Poetry Magazine, Featured Poet: Claire Keyes, March 2002

Poetry Magazine

Claire Keyes

USA

Claire Keyes lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts and has received a grant in poetry from the Massachusetts Council of the Arts as well as a Wurlitzer Fellowship in poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and she has published literary criticism including a study of Adrienne Rich's poetry called The Aesthetics of Power. She is Professor Emerita at Salem State College. Her manuscript, Rising and Falling, won the 1999 Foothills Poetry Chapbook Competition.

DANCING WITH WALLACE STEVENS

We drive north out of torrential rains
and into mountain clarity, the cloud cover

breaking up and then the full moon smiling
like a kind host over the cabin. Dawn brings

the flutey vitality of the veery and chickadee.
I slumber through their calls and dream

I go dancing with Wallace Stevens. He swoops
through the air, holding me in his arms: here, there.

We are leaves floating from slim, white branches.
He's that light on his feet. I know who he is

from the elegant stripes of his shirt and the mole
on his cheek. He wraps camellias around my wrist.

I am Rita Hayworth with my red, red hair
and a waist that slenders to his hand.

He nibbles my ear and tells me I am his darling,
for there is music in my eyes and in the rhythm

of my skirt. When I wake up, you're beside me,
your sleep silent. He's gone

and the trees mourn. I am bound by their sound,
having only his words today as I listen to the wind

swelling over the far side of the field. It lapses
and builds again like waves rushing to shore,

but even more free, I tell you, because bodiless.
Some things we know only by their effects.

from Zone 3

STRANGER IN FATIGUES

Thinking about pedophiles I grow lonesome
for the woods, the tender appeal
of the hermit thrush. The pederast
was caught in New Hampshire, the child's
finger pointed at the man in black leather,
grey hair and boots. When the sun makes it
over the trees, the birches stand out, their
pocked bark. Now everyone knows
his little tricks: Come to the carnival,
little one. Only there is no carousel
just fun and games with a creepy old guy.
The scrub grows lush this time of year,
raspberry bushes at every turn.
Someone was stealing our berries.
We imagined the new neighbors but never
the frisky black bear, lifting its snout,
inhaling the blush of red fruit before
stripping the bushes. When I was a child,
I was fragile inside despite legs like
an elegant colt. The stranger in fatigues
noticed. Is it easy to violate children?
Those Concord kids ran away and told
their parents who told the police who found
the man who swears he's innocent, a lover
of Keats and Kerouac. He teaches English
at some exclusive school and detests everyone,
the paper says, except children.

from the eleventh muse

BRIDGE TO SAVANNAH

Because the bridge we cross
driving south to Savannah
rises so high into great sweeps
of silver-looking steel--
and because I can see only the crest
and not the shore beyond,
I grip the wheel a little tighter,
touching a fear that surfaces
only in dreams: it's night
and I'm driving onto a bridge
into a strange city. Four lanes
compress into one, my car wedged
between trucks. My hands sweat,
the truck behind thundering so close
it could drive me over the edge.

It's madness to follow
a red dragon tail of lights
speeding towards a distance
that means pure terror
and I've forgotten
what others seem to know:
where they are,
where they want to be.

But I'm not asleep now
and can tell you about the bridge
tormenting the dreamer.
It's not the same as this bridge:
a luminous and graceful arc
of strength married to beauty
even as it recedes
in the rear-view mirror,
slipping lower and lower
down under the sky, connecting
near shore and far.

from the Onset Review

BROTHERLY LOVE

My brother sees me once
after months, then crowds my phone,
his protests of love thick in my ears:
Your face is full, says he.
There's something about your fullness.
He probes my health, my weight
as if I possessed a secret he might use
to shame his enemy. And I resist
though his emotion takes me back
over the miles and over the years
when he summoned me to swing high
onto his shoulders. To be healthy
is to be beautiful, says he
and his voice soft in my ear:
I love you.

He gets little in return, only
an astonished Oh! and my breath
expelled like a long-held wish.
Death must have been pinching him
even then--that tightness near his heart
propelling him to touch me.
And he did, through the distance
we had coolly measured off.
He had a boon to give and he gave it,
allowing me to feel his love as more
generous than a pair of tall shoulders
that meant brother, that giddy height
making me imagine his long arms
said everything about him
I'd need to know.

from Kimera

IO'S REVENGE

All she did was refuse sex
with the king of the gods
and look what happened: yoked to him
for eternity, a piddling moon
to his magnificent planet.

On earth, she had it worse,
the god's wife transforming her into a cow,
a cloud of flies ordered to nip at her cheeks,
flanks, heels. For recompense, Jupiter
gave her death and the sea nestling Greece
and its islands, Ionian waves
slapping the shores of Asia Minor.

I train my scope millions of miles away
to see tiny dots dance into focus,
then an impotent flash.
Let him have it, I chortle
as this summer's comets bombard Jupiter,
showers I liken to Io's revenge
even as they implode in the planet's sizzle.

Science becomes amiable
consort for myth and language,
my tongue finding a home
in a universe so amazing and lethal
I have to belong here.

from Spoon River Poetry Review