Marcia Slatkin
(USA)
You Say, “Black.”
I cradle white, croon to it,
cream-puffs and marshmallow
of my youth, time
sugared white, and I murmur,
“white, white,” to entice you.
You teach me.
You diagram “black,”
parse it, build
black theories
with wire cutters,
weld black arrows
to point the black path.
My sugar bowl
crawls with black ants
I notice black hooks, hangers.
see black seams in the bricks
of buildings, cracks
in the white path,
follow black lamp wires
to light.
Mending
your coat with black thread,
I almost long to become
charcoal for your fine, sure hand.
But nights,
while the black watchdog snores,
I dream white.
What The Stars Are
The buck chased her,
his fullness toward her tail.
When she would not stay,
he reared, hit the sharp
yard-rail, and sprayed.
The man in the moon
was like that.
In the dark,
he pawed the earth’s
soft waist. His fingers
clawed beneath her clouds.
And when she turned away,
he arched his back
and sprayed
the night with stars.
The Last Duck
We trapped him –
the dignified male
with the graceful neck –
and held him down
till drowned. His death
was ugly. His heart
wouldn’t let his wings
go limp. They hit
the lip of the tub like fists.
There were long slow moments
when we could have let him live.
Then his beak bubbled death,
and we didn’t. That day,
A silence stilled the yard.
The ducks didn’t fly, drink, eat,
or bob their mobile necks to speak,
but stood, breath-stopped as stone.
In time,
they sought the boulder
he’d used as throne,
exhaled sighs
like oboe notes,
and the gargling roll
from the root of their throats
flooded every bite we chewed
of this last duck
we killed for food.
Solicitude
Amid a maze
of age spots, raised
as gravel, walnut hued
and jagged in shape,
my mother’s breasts
emerge, still pink,
unscarred though fallen,
guileless on a sheet
of rippled skin.
And after donning
bra and snapping
straps in place,
she gathers them up
like scooping pliant
honey with a spoon,
or shaping dough
to buns that fit a pan –
and rests
obedient lobes
in waiting slings
slowly –cradling each
with vein-rich
careful hands.
A Prayer to the Dial Tone
Eyes tightly closed, holding
the buzzing phone to her heart
like a crucifix,
thumbing random numbers
like worry beads – or perhaps
davening, as she’d doubtless
seen her father do, swaying
with each fervent phrase
whispered into the top
of the plastic messenger
of contact and warning,
my mother communicates
with the spirit of her son,
whose work entails travel:
“My sweetheart,
be safe.”
Not Yet
You might think
I would have rid myself
of that old myth. The dead
are gone, beyond reach
or calling. But when,
ill for days, my mother
rises, looks at me
and calmly says, “It’s time
to find my husband,” the ice
that sometimes gathers near my heart
melts, flows over, floods. “We
don’t know exactly where he is,”
she says, her voice
a luminous string
to which she clings
as she begins to tread
some fathomless bridge
that leads beyond my tears.
My caress pleads
with her eyes, now
grave, bright, and caught
in what seems
a moment of ultimate
seeing. Then I sculpt
my sobs to words,
and cast a net
that hauls her back, back–
promising she will of course
find him — just
not yet.
Melt
Immobile, my form
was powerfully fixed
in what they call Greenland,
my sheets for centuries
stacked within an ocean
cold enough to keep my ice
intact. I was content.
My massive presence
ruled the waves
and trapped excess,
a glassy girdle
cinching seas.
Now, heat from a savage sun
attacks me. Huge chunks
of what I feel as body,
and weighing a billion tons,
shear off and slide into the deep.
I am disfigured. I melt
and drown at once,
the ocean rising round
a self no longer strong enough
to tame its height. If I die,
my power dissolving
into liquid surge,
the sea will rise twenty feet.
Submerged, my wave-capped corpse
will spread, swirl past, seep
and flood all low-lying land.
The creatures with the fleshy
legs and chests, with hair
and anxious, beating hearts
will flee my reach.
In death,
I will be everywhere.
Upheaval
Sometimes, it is a
bubble on the walkway;
a small hump that barely
breaks the man-made grade.
One passes easily.
Sometimes the sidewalk
is broken — a sandwich
shared by friends,
a pizza, placed on a table
and pulled apart, islands
on an empty tray.
But sometimes, pavement
heaves up, the eruption
of volcanoes, the clash
of tectonic plates
creating temples of concrete–
A-frames, defiant, jutting
into air like ice floes,
their sides aslant
in a choppy grey sea.
It is easy to trip
on these monsters,
to stumble
and lean on the very tree
whose roots have gashed
the man-poured skin
and crazed it egg-shell split,
as it yields to the thrusting
power of growth
beneath – the force
of nature breathing.
“You Say “Black” won a Walt Whitman award from a NY bank in 1978; It was published in the anthology Bizzaro/ Dobrin/ Slatkin, ISBN 0-943018 04-8 put out by Backstreet Editions in 1982.
“The Last Duck” was published in the Paris Review in 1992.
« The Last Duck » and « What the Stars Are » were all published in a chapbook called A Season’s Milking, 2003, by Pudding House Press, ISBN 1-58998-218-5., and later in a full length book called A WOMAN MILKING, WORD PRESS, 2006. ISBN 1933456493
“Solicitude” won first prize in Stony Brook’s Institute for Medicine in Contemporary Society Poetry contest, 2004, and was published in Contexts Magazinein the spring of that year. It was later published in a chapbook called I Kidnap My Mother in August, 2005, by Finishing Line Press, ISBN 1-932755-018-1. It as well as « Not Yet » will be part of a full length book called NOT YET: A CARE-GIVING COLLAGE, forthcoming from SFAPRESS, Stephen F Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas, in early 2012.
« Melt » and « Upheaval » are part of an unpublished manuscript called OP-ED: EARTH, a series of 60 poems about climate change. The work has been done during the past two years.
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Former English teacher, farmer, and care giver to her mother, an Alzheimer patient who lived with her between 2003- 2007, Marcia Slatkin now plays cello, takes photographs with which she makes collages, and writes. Her fiction won two PEN awards, and many stories have been published in small magazines. Sixteen of her one-act plays have been produced in small venues in NYC, San Diego, and Long Island NY. Her full length play, UPSIDE DOWN, won a staged reading at the Long Beach Playhouse, Long Beach California in 2010, and had a 6 performance run in NYC, September, 2011. Honors include finalist status in the Samuel French one-act play contest three times, and the survival by her full length screen play, « HOME FRONT, » of first cut in the Sundance Film contest, 2004 – 5. Her first chapbook, A Season’s Milking, Pudding House Press 2003, was followed by a chapbook called I Kidnap My Mother: Alzheimer Poems, Finishing Line Press, 2005. The full length « continuation » volumes of both of these chapbooks are available. « A WOMAN MILKING: Barnyard Poems » was published by WORD TECH in 2006. « NOT YET: A Care-Giving Collage » is forthcoming from SFAPRESS, TEXAS, in early 2012.