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Dorothy Barresi
USA
| Dorothy Barresi is the author of three books of
poetry, All of the Above (Beacon Press,1991), winner of the Barnard
College New Women Poets Prize, The Post-Rapture Diner (Univ. of
Pittsburgh Press,1996), winner of an American Book Award, and most
recently, Rouge Pulp (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).
Her poems and essay-reviews have been widely published in literary
journals including Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, Harvard
Review, Kenyon Review, Parnassus, POETRY, Ploughshares, Virginia
Quarterly Review, Triquarterly and Southern Review. In
addition to the American Book Award, Barresi has won two Pushcart
Prizes, a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
Emily Clark Balch Prize, and the Grand Prize in the Los Angeles Poetry
Festival’s Fin de Millennium poetry competition. She has served often
as a judge for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry.
She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at California
State University, Northridge, and she lives in the San Fernando Valley
with her husband, Phil Matero, and sons Andrew and Dante. |
Ephibephobia
Now it makes sense
to hate the young.
To fear them
as we fear the green hearth
of an open grave.
Under our ribs
we grew them,
spark and bright spoke.
We lived to love—
in mostly custodial ways—
the scald of their first beauty:
the underlife,
the milk stem,
the tingling, sucking babies who needed and needed us.
We licked the caul
of their birth hoods
back, then kissed
their yeasty heads
(though their teeth soon looked
a trifle sharp).
Oh, we could eat them up!
But the girl with the summer body, summer skin,
turning cartwheels on the lawn
at fifteen
wants to murder us, it turns out.
She’d do it with her own hands
and enjoy it.
She won’t have to.
The young are God’s gun.
Our DNA, re-
mastered in a cool gel matrix
wearing a little slip of a sundress, who coos
to the skateboarder
flipping us the finger.
At forty,
we meet ourselves coming and going.
It forms no small part of the plan
that as we thicken
toward middle age,
dragging our great, upholstered bellies
like ziggurats of commerce
to the goblin market
of our lumbering importance,
the young grow swift as vitamins,
the lilt of malice
in each step.
Lean as gall, wolfish, whistling,
they stand on the front porch calling:
Grandmother, Grandfather, let me in.
I’ve brought desert!
while we pile chairs
against the door
and miss our nap,
and fiddle with the thermostat.
--This poem first appeared in Pool.
Security
LAX, November, 2001
Each checkpoint
was different.
At one we were asked
to recite
the Lord’s Prayer.
At another,
to sip from the wheezing guard’s
cold coffee mug.
Are you a wolf?
Have you ever been a wolf?
Pancakes were fried
in a gentleman’s hat
who wished only to visit his mother
in flat Cincinnati.
A rooster was decapitated
and his head thereafter
reaffixed;
though we knew not how,
it felt like love
to be considered
so carefully.
The woman behind me
began to cry—
was there a little leak in her fate?
Sqeaking shoes
must be x-rayed
Because we are more and more ourselves
the longer we wait
in any line.
Capable of anything.
It was the world and the next day.
It was the apprehension of things unseen:
would, for example,
the sky accept
our names today?
The crossed blue circuitry
of the sky?
A pipe-and-curtain stanchion
was erected around a toddler
who made a verbal error.
Outside, whipped cream was being pumped
along the runways—
“emergency foam,”
we supposed,
though no one ever landed
or took off.
A stewardess with a nosebleed
ran past,
chased by her suitcase.
--This poem first appeared in Hunger Mountain.
Carrying God
Tiny, but the density!
Like Texas
molten and poured
into an old European candy mold
of an acorn
you must carry on your shoulder whilst
simultaneously
delivering the mail’s
crushing debts and seed catalogues
to both sides of every street in your
planned community
bright as Death Valley now, tumble-weeded, thirsty, and,
because God is detail-oriented,
twice on Sundays.
Heaven
A scavenger hunt, evidently,
where the looking is for God.
The foyer is pave.
Inlaid with jet beads and odd red etceteras
waving from walls that now
by redemption’s overhead light you see
(how long have you been dead?
the waiting room was jammed, and hot)
to be pincers, antennae, the multiple
mouthparts and slick eye-globes of every bug
you’ve ever crushed
since you first fell toddering into your mother’s arms.
(She thought she’d feel more,
seeing that.
Nevermind).
Heaven is a very confusing reunion.
Every cockroach-butterfly, every June bug that jumbled
at the mosquito screen
wants to touch you with a thorax
no bigger than a burst comma
and a wing
ground to powder on the sidewalk in the Summer of Dampness
when Spike and everyone had fleas.
We are all gods to what we kill.
Which explains why this place feels more
like a television star’s
walk-in closet than any heaven
you’ve imagined.
But what exactly is your role?
Should you work this hurt hall
like a politician
shaking hands with whatever
your constituency extends,
greased from these walls?
Is this an apology or an altar call?
A nonesuch healing?
I’m no Buddhist, you cry—
how could I have known Anyone cared?
Now filament feelers
graze you gently as Indian clubs. You are clobbered,
one eyelash at a time, famous, loved—you,
who bruised so easily on earth,
stagger like Marlon Brando at the end of Waterfront
and your God (pro-union, apparently, but dodgy)
must be Lee J. Cobb, grinning somewhere off screen.
There’s too many of them, you groan;
this will take forever.
Now you’re talking,
a lint-lithe moth weeps singing in your ear.
Now you’re talking.
Winter Nap
A little theft from night’s locked box?
Dilation of a gray afternoon
admits bedlight and the giving over.
Plowlight, pillow light,
barbiturate snow--
a light dusting is delicious. And if so,
may I be a birch clearing for an hour? A gingerbread girl,
or am I a sheep
in wolf’s clothing again,
stumbling in ridiculous, oversized fur?
Joseph Cotton narrates my long winters.
His voice is a précis of wind
bent back through hundred-year pines to touch the earth.
Syrup boils on the stove of that voice.
Admit you are lost.
Admit that what you have found
you have found
because you are lost.
Fair enough. Now, which bed is mine?
In every cottage, in every forest of ruined confection
there are at least three, one for worry,
one for regret, one for terror, and each
blanket is turned back, and each
headboard is identically carved
with a wheatshock
graced at the narrow
schoolgirl waist by a ribbon.
Who am I
that I cannot forget myself for an hour?
Sleep is what it makes of me.
I hang my mistakes on the chair to dry.
Every pillow has a cooler side:
Turn me. No, turn me. Did I say
An hour?
Three. I sleep so deeply
the furnace goes out. Sucked wordless.
A lack of oxygen, I suppose.
When I wake I am a crone in an ice cave and I know without looking
that my fingernails
have yellowed and curled. A bloodied half-mouse by the door.
But where is the birdsong
trapped in its begging cup?
The hourglass, the bones of the soldier I tricked on the road, the
children
locked in their sugar cages? Too late--
I meant to have more children.
That is what worries me tonight, true night now, and the frost
leaves no peekhole through my window
though I feel the whole world
is filling with snow,
meadow to graveyard, graveyard to road.
First crumbs, then
every path obscured.
All night I am sleepless as a new moon
eating, eating her way home.
© All Copyright, Dorothy Barresi.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By
Permission.
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