USA

sdolin@earthlink.net

MISTAKE

Mistakes are what you leave out
for other people to put away.

They are the picture painted out of
the picture which is nonsense
because already I can picture them.

Mistakes are the only thing you can trust
to go wrong and that's how
they right themselves no matter how
much you knock them over.

From the outside it might be a blemish
or stumble; inside it's the scar
of who you are.

The point of interest in any story
is where it goes off the tracks.

That's how we keep track of time
or time keeps track of us.

If it all came out right the first time
I'd be an automatic writer
and I'm not.

But this is coming out all right, isn't it?

"Mistakes" was the title poem in the chapbook Mistakes (Poetry New York Pamphlet Series, Vol. 24, 1999) and is forthcoming in her new book Serious Pink (2003)

OCEAN PARK NO. 64
after Buson

Look closely at the under--drawing
stallion you rode off in a blur           underwater

--corralled by luminous white-washed blue
fencing of the earliest dawn sky: The short night.

near the pillow
a screen turning silver

Memory is a fever--trapeze of lines resolving into images
          underpainted by association.

What if he simply tore down the building and left the scaffolding--

"Ocean Park No. 64 appeared in the chapbook Mistakes (Poetry New York Pamphlet Series, Vol. 24, 1999) and is forthcoming in her new book Serious Pink (2003).

BLACK PAINTING #4: BULLFIGHT

It could have been a bullfight
who knows which way we were running
it came after us

(the blurry clown could not hold
anyone's attention)

the horse         ridden in        the picador
was gored--who?
yes       arched his back
wasn't it what we all desired

passional thrust
when the bull pierces
your thigh
but what is a nun doing on horseback?

"Black Painting #4: Bullfight" appeared in The Journal and is forthcoming in her new book Serious Pink (2003)

DAY DREAMS

Let spectacled be speckled
and strips become tipples of stripes.

A wavery view loves a vapory hue,
an undulant curve, a redolent verve.

A donging clock polkadots time,
does a stippled back chime?

At center is an ocean obscured by raging light

Serious pink seems to lean on everything
in spite of trivial blue candy canes.
curtain folds on a proscenium stage.

It all comes down to land scaping a backdrop
for other protagonal forms (and the surround not always round)

And what you think they're doing, anyway,
humping or huddled there together on that beach
of light and black almost never out of reach.

"Day Dreams" appeared in American Letters & Commentary and is forthcoming in her new book Serious Pink (2003)

THE SEAGULL

The clipper ship in the bottle
the goose in the goose-neck bottle
the baby floating head down batlike in my belly
the seagull caged beneath the garbage pail
as I stand on upper Broadway peering through
the crowds at the busstop peering through the mesh
at the seagull.

Larger than the random beach scavenger
tall as a two-year-old and broader.
his feathers are filthy.he stands nonplussed
in his makeshift metal cage in front of the bank.
Not a peep out of him while all the human
crows flock and descend: even seven policemen
from at least three different vehicles.one with

a box to transport him to a vet or humane
society.and a fire crew. He can't fly
and somehow landed on Broadway was hopping
all over the streets, the traffic island
until two brave women caught him
now themselves on video recounting
how they captured him beneath the steel pail where

he gazes out into all the meanings we make
of him, some of us wondering how
a seagull got on Broadway forgetting
the ocean a few miles south the Hudson
two blocks west. The anomaly of things
caught inside things or thoughts:
how a soul gets caught in a body

and if it's true as the Greeks said,
The body is the candle wax, the soul
gives it shape; we burn it up until neither
remains. But how does the shape arise
how will this bump in my side emerge in
days as a foot attached to a body
which has a soul and what fire

will light it on its way so my passageway the
size of a thick finger will open and let a head
then a shoulder then another pass through? How
does the night open and the milky streaks
of light pour through.the fist of sleep loosened
so consciousness lying on its pillow wakens and
stretches into restlessness?

