Two Poems

Melissa Carl

What I Think About Death, if Anyone Asks

                        ---with a nod to Maud Kelly

I can tell you about Monet, sitting at the death-bed
of his tubercular wife, how he stared at her temples,
blues and grays gathering under her skin
in soft successions, how he analyzed ratios
of hue and pigment before he caught himself.
I can describe his guilt and horrified remorse,
though he had no intent to release her, even then,
from the tenderness and cruelty of his art.
I can tell you that I barely recalled anything
about the biography of Monet
until the day  my brother-in-law shot himself
and we arrived to help clean up.
I should have been sick in front of the bed,
that awful sponge, not wondering how many quarts?
I can tell you about the curse of observance,
how I now know that the answer is six
because the day after, I looked it up.

***

Things I Never Meant to Say

Tonight my heart is on its usual cracker
for anyone to eat. Don’t look up---I’m a Little Chicken
and the Lie is Falling. My fortune cookies are liars too,
with their promises of strangers and desire.
I call things possible, as if they were,
but the sadness of an iron bridge at dusk
is what really owns me, makes me unfit
for other people’s company.  Which I sometimes want. 
Or think I should. Were there any other little girls
who read about Niobe and stared for hours at the globe?
Chersk Mountains. Strait of Hormuz.
And now, I can’t attempt to care about potato salad
or manicures while my mind monkey-vaults
around Russian quotes and sky color.
I have to write the quotes and color down---
who can predict what will survive
the mind’s dragonfly inconstancy?
I might even have enough words left
to write the standard apology right after I slap
the next half-naked girl I see wobbling
on the whorish architecture of her ridiculous shoes.

Melissa Carl an accidental teacher and deliberate poet who lives for love and the lies her fortune cookies tell her. She is in love with the word "Etruscan" and repeats it to herself like a private spell.  She shares her admittedly messy existence with her husband, son, 12 hermit crabs and a dingo---but not necessarily in that order.
donaldcyork@aim.com

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