Liz Rosenberg: Eight poems

HAND OF GOD

Rodin's stone "Hand of God" looks too much like Rodin's, long-fingered and aristocratic, resembling yours but lacking the width and breadth, the padded beauty of your own. Hands of a hero, uncomplaining hands. Pale skin, rough brushed with rose. And yet the gentle, easy way God holds the earth--the man and woman curled into his palm--remind me of yours, lifted in sleep, air-borne as if to hold the house of dreams above our heads. Or wrapped around a steering wheel, turning a page, paint-spattered on the knuckles, nicked and cut, sporting a band-aid, waiting patiently for fork and knife. Me holding the hand of God in the darkened movie theater as he hoists a bucket of popcorn up.

REMEMBERING JUNE

One last call of the summer birds--the heart remembers with a leap back in time. Warm June, fat with green leaves! Come-to-it! come-to-it! Rustle of early morning waking, one happy after another. Long, late nights with bicycles all over the street, lying down or standing up at rest like sleeping horses. Sweet song of the summer bird, and behind it the sound of a broom sweeping up fallen leaves.

ONE CHILD

In the schoolyard, the omnipresent teacher's whistle, and the one child staggering around with shoes untied, ill-fitting jeans, a fake-fur jacket bunched around her shoulders. She is the doomed one always alone who moves from this slide to the next as if from one bus-stop to another; her cuffs tugged down over her hands, arms stretched out like a movie zombie. The shrieks of the other children float high-pitched as an eagle bone, flocks of friends holding hands, then separating, waves pounding at the shore of her aloneness.

THE MAILMAN

The widow across the street opens her door to check the mail. First she slides the flier from the bottom--the slot reserved for newspapers and magazines. She glances at it, then opens the mailbox below, withdraws one thin white piece of paper--looks at it in disbelief, both sides. What is it? A postcard? Note of apology from the mail deliverer? Anonymous love letter I think not from the way she closes the box again, turns the lock and shuts her front door. There's a window shaped like a diamond in it, but there are no lights on in the house, and nothing sparkles.

THE KISS

Snow fluttering down. The broken heart doesn't break, it bends, struggles to grow larger than its suffering. Knows that the same snow is falling over the roof of the beloved, the dark ceiling, sleeping head. The heart goes wandering among dots of snow and, letting go, kisses the loved one cooly on the lips.

THE WINDOW

In the window across the street the passersby walk by blurry, in colors of a circus poster, fleeting as clouds. Hear the rattle of cars, see the pink coat passing in the dark glass. If something trembles, is it a fault in the world, a loose pane, or a problem in the cornea? A local woman smears her naked body with chocolate, presents herself to a neighbor as an Easter present--what mania? How many days of false spring, false promise, a neighbor's wave mistaken as an obscene invitation? Consider it from his side; how she passed like a shudder over the lens of his horrified eye. Then you look across at the window again: see a dark square made up of two rectangles, framed in blue paint, with nothing inside.

SAFE

If I sit here in this car, nothing bad can happen. My son's raspy breathing bears me up like a wave. I can ignore the pain in my side or if I can't ignore it I don't have to do anything about it yet. Only the dark quiet of the car--the calm radio voice and its small green screen. Cars slice up or down the hill, while ours sits in the driveway like a boat tied to a dock. My anxieties, my life or death. I doze off in the dark compartment, head a few inches from my son's--mine tilted back in the front seat, his resting forward in the back.

THINGS OF THE WORLD

To escape the things of the world by way of the world. This morning the back of the yellow jacket turned out not to be yellow at all, but iridescent green chenille. Before it flew off, awkwardly, lifting the heavy challice of its body, it seemed to notice my surprise. Flashed its wings an instant. Meanwhile, the doomed squirrel crept off with almost a limp, almost a hunchback, the posture of a whining beggar.

Liz Rosenberg's most recent book of poems is Children of Paradise, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994. Her first novel is due out next year from Harcourt Brace. she teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Binghamton.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jan 1995
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