Ophelia, in Winter

Twisting out of fevered sheets,
she presses her blush heat and dark

against the windowpane to witness
winter's unsullied flurry, midnight snow caught

on lilac twigs, vesting brook and rock.
Beyond the glass, ink strokes of stubble

pierce the undulating body of the fields.
If she slipped through her reflection, she could drift

down the feathered path from which no one
could summon, no one take her. She tips

back her head, receives the chilled wafer
on her tongue. Kneels to watch her other face

ripple silver in black water. Lifts the ice
chalice to her lips, lets herself sink

trackless through white rapture. She becomes
concealed=as the knot coils in the pine,

as seeded grass genuflects in snow-
erasing the cloven print that bids the buck's

thighs to her melting source. She takes
that blue-tinged veil to cancel heat. Appetite.

First appeared in Gulf Coast; also appears in the anthology In a Fine Frenzy (poems inspired by Shakespeare) and in Red Jess

Simmer

Bent above the scarred desk, I aim
to limn the long pure streak of white

that cuts through egg-blue dawn,
the birches ’ lace-serrated shadow

as leaves begin to knuckle under
to October—but at eye’s edge,  

in my safe room’s shadows, lurk
the leash, the bitter wire, the hood

that shimmers out of other shade. . . . Not  
I, I think.   But the bleak objects insist:

they summon the stained chair, the socket
jammed with wrenched light, the gasp

of electricity that simmers in the wall’s
innocent plug.  Common objects.  Rope.

Wire.  Match.  Knife.   Waiting ready-to-
hand in every everyday American home. . . .

I too can insist on innocence.  That I not
be held accountable for skewed use.  Other

users heft these tools in sweaty, sand-stung
palms, considering how each might best

be turned to terror. . . . Now I’ve said it: how 
fear deforms object.  Subject.  How it twists

the blessing of stout wire tight about
the most delicate of human parts.  How

the honed blade edges into flesh, leaving
scarlet glyphs carved on body.  Beyond. 

How the chair comes to weep its litany
of piss and blood.  How the young girl

who crouched frightened in the belly
of the stripped cargo plane, how in her

 mottled regulation camouflage she steps
rom shadow into sun.  How she cuts

the next hood from a pattern frayed with use. 
How the stripped wire warms in her

recruited hands.  How before me she tests
the human leash lightly in her palm. . . .

I open mine.  The twisted rope burns.
 

First appeared in Bellingham Review;  nominated for a Pushcart

Copyright 2007, Judith Montgomery.
 All Rights Reserved by Author.