Poems of the Week

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.