At the Radiation Clinic

On one wall van Gogh’s trees twist
from his sun, which tattoos the soil
with their black, orange shadows.
They would run if they could.
 
Even this cheap print radiates white
and yellow heat to a dozen patients
who have come to respect
the duplicitous power of the x-ray.
 
My father shuts his eyes, tries dozing
in a wheelchair until his name is called.
I study van Gogh’s olive grove,
its sunshine of visible strokes:
 
How he saw through saffron and gold
to an indifferent gray, a cold platinum,
a brutal blue; how he painted light’s capacity
to nurture or wither, cell by cell.
 

  originally published in Poet Lore 

Immigrant

 Science can’t convince me
I’m not related to this snowy egret
who reminds me of my grandmother.
 
Hunched like a widow’s back, feathered
like a vintage hat, she picks her way
across a pebbly beach and toes the water.
 
Any moment she might speak,
stern and guttural, ask me if I brought
a “bath costume”  for the beach –
 
pronounced as bishh.  And I will say
the least I can, shying from conversation
with creatures alien and weathered.
 
I won’t understand enough to pity her
the cold, brittle home she makes.
Only later – when I consider
 
the distance that she flew here
without knowing where she’d land –
will I call it deftness, call it courage.

originally published in CALYX  

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© Copyright, 2012, Susan Cohen.
All rights reserved.
These poems from THROAT SINGING by Susan Cohen, published by Cherry Grove Collections, Cincinnati, OH, 2012.