THREE POEMS BY SHARON DOLIN
Street
This is the city
alleyway of windows
with shadows passing for time:
if it ends in an ocean or river of inanition
those roofs of powder blue and
terracotta pink would be a childhood sky
could be trees fusing
into a grand piano
of Kelly green
could be sheets of apricot rain
on mountains passing their shadows
off as clouds
and there you are in the rearview
cut out and refracted onto the road
among silent palms
uniform slope of stucco beneath
a whitened density of blue
so that houses seem carved
from a topiary of air and earth
as your eyes rove over hills
in an atavistic search
for the sea
Black Painting #2: The Dead
Blue winter rain
that’s what you’ve become
cloud
whitewashed by weather
this window
beyond being
the elements eat you
damp cold
of the first winter
now the second
you said you wanted
to travel
now you’re still
blotches of flight
descend into your
stationary car
Discarded Clothes
are flags of our own disapproval
lineaments of an evening we discard
as quickly as some friends
if there’s a freckled monument to gloom,
it passes. Lovers of the daily
who repeat for us an antic state
return with small remembrances of leaves.
We watch them buckle and heave, tell
of our quick departure into flesh
white lilies on the pond’s edge
grow splotchy and dream:
Your pants are made of wind,
your shirt from daisies blown
to dusty globes on the lake
by our breath.
*all from Serious Pink, Marsh Hawk Press, 2003.
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