Poetry Magazine, Susan Terris, March 2002

Poetry Magazine

Susan Terris

USA

Website: members.aol.com/sdt11

From The Wing Bone Of A Crane

Anemophiles, lovers of wind, believe time
is infinite, and the past has no claim,

but in China there's a 9,000 year old flute
carved from the wing bone of a crane.

Once, at Jiahu in the Yellow River Valley,
flood and ebb, rice ribboned green, and crane

on one leg in the shallows, his target-red eye
scanning fish. A rock flies. Feathered death.

O solemn bone, white and hollow and smooth.
Seven chiselled holes, a delicate windy sound,

millennium after millennium lost
only to be unearthed, brown and mottled,

trilled again by other lips and fingers.
Same flute. Different song.

The human brain weighs little and is lightly
grooved, yet it knows when a flute is a flute.

Anemophiles might embrace this bone.
Or say it does not, cannot possibly exist.

"Notre Dame Review"

The Lie Of The Ordinary Life

A muster of white peacocks preens
by the inverted lake pooling the ceiling.
The peacocks are mute.

He is not quite mute. An inattention.
Letters answered in such haste, he fails
to answer. Words overlaid,
commas sliding out of line — a riff
of lost eyelashes punctuating nothing.

In this hungry place, there is a bed and a sign
noting the danger of temporary tattoos.

"I think," he tells her when they've fed one another
raspberries and champagne grapes,
"you may find me too ordinary."

An ivory plume breezes down, not yet knifed
into pen or dipped into black-squid ink.

His gift to her: a silver arrow lancing
an amber heart. And, of course,
the dense sweetness of his soap, his skin
on the pewter of her silky burn-out gown.
Her gift to him: a magic stone left behind.

Then the peacocks screech.
Gravity arrested, the plume begins to fall up
toward the mirage. Lake. Sky. A void.

"Ploughshares"

All poems here are in Susan Terris' new collection of poetry FIRE IS FAVORABLE TO THE DREAMER which will be published by Cedar Hill Publications in 2002