USA

bqwriter@earthlink.net 

The Waiting Room

I imagine it in the usual way.
A tunnel with
light at the end:
long shadows,
silhouettes.
The doorknob is missing
on one side, our side.
I heard it being jiggled
the other night
while we made love.

Someone
was trying to get through.
The door began
to give way—I saw
the light, the shadows, felt
the rush of warmth.
And then you pulled
out of me, like a fish
wrenched from the depths
of a dark blue lake.

While your seed spilled
on the bedclothes,
the door slammed shut again.
I heard small sounds in the
darkness on the other
side.

I placed my hands
against the door,
like a blindwoman
trying to understand
a face she can’t see,

Like a traveler,
waving goodbye.

The Grass Knows

The grass doesn’t care
as the wind blows over it,
as the rain beats it down.
It gleams and grows
as soon as sunlight
touches it again, submits
under the whirligig blades of the mower,
grows again, its real life
underground, tangled,
intertwined with tree roots,
earthworms, dead-ending
in rock, clay. Turning
in blind pursuit
of softer soil. The grass
doesn’t measure days or failures.
The grass loves the dark dirt
and the sunlight equally.
Receives the imprint of the body lying on it,
grows over and feeds upon the body lying
under it,
with equal passion.

The grass is a thousand times wiser
than I am, stuck in darkness,
hungering out of season for warmth,
for light.

The Path Itself

It all boils down to this:
We get older, we walk down one
or several paths of our choosing.
We brush away the gnats from childhood
that follow us everywhere; we always hope
to lose them.
We see the lake ahead of us:
as blue as the waters of the Great Barrier Reef.
We keep walking, but it never gets closer.
The path itself is hot and dusty,
sometimes overgrown. Every few years
we may lose our way. Sometimes
the lake seems like a straight shot
ahead of us. And then the leaves and branches
close in; or else night comes,
and the blue waters exist only
inside us as a dream.

If you are a gnat,
I will brush you away
without compunction.
If you have a machete

or a flawless sense of
direction, or if your spirit
shines with the awesome wattage
of the full moon,
then I want you beside me
on that path, walking toward
the place that each of us
can only reach alone.

Fava Beans

Carefully, with your thumbnail,
break open the long, green,
undulating pod. There they nestle, blanketed
by soft white vegetable stuff that could be
fur or thistledown, each bean
in its own perfectly shaped declivity,
five thumbprints in a row.

I was held as perfectly by my mother
as I grew from bean size to baby.
Her body knew how to cradle me
in a way her hands and heart
were too bloody and bitter
to remember.

Steam the fava beans. Serve them
with garlic and olive oil.
Cast out the shells.

© All Copyright, 2000, Barbara Quick.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.