Life of Sorts
Stopping under the speaking tree
tracing the lines of my own face
with well lubricated fingertips
I am not now
nor ever have I been
free with myself,
and you know why that is.
If I could only learn to make the perfect skirt
I would never work again.
My own line. "To what do you attribute
your success?" Talent and genius.
A talent for genius: Crows paired up in the black tree
lift off metonymically,
two feathers ride an invincible,
blooded draft. My life
as an activist
begins.
Eminent Victorians
Half the day is dead already—
a lady with a baby in the shady graveyard
promenade not quite the idea
but the first idea to be impressed
so firmly—Grace to be born
in the
bisected quadrangle
stones propped insensible
but all in relation
to the babe.
Babe what suckles
babe what grows comfortable with thieves in a fertile
bed of unsaid
slice of eponymous
grafted to the reef
Hold my hand
in the undergrowth
waist high at your leisure cheerful
child of melancholy and displeasure.
Soft in the lap you grow
hard at the breast—Oh
under- and aboveground we go
to relieve us. Camphor
and cambric by the hand not by halves,
one turn more
will take us back to where we rest.
Baby is not baby when she
wears her oblong
freshet
I will take her home to rest.
Invidious Comparison
Fat kids of the South
with early breasts
in the swimming pool outside
and as rites of passage go,
it's a benign and thoughtful entry.
There is an expression I keep hearing
I wanted to use it. I looked for it in popular music:
If she's a nun then I'm the pope.
Don't ask me what I'm doing.
I'm thinking it's only this beautiful
here. Now my body is made of long-standing
spirituality, by nature benign. Don't laugh: I'm a
Lotus-flower Gentle Sitting-still Woman.
And another paradigm slips into
place like the diamond it
sounds like. I'm no go-getter—
what am I after all but a
raft.
(c) 2004 Rebecca Wolff. All rights reserved.
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