USA

serenajfox@earthlink.net

Before the Rain Jasmine

When the binding stopped,
It should have been better.
Standing at the gate,
The jasmine are beginning to fade in the drizzle.
Soon the men will return
With empty packs and wide calluses.
During the typhoon months,
Our minds can stop detours.
We hug teacups across the table,
Wondering loosely how a year of roads
May have informed their feet.
For the first week of their return,
We are brusquely reacquainted
With a lean smell,
Bedded with leather and hinges,
Longed for through three remote seasons.
But their feet are accustomed to plodding,
And the relentless drumming invented violence.
Soon the children of last year's rains
Will be crying in corners,
While the pots fly.
When the roads heal,
We are relieved to see the men,
Pacing at the gate,
Loaded with wares and talismans.
When we stop waving the anxiety begins.
How many villages and how many women,
With a thousand dry, Spring names,
Will welcome them after all these months?
Will their children never stay out of the mud?
There is nothing worse than bound feet,
Unless they are wet and bound,
To the year since we touched once,
Stalled at the gate,
Before the rain jasmine.

Normandy, 1971

The sun peeled back, languorously as the tide,
Highlighting the house, its' nasal planks,
The self-assured bidet.
A clutch of bathers followed the tide,
Prying open prizes dug out of the sand,
Swallowing raw.

Mildly disgusted, seventeen,
Too embarrassed to speak French,
Because my accent would not be perfect,
I withdrew,
As pots of boiling water enthusiastically steamed clams.
I had given up shellfish two years earlier
For Kashrut.
Not everything alive on earth
Is meant for the mouth of Man
Or Woman.

The bidet, I reasoned, was for washing sand off
My feet.
To this day, I think, my hosts
Must take a grainy view of silent, dark
Jewesses.

Dixie Cups

Both a nightmare and a documentary:

    Left nipple rubs off, rubbery, big as a
    Dixie Cup. (Hurled over the fence, the big,
    black retriever in the back of the pick-up,
    bounds over the fence and devours it.)

Was a breezy change of subject started it:
    
    From "If they knew, they wouldn't want me
      to feel this way every day",

    (They being the people who love me, whom
    I love beyond insignificance, desolation,
    the minute-by-minute effort of finding meaning
    in the daily life of rituals, frequently so
    comforting, and, of late, become excruciating.)

    To breasts: "So, are they getting bigger?

    (Sharing is better than whining, right?")

Besides, all pregnant women are bewildered by their
Breasts: "The nipples get so hard, they're just like
              Dixie Cups."

    Laughter (mine), the surprise of it, gets me back
    on track-- 

     (The earpiece, the visceral coolness,
     the-way-things-are-supposed-to-be-happy-
     future. Telephones are easy. My Best
     Friend.)

I should desire to share.
I intend to. To
     
     suck back all those (knocked-it-over-by-
     mistake-quick!-wipe-it-up-did-you-hear-me?)
     indulgences.

The TRUTH is, I could stand to get away from all this
big belly,

     (the shards of consciousness and conversation
     lumping up my bed, the messy-quilted, voracious
     way I hurl day, warp night,)

And lie on telephones.

MUSKRAT AND 
THE LADY OF THE LAKE

Black lake
Triangle in
Lady of
The tangible veil
Insect and vapors
Nose-point
Ungraven image
Icon of the body
No different from
The breathing of the lake
Point of origin
Point of recession
Parting the veil
Lady of
No longer cold
No longer breathing
The lake is breathing
The lake is a word
Here I am
I, here
Here

                      Sonnet  J.

                Local anesthesia hurts like hell.
                The pledget to a plundered ventricle
                That spews, within an intact chest,
                An irony of plum and turquoise flight,
                Desire and denial caged, but not consoled,
                Love plucked from its pine and handed back,
                An injured Steller's jay that still can fly,
                But gags its need for fear of crying out.


                Well, "nothing happened" to me, too,
                Like a screaming, plumaged, hatchet-head of sky.
                Indifference is the antidote to love.
                When pride and plummet dictate, re-inject.
                This mountain air's so dry, tears blot themselves.
                You will never see me cry.

© All Copyright, Serena Fox.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.