Poetry Magazine, Susan Terris, September 2000

Poetry Magazine

Susan Terris

USA

FRANKIE: PANTOUM FOR 
A MEMBER OF THE WEDDING

It was the summer of fear.  A jazz sadness quivered her nerves.
She was an unjoined person.  A member of nothing.
The world, she said, is certainly a sudden place.
A green sick dream.  I wish I was somebody else except me.

She was an unjoined person.  A member of nothing.
Too tall for the arbor, she stared into a tangle of vines
A green sick dream. I wish I was somebody else except me.
Remembrances were sudden, each colored by its own season.

Too tall for the arbor, she stared into a tangle of vines
Sun-drunk bluejays screamed and murdered among themselves.
Remembrances were sudden, each colored by its own season.
But in the corner of her eye.  Love.  A thing not spoken.

Sun-drunk bluejays screamed and murdered among themselves.
The wedding was like a dream outside her power.
But in the corner of her eye.  Love.  A thing not spoken.
She was a wild girl.  Strange words flowered in her throat.

The wedding was like a dream outside her power.
In blue light, she felt as a person drowning.
She was a wild girl.  Strange words flowered in her throat.
She heard a chord then, a bell, an unfinished tune.

In blue light, she felt as a person drowning.
It was the summer of fear.  A jazz sadness quivered her nerves.
She heard a chord then, a bell, an unfinished tune.
The world, she said, is certainly a sudden place.

*Flyway

PARCHMENT PAPER MYSTERY

I did miss

Tucked in my volume of Renaissance poems,
found after 30 years, a sheet of folded parchment:
with a drawing I'd done of a crystal ball, a list
of my clothes to be altered,

Thy delight

and, spaced down the page, tiny obsessive print
in some other hand ‹ 5 lines of entreaty
and passion.  What do they mean?
Who penciled them onto my parchment?

I am not heard

Todd?  My old graduate school friend ‹
a city gardener with a pipe and Aran sweater?
I was married and a mother.  Were the words
meant for me?  Did I smile?  Did I frown?

This morn consent

Lines from Fulke Greville?  From Skelton
or Marvell?  Will I scan 1000 fine-print pages
to find the author?  Or was it
Todd, and where is he now?  Where am I?

To ease my heart

Does the person I was know the person I am?
What became of the alterations,
the crystal ball?  Who was I?  Did I hear?
Did I consent?  Did I offer ease?

*Haight Ashbury Literary Journal

Purple Echoes

After the break, the weatherman said,
he'd talk about purple echoes:
tornadoes careening through the south,
leveling cities and farms as well as
trailer parks.  When they struck,
cows floated Chagall-like on air
with cars, rooftops, baby beds.  Showers of
shattered glass rained from the sky.
Godzilla, an 8-foot lizard, escaped
from his cage in Virginia.  Nearby,
a monkey was eating stray cats.

A stillness in the eye.  Though not
transported to Oz, she was floating, too.
Weightless for a moment, buffeted
by purple echoes of her own:
severed poppies brushing her cheeks,
the meadow scented by wild azaleas
where she knelt on a white rock
by the stream, winged dryad lithe
and unsuspecting, pre-Raphaelite hair
bright on her back and shoulders.
Before the storm.  Before the end.

In the science museum, the tornado surges
and forms in its plexiglass cylinder,
clear image braiding upwards
against gray-black walls.  No lizards
or monkeys or showers of sharp glass.
No ache from the perfume of white azaleas.
Instead, something contained
and controllable.  Something halted
with the flick of a hand
or allowed to rise.  Beauty
but no echoes.  And no hint of purple.

*Sheila-Na-Gig

SERIAL KILLER

On New Year's Eve
when we were celebrating with
Bryan the tarot reader,
a magician who swallows needles,
and a graphologist who sleuths
for the FBI, Bryan said the death card
could be read two ways while
the graphologist was telling Olivia
she has the handwriting not of a prodigy
but of a serial killer.

If she's an assassin, she's subtle,
implying she¹s ranged flowers
fresh-clipped from her own yard,
when she's been shuttling vases
to Yoko's on Haight.  Or she will mention
business in Denver when she's skiing
Vail, will fictionalize or elide
the daughter who seeks asylum
in Shangri-La with a female Hindu guru.

Sometimes Olivia needles spouses, friends,
occupations like half-done knitting.
If she drops a stitch, she creates another
and proceeds, vowing to catch
the loose one before it ladders.
I am trapped, suffering as if my sister
cast a pall at some formal dinner
by fingering her crotch or picking her teeth.
But I feel anger, too, and impotence.
My tarot reading exposed the Ace of Swords;
and I'm afraid our prodigy,
may be laddering flesh
behind my ribs as she revenges that gift.

"Death," said Yoko to the man who wanted four lilies,
while Olivia and I, holding her vases, stood listening.
"In our culture, four means death."  The man
fled; but I, though bleeding, stood my ground.

*The Creative Woman