Tuesday Poem: From The Water Series

Snowdrop Soup

is what Luna serves him.

She forages and all she can

find is these, with their little

white heads and greeny secrets.

Months of being cooped up

in their too tiny space,

inundated with snow, after

heavy wet ice, after hailstone

and rain, wind whipping

beneath the floorboards, stilts

rattling a rough tattoo.

There were shriveled carrots

and mildewed beets left,

to throw in with a brackish

draw from the well, her

put-ups all but decimated.

She spies them at her feet,

clusters of early March milk maids,

a first flowering, stoop-shouldered

and shy above the sooty patches of melt.

A gift, she thinks, from the angels,

for ain’t she like Eve almost? Needing

a little swig of the hope, after

losing so much that was good?

Too late she remembers their other name:

death’s flower, so beautiful were they,

once she clipped them, like mermaid’s

hair drifting across the bowl.

He gobbled them fast, and she did too,

so craving of green were they, and then

the cramps and the stomach flips set in,

the two of them dizzy as love sick fools.

Giddy, he says, with spring just round the bend.

Their guts will mend, since at least she

remembered to leave bulb in the ground.

She doesn’t tell him the story. Maybe

next year. Pictures how hard their

empty bellies will shake when they laugh.

Tuesday Poem: Previously published by Calyx in 1987

Painting by Francien Krieg

 

Linda

As I passed the door of her room,

I had to rub my eyes.

Her pink nipples and pale 
rise of china breasts

looked new as a young girl's

beneath the wrinkles of her face.

Old age rustled like wind on sand

in the Swancott Home for Ladies,
and she reclined oblivious,

an odalisque on a narrow bed

in coral and porcelain autumn light.

A gift of late blooming roses,

ashimmer over shifting dunes.

A mirage? No, an oasis in this 
barren, stoop-shouldered place.