Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Jean Nordhaus has published her poetry in Prairie Schooner, Poetry, APR, and Gettysburg Review among other journals and in five collections including The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn from Milkweed Editions and Innocence from Ohio State University Press. Her most recent collection is Memos from the Broken World, published by Mayapple Press in January, 2016. She has coordinated the reading series at the Folger Shakespeare Library, was President of Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and, most recently, has served as Review Editor for Poet Lore. She spends her time in Washington, DC and Taos, New Mexico.

THE ROPE WAS INNOCENT 

and the ass, the two man-servants 

below on the plain, the ram 

the wood, the knife, 

the fire.  The pit, the rack, 

the bullwhip-- all the instruments 

were innocent: iron slept 

cold in the ground.  But love 

was not innocent. It was love 

who gave the order and love 

who obeyed, who carried and stacked 

the wood, offered wrists and 

ankles for the binding.  Love

prepared the fire and raised 

the knife, and it was love 

who lowered it.  Bless the animals, 

who live without mercy:  the ape 

with her beautiful breasts, 

nursing her young, the tethered

ram, and the ass grazing there 

in the lowlands -- little wooly ass 

who cannot pray, who hears only 

the braying of wind in the grass

and when death comes with its smell 

of lion, answers: Here am I,

and falls to its knees without wonder.

MY LIFE IN HIDING

My life in hiding

is not unlike your own.

Each morning, I clap a tame face

over my wild one, dress as you dress, 

train my gestures to resemble yours. 

Time touches me, 

brushing my skin.  Money 

slides through my hands.

Eggs siphon through my body,

sand through glass.

There are days when nothing happens, 

evenings when the winter sun

turns the sky to a city in flames.

Sometimes I speak to myself 

and a stranger answers.

When the child began to grow inside me, 

clambering from deeper into lighter shade, 

to crown from hiding 

                     

into hiding, I saw how camouflage 

contains disclosure, how each unveiling

draws us 

into deeper disguise.  And so I rise 

from caves of wrath to live

as one of you, a woman wrapped

in silence, bearing alive 

my buried name.

—from the book by the author, My Life in Hiding, Quarterly Review of Literature: Poetry Series X

A WIDOW READS ROBINSON CRUSOE

Islanded, he must have been surprised

as she to find herself alone

in a season when even the winged

seeds of the maple come paired.

She admires his ingenuity

and how, bereft, he never lacks for comfort

how from the wreckage of hope, he framed

a habitation, fortified it

with a palisade of still-green sticks

that rooted in a self-renewing wall.

Slowly, taking pains, he taught himself

to fire cooking pots of clay, grind flour

for bread. Inventing agriculture,

rediscovering animal husbandry

and tailoring, he built a life

not so unlike the life he’d left. Once

from a felled tree, he carved a boat

so big he couldn’t drag it to the water.

He started over, dug a smaller 

vessel he could launch—for time

was all he had—twenty-eight

years, long enough to marry

and to raise a child…

It’s night. The telephone lies still. 

Beside her looms the empty bed

unmapped and dangerous

as sleep. And so she pulls the afghan close 

settles her glasses on her nose and reads.