USA

Bypoetno1@aol.com

ORDINARY FACES

Masks have always been with us,
carved into pottery excavated in China,
transforming shamans, tribal dancers,
exaggerating love or hate in Greek tragedy.

But these men wore no masks
as they sat beside us in bars, on buses,
studied in our schools, lived next door,
slyly threading into the fabric of America.

How could we know the horror
beneath ordinary faces?

ICEMAN OF SIMILAUN

On September 19, 1991, hikers in the Tyrolean mountains discovered
the 5,000 year old body of a man protruding from a glacier.

If I could speak,
I might tell
how I lay on the mountain
for 50 centuries,

where silent snow
fills the empty hollows
of space;
and the wind,
never ceasing, sweeps
through the chasms of time;

where the diadem of night,
embedded with cold light,
encircles my resting place,
and fire in the sky
melts my tomb of ice
drop by infinitesimal drop;

where you have found me
preserved, clothed in animal hide,
packed with straw for warmth,
one arm clutching my bow,
my flint pouch, the other extended
against death.

If I could speak
I might ask:
Do you
honor the mountain,
respect the ice,
guard the flame?

Do you still sharpen
your weapons
for the kill?

I WAS ALICE FAYE

Dressed in mother’s pink rayon nightie,
lips smeared with poppy red,
I was Alice Faye
singing and dancing
in front of the tarnished mirror
in the house that was a white box
tied with green trim.

Outside the window, a curtain
of late-afternoon snow fell
before my make-shift stage.
Downstairs, by the dome-shaped Norge,
father warmed up with a shot of Four Roses
from the bottle he’d stashed behind the fridge.

I was one of many children who lived
in square houses on rectangular lots,
where fathers were returning
to work after years of idleness.
Some would be called to war;
some to double shifts
making the machines of war.

In Germany, brown-shirted boys
goose-stepped, saluted a man
with a mustache like my father’s.
Soldiers, wearing the twisted cross,
would march into Poland in the fall.

Pandora’s box was open,
but in Braddock, Pennsylvania
during the winter of 1939
I was Alice Faye.

First published in The Sandburg-Livesay Award Anthology, 2000

1988, SUMMER OF LOCUSTS
for a friend with AIDS
who died on August 26, 1988

It is the summer locusts swarm in Africa
and fires devour Yellowstone, the summer
dolphins die mysteriously, and waves
of syringes, vials of contaminated blood
hit the beaches. It is a summer of drought:
relentless sun, scorched wheat, stunted corn,
lean cattle huddled together in the shade.

For you, it is a summer of steel needles,
plastic tubes, bed pans, an oxygen tent.
You whisper, "No visitors," on the phone,
and I, a coward, stay away. I want to
remember you as Charlemagne in Pippin,
majestic in purple robe and crown,
your voice flooding the theater,
as powerful as rain.

First published in The Sandburg-Livesay Award Anthology, 2000

GOING HOME

This was my home for twenty years,
this house ablaze on evening news.
Flames buckle the red insulbrick,
reach into that basement kitchen
where I lit the oven on cold mornings,
counted nickels to buy a pound
of ground beef stretched into two meals.

In shock I watch as tarred roof
collapses into the bedroom
where I scraped away five layers
of wallpaper, patched plaster
before painting, where the children
and I huddled in one bed for warmth
when the pipes froze in '62.

There is nothing left of the house on Reeves
but charred wood, splintered glass.
Yet in dreams I return time after time
to sift the warm ash through my fingers.

First published in yawp, Pittsburgh, PA, 2000

© All Copyright, Anita Byerly.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.