Genevieve Payne

Back to Issue 7

Those Poets
          After Linda Pastan

Those poets stood at ocean’s edge
while mine and I are at the edge of war
at the edge of the time of war
like it were a sheet of paper
we could skirt the corners of were there
any to skirt, but it extends infinitely as
arms without hands must and
it is like time: there is no handling it
anyway and it goes on and onward
in either direction and it is
never assuaged, never.

 

Not Shoreless
          “My heart is late and shoreless” 
         --Pablo Neruda

the shore to
the woman’s heart:
crippled banks of flat
 
stones that
stack vertically
 
next to one another
and the woman thinks
of young shoulder blades,
 
exposed bone and pine
needles and rusting
leaves and the roots
 
of the birch trees
to hold them fast;
the thinnest water,
 
swallowing and
releasing the stones
 
like a coming kiss
or a hand that
has done no good
 
and like a blown
light, suddenly,
is gone.
 

New Century
          After Weldon Kees

We were easy, all us girls, in the first decade of the new century
and angry, and in a way or two: free.
In the same light as Kees, it was a back porch and a window to the downstairs
bathroom we could slip in and out like yellow bellied fish
through the mouth of a bucket.
We were slick with time, some of us still
and we were kings and we had kings,
and we left our neighbors to face their own quiet little deaths, coming.
The light on the back porch has just gone out, we can come home.
Our legs are stiff as cold hair.

Genevieve Payne is an assistant of some kind at a public access television station in central Maine. Her poems have previously appeared in Stolen Island and Scissors and Spackle.

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