The seagull left upper Broadway in a police truck;
most of the spectators left on the buses
that stopped one by one. Things inside of things,
even the dead flickering in the heart (How do
we put them there how do they get there?)
and with a name called out in the dark they
break free of rib and muscle and fly they
soar they remain inside the cage of memory

fly back willingly.
But the clipper ship the goose the baby the seagull

"The Seagull" appeared as a limited-edition letterpress book published by The Center for Book Arts (2001) and is forthcoming in her new book Realm of the Possible (2004)

REALM OF THE POSSIBLE

Now that he had reached the age of forty, he would never become a pianist or learn Japanese, he was sure of it. . . . Perhaps all things had been possible but they were no longer..Cees Nooteboom

We climb to Villa Jovis
in a sweat
no longer in our first marriage
but thriving into this present
that sweeps us up to gape
closed-mouthed at the sea, at rocks jutting up,
dotted with cypresses and pines.

We've come to the summit
to poke among bricks and imagine
an aging emperor carried uphill
past olive trees and pomegranates, lemons
and tomatoes, sprays of agave and oleander
so he might watch the room-sized cisterns being refilled
before he soaked in a sea-water bath.

Maybe all things are no longer possible
yet late, past forty, you learned Greek
well enough to read yesterday of the origin
of men and women.those four-footed, four-handed,
two-headed beasts, split apart so love could become
the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.

At forty, I can say at least I am
a cognoscente of the sea:
knowing how to immerse myself
without regrets or direction
letting the currents trundle me
to a cove where small black fish sway
and then dip while feeding.

Today I finally swam into the grotto
with its vaulted ceiling, blue midnight
waters and echoing slap, all the while
companioned by my fear.

Now on a hillside in the dusk
as the sea lifts and pastels into sky
and the crickets' percussive buzz
is a twilight song of self

I wonder what is still possible
when you dub me your "current wife,"
meaning only to place us in the midst
of the momentary.

I'm going to slip these words into the current
among orange-striped powder-blue fish
down into an underwater cove
like Salvia, who dug up a jug of Tiberius's
wine, mixed it into his barrels
so all his wine would be related.

So my being late in finding you
and enjoying where I am
I wed and toss to these waters, these ancient
cicadas, these rocks waist deep in the sea.

"Realm of the Possible" appeared in Barrow Street and is the title poem in her forthcoming collection (2004)

IF MY MOTHER

were not an emaciated bird
who stands shorn of everything
but her pocketbook
she dangles--empty
save for her lipstick and pounds of change??
the sac worn outside
like the one in which I curled, slept, sucked
my thumb--if there weren't so little left of her
barely keeping herself erect--how could she
ever keep anyone--herself--warm again -

if my mother were not a flamingo that we leave in
the hospital lobby--half-terrified
that her bed--so close to the other patients'
coats--might threaten her--my mother,
who has fought her visions for 45 years
and received no medal--
watched her husband wrench away out of disgust
and grief--if her newest children were not wires
she sees everywhere--sparks
of her life escaping to endanger her . . .

then I could not be brave--
become like
my sister--unshaken who holds me in
the bathroom of some forsaken diner
in New Jersey--after my mother has
cursed the meal, everything, even the rice pudding: slop,
real slop--and we have to laugh
at how right she is--
as she gets up
and hobbles out of the diner
to the parking lot--
not knowing where we are taking her
wounded by all the people who
might kill her

except for me and my sister
who glide her
to the hospital emergency
just let me put on my lipstick
refusing my compact mirror--an expert
against a parked car's reflecting glass--she
takes up the pink stick and traces--her better
lips--the ones she will purse and hold and
question me with
when she goes to sign herself in--
waiting for me to nod, yes, it's okay, you can sign
no one will keep you here forever--no one will
shock you again no wires--no one
will do that to you again.

"If My Mother" originally appeared in POETRY
and was published in her first collection HEART WORK (1995).

© All Copyright, Sharon Dolin.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.