Lee Upton
(USA)
The Metaphor & the Simile
What drops from the magnolia
veined with silver
a little well inside each petal
near the picnic
and inside the well
the winding stem of a clock.
The woman who sees her face
in her mother’s face and doesn’t frown
eats her lunch on this lawn.
The blossoms fall like sisters.
Portraits of Artists
What is it
that
makes them
celebrate
the citizens of their island,
always
their island alone and
raise
statues to their
fellow
citizens, claim loyalty,
admire
and admire and
admire?
While citizens of that
other
island claim how trivial their
own
lives are, as if their
days
and works must be only
soil
backhoed out of a grave.
No
annals for them,
only
for the neighboring island,
above
which they fly, their
beaks
curved to their
chests.
The Patterns
My mother took me to visit her, a friend known to be dying of cancer,
to help her pick cherries. I couldn’t look at the woman, but then,
at that age, I didn’t look at adults. We were picking cherries before
the birds picked them. While we were on ladders I saw how,
among the leaves, the hanging cherries made the woman’s face
look like a dress pattern. Then I wasn’t afraid of the woman
or guilty for being afraid. After we finished, my mother’s friend
rinsed cherries for me in her kitchen. I hope I thanked her.
It was years afterwards when I had the dream of the woman.
She was standing in our garage in a dress patterned with cherries.
It would take me more than a decade to begin to look like
the woman in the dream, to fulfill what I thought was a pattern.
She raised her arm, the woman on the ladder, and the pattern broke away,
and I went on picking cherries. Later she cut out each stone for me.
____________________________________________
Bio Note
Lee Upton’s most recent book is Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy (Tupelo). A collection of her short stories, The Tao of Humiliation, is forthcoming in spring 2014 from BOA Editions. Her poems have appeared in the New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and in editions of Best American Poetry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Upton