B.Z. Niditch- Three Poems

IN THE CORNER

Your first holiday
with no love letter
falling into strangeness
out of hand
barefoot by dunes
on the warm shore
after summer school
once seeming immortal
in sober exercises
and lesson plans
that never go into effect
making up for laziness
and lost time
in those marred days
of false disciplines
down heated corridors
with hospice smells
and sorry lunches
on purple edged vases
replicas of the Romans
who occupied our world.



CITY READING

Here at my urban read
adolescence pumps
out a rascal's diary
and return to my past
with signs everywhere
like effaced wounds
of disappointments
apprenticed by visions
on sleepless hours
stroked by kilometers
of magnetic language
grown up from running
on fragments of words
in uppermost fervor
of memory not distant,
in an expressionist time.



UNSPEAKABLE PARIS

Whispering a Rimbaud
poem in an attic
hiding with a slogan
by a blinking past
you recall
your first piano recital
at six playing Satie
doomed like a voice
inside you piano notes
hiding apparitions
up the staircase
locking the school doors,
memory moves
in my leafy eyes,
a love letter
left on your bureau
falls in a shaving mug
by a Balzac miniature
given to you at school
before graduation.