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dkmartin@us.ibm.com

La Vie Intérieure

The Champs Elysées along the dining room wall
narrows to a point in the distance where
dark green figures stroll under parasols on a field of cream
as if perspective could persuade you
of something beyond this wall
other than the boiler room churning heat.

You are the boy, slicked back, seal-black hair,
in front of the new '52 Ford-framed forever on the Wurlitzer-
about whom they whisper they tried everything.
At night you lie tangled in sheets;
a car coughs, complains, turns over.
It will corrode with weather and rock salt in Wanamaker's parking lot
until the tow truck comes in spring.
The air conditioner burrs on through winter.
It is Christmas. The Yule log on TV
burns and is not consumed.

(The above was published in Hayden's Ferry Review in Summer 1990.)

Making Snowflakes

Every day for three days we sit on the floor making snowflakes,
my five-year-old who has never seen snow fall
and I, drifting back to pale blue shadows of other winters.
Now, folding a square of thin white paper
in half, then again to find a center, in threes to make a cone,
again in half-slashing to make six-sided shapes,
no two alike, I tell my son a snow story:
how my mother sent me on a mission
through a blizzard-I remember a blizzard-
to buy a pack of Kents at St. John's on Alida.
Coming back, I put two quarters' change in my mitten.

He looks at me. It would not be a story if nothing happened.
I tell him what he knows, how
on my return the mitten was empty, how
I promised to look for the coins at first thaw.
Now he lays his snowflake down.
He wants me to tell him I found them.
I can see the expectation in his eyes, shining,
waiting for me to pick them up.

Shooting Star

All year the boy has waited to see
shooting stars, the meteor showers called the Perseids.
Perseus slew Medusa, rescued Andromeda-
but was half immortal. The gods favored him,
and Zeus, his dad, starred him in death in the sky.

The boy thinks how great it would be
to see rock burn through dark billions,
a god's eye singling him out, glowing closer,
to crash at his feet. Wouldn't the cows be startled?
He'd keep a piece as proof. He savors
the impossible odds, a hard candy
hoarded in his tongue's curl.

But they hadn't counted, his mother and father,
on summer fog, low valley clouds, the lights of the city.
They've turned around, headed back toward the Bay,
the event snuffed without ignition like the trip to the Sierra
they can't manage to pay for this summer.

They would have been there now, standing astonished
in cow-pied lupine while the best ever fireworks
swept through the heavens. I saw one, I saw one!
...two, three, four-he'd count and lose track
as he loses track now, falling into the dark sameness
of sleep in the back seat, his chance in a billion
plummeting all the way through the galaxy
to where he would have stood in that meadow.

© All Copyright,  Diane Kirsten-Martin.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.