HAYSTACKS
Across
the meadow, Monet’s stepdaughter,
Blanche,
carried canvases in a bumpy wheelbarrow
to
help capture the transience of light.
Hurry, Papa said, the sun sets so fast!
She
prepared another canvas.
Throughout
the day, each half hour,
the
color of the haystacks changed
like
a bruise on the skin.
∞
On
my father’s farm, Mother chooses to die.
Splotches
on her legs, the only modest place
my
father shows me, ugly purplish and reddish,
like
sunspots, as if the sun appeared to perish.
I
run to the harvest haystacks to hide
from
death. But he finds me.
At
the funeral parlor, Mother looks like Mother
except
for her skin. Gone the soft hands
that
washed my dirty face. Gone
the
tender cheeks that tucked me in at night.
Gone
the supple lips that kissed my forehead.
Instead,
a hardness, like rock
I
tote from a fertile plowed field,
like
the brick of the silo storing continuance,
like
the bark of an apple tree heavy with fruit.
Even
the hard earth as I sit at the grave,
the
sun setting, Father’s callous hand
reaching
for me, lifting me
into
a world I know will be forever hard.
LE
CHRIST VERT
I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul
Gauguin
I
have put you behind me,
a
green shadow signifying death
or
maybe a verdant pasture
where
I repose
watching
waves break
like
mirrors, no longer reflecting,
shards
capturing the flight of gulls,
flickering
spatters of impasto
mixed
with sand, glass, ceramic,
creating
a mosaic,
freezing
the moment
the
heart is pierced with a lance,
or a
word, or a look from you
when
I refuse to remain
impaled
on the cross.
CIOCIA MARY’S BROTHER DYING
She
rented a room across the street
so
she could care for him, a bachelor
with
cancer. He refused treatment, fifty-some years
enough.
To me, at ten, he made sense.
One
time, Ciocia Mary invited me to sit
with them,
the
rented chair, wooden, green paint chipped,
showing
layers of white, blue, and yellow
like
his skin. On the rented bed stand, a crucifix and clock.
I
stared at the clock while the two of them spoke
in
and out of Polish. When she mentioned me,
his
chest heaved as if to speak. I smiled.
The
man on the cross remained silent.
On
top of the rented chest of drawers
a
living cemetery of relatives. They smiled, too.
After
an exchange of Polish, Ciocia Mary
cried.
He
asked me if I played ball. Little League.
Two
words to a man I would never see again.
Looking
out the rented window I observed
how
darkness slowly ate the light,
how
I felt there wasn’t much time left
for
me to play.
donnarkevic:
Weston, WV. MFA National University. Recent poetry has appeared in Bijou Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, Prime Number, and Off the Coast. Poetry Chapbooks include Laundry, published by Main Street Rag. Plays have received
readings in Chicago, New York, and Virginia. FutureCycle Press published, Admissions, a book of poems, in 2013.
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