Poetry
Siegel, Joan I.
POEMS Joan I. Siegel My Mother at Eighty-One Fear is the blue shadow under her eyes where the skin is fragile as the porcelain teacup I broke years ago. Her voice floats on top of her...
...Dance of the Sanderlings The sea's rhythm keeps them in step and balanced on this edge of treachery...
...The headboard is granite...
...All morning they dance to the surf looking like a corps de ballet well-rehearsed in their choreography stepping quickly into the ebb tide to drill for bits of food tossed out by the sea benign us an old woman feeding pigeons at the park and race back just in time before the next flow drags them under and cracks their legs like twigs...
...Memorial All day the argument froths at her lips...
...She shakes her fist at him and her voice cracks like the sound of someone shaking out crisp sheets...
...If he were suit here he'd wait for her at the door while she checked the gas range one more time...
...The grave is wide as a double bed...
...Then he'd get the car...
...Her voice floats on top of her breath making the sound a bird makes with its wings just before it dives into the air...
...Later My mother's voice stretches thin as the telephone wires strung between our houses: I close my eyes and it is already that other time when her voice will come to me from far away and 1 will reach for the phone to dial her number and no one will answer or it will be a stranger's voice and all night I will run through dark streets trying to find her house the right door the key that fell through a hole in my pocket...
...In the end she will lock the door to us and go off alone...
Vol. 122 • May 1995 • No. 10
