hold my ragged red

thoughts”

he cried

Lucy Simpson, Seattle, 2/18/2009

a pair meant for each other

the man wore doves

white feathers flapping

and guano reeking

his wife wore fish

only she sang in the scale of air

and they kept dying

they were quite a pair

the two of them

him with the frantic avian shrieks

and her with the mute gaping mouths

Lucy Simpson

Seattle

1/21/2009

the realization that my lover is light

(for Michael)

If I knew you were light

I would've peeled away the layers

to your glorious mouth

many years ago

I would've thrown spoons at the sky

for a taste of you

going down like fireflies

into the darkness of my belly

for night is in my belly

a winter new moon

it crept up this morning

from the floorboards

like an oil spill

defying gravity

settling under the ribs

now I need your light

to see which way

to rescue a bird caught

in the black

Lucy Simpson

Seattle, 1/14/2008