Poetry | March 01, 2010

Featuring the poems:

  • Baucis and Philemon
  • The Event Horizon
  • Melancholia; a Fantasy
  • A Marriage Poem (featured as Poem of the Week, May 4, 2010)
  • The Distance Between the House and the Barn

 

A Marriage Poem

I am unmarried and do not know

how life is simplified by cruelties.

—Beckian Fritz Goldberg

 

It is the year

I have bartered away all my teeth.

 

My mouth is a lush place,

full of black usury and in return

 

I have a pair of new shoes,

a wheel of soft sheep’s cheese,

 

five of the world’s ten hottest peppers.

Where will I go, my mouth

 

so many wounds, that they

won’t know me by my absent bite?

 

How will I succor you, or the cat

we kept, or the one whose fleas

 

I am popping flat on my thumbnail

even as I reject her winsomeness?

 

Still, I don’t regret.

I am not a wife,

 

but maybe a window. Look

through me is the house,

 

is the water boiling,

a pepper slipped beneath the skin of the pie.

 

Look through me is the carefully arranged plate,

an eye for beauty, a terrible smile

 

all the worse because I mean it

so sincerely, am so happy

 

in these beaten hours

tapping back and forth across the boards.

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