Two Poems

Jeanne Wagner

Van Gogh's Ear

My mother used to say
her words
fell on deaf ears,
and I could almost hear the words
falling
with the crisp silence of leaves,
and see, waiting below,
ears,
flanged and grayish white
as the underside of mushrooms.
But harder.
Didn't we call it hard of hearing, then,
didn't we say stone deaf,
imagining the vacant eyes
of statues?

~

But I have to tell you
how cautious I've become
with words,
how first I press out all the creases,
then align them carefully,
pausing for a second
before I slip them, one after the other,
into the obscured portal
of an ear,
like inserting paper money
into the difficult slits
of parking lot
machines.

~

I think of Van Gogh,
because this is how we dismember
ourselves:
the hard hearts and deaf ears,
the blind eyes
that keep turning toward us,
the mutilations
of so much metonymy.

~

What's funny is that my father,
who, like God,
was never good at presence,
always became more intimate
on the phone,
holding its deaf ear
up to his own ear,
the constraints of the plastic mouthpiece,
with those little holes,
like the fine mesh of a confessional screen,
filtering out the swagger
of his words;
verbs packed like fists
gently unfolded on the phone,
his voice,
drawn through cord
and coil,
through miles of telephone pole
crucifixions,
streamed, sweet and ductile,
into my invisible
ear.

~

Other times
I envied Hamlet,
when he saw the vial of poison
poured
into his father's ear.
I imagined a lifetime
of vituperation,
liquid and distilled,
funneled into a cupped ear,
which is both open
and closed,
because,
when we speak
into someone else's dream,
our words are falling
on deaf ears.

***

Anonymous Submissions

I want to throw a rock with a note
through your front window,

imagine the star of air in the burst pane;
sudden vent of split-second wreckage.

I want to know that a cool breeze
can raise the hair on your arms,

grate a moony-surface of goose flesh
on the outer layer of your skin;

I need those involuntary signs of
intrusion and fear. The kind of hole

only a vandal can make, that tears
a threshold where there is no door,

asks your sympathy for the rock,
that yearns to show off its heft,

obdurate and sly inside your room.
More alien that any asteroid.

Jeanne Wagner is the winner of several national awards, including The Francis Locke Award, The Macguffin Poet Hunt and The Ann Stanford Prize. Her poems have previously appeared in Quarterly Review, The Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod and The Atlanta Anniversary Anthology. She is the author of four poetry collections, including The Zen Piano-Mover, which won the 2004 Stevens Manuscript Prize.

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