IN THE MUSIC ROOM WITH FREDA.....Joanna Ezekiel

PUTTING THE BOOKS AWAY................George Moore

LATE IN THE SEASON...........................George Moore

AMPHORA..............................................Judith Skillman

IN THE MUSIC ROOM WITH FREDA

Joanna Ezekiel

Lunchtimes, Freda played the piano

in the music room. We were not

supposed to be there, hidden

at the top of the school, far from the clatter

and scrape of the dining hall. Freda played

the pieces she’d learnt for her grade exams,

sometimes a duet with Rose. But we forgot

to be watchful. One day Mrs Harrold opened

the door, shouted Freda - Freda - Freda -

over the loud chords. After that,

we only went back for lessons. And now

I wish for a music room of my own,

light, airy, a sloping roof, a wide window,

panels of pine on the walls, and a piano,

upright as a promise, in the corner.

PUTTING THE BOOKS AWAY 

George Moore

Like seeing pictures of old lovers,

this putting the books way, finding each

its space in the new shelves, new life,

a new age for me, new names in the house.

New orders of the old alphabets.  The old

names now, classic and refined, where

once they were the renegades.

The dust and water have taken their toll. 

But words do not warp with time, they are

part of this mythic origin of the other self,

stirred into fire by the first poet’s words.

The names are familiar, but the day

I met them seems obscure. 

There’s Merwin and Ashbery, beyond

the power of their youth, there’s Hine

and Everson, Spicer, Logan, and Dorn.

Names that do not stop at the door and ask

if they might enter, they grab the brain

like fire in the weeds around the ranch.

A fire that eats the soles of my shoes

and makes my knees bend to change.

I am simply putting the books away,

sliding them into a new time and space,

new dust, new distances, the old fires

touching as I touch the binding of each,

but nothing then can really change

what the poems still say.

LATE IN THE SEASON

George Moore

The book of this time gets long,

limbs weighed down, hangdog pages

iced with intelligence.  Unable to move

it hollers out from underneath an avalanche

of now.  At later dates the words spring.

They make brown print green tinged

at times like these, imagining beyond

the pulp edge.  The trees themselves

seem weightless.  The Navajo say

the seed survives into these dead

seeming months, housed in the husk

is the real start of things.  Not the silly

profusion of everything at once.  Together

hunkered down to bear the freeze like

the animals we are, to know sleep through

the mind’s coldest season, reading again

in dull pages that repeat themselves,

we are at our best.  As after the fires die

and we wake near the coals, and the novelty

seems to end, until the book turned down

spills out its river into the coming ones. 

AMPHORA

Judith Skillman

To be statuesque,
to bear the heady essence
of camphor oil,
or oil pressed from olives.
 
Not to be dropped
or used by fancy.
To be the bearer
and the mourner at once.
 
To bequeath
all that is not inscribed
in marble, the everyday
travail of citizens
 
sickened by the laundry
of their former selves,
those who were carefree
and shared bounty
 
in a house full
of adult laughter.
To bear what can’t
be borne any longer

and rise under the strain

of patience—hands
as handles grasping the hysterical
one, the innocent
 
ensnared by her own body.
Unlimbering the grasp
of an infant who cannot let go 
the spoon, the autistic one
 
tethered to home by thought,
the adult woman ill 
with an illness deemed chronic,
her face become porcelain
 
as the visage of sun and moon.
To hold these qualities
in opposition and carry
them all lightly, without missing

a single step in the chain
of generations stretching
from Egypt to Greece to Rome
to Carthage to Spain.
 
After a dinner of skewered hens, 
to hop-scotch Polynesian
islands, where exotic birds
wear their luxurious ruffles

to a breakfast of worms
proffered from the earth by rains.
Where whomever eats the eater
goes far beyond a repast of grubs,

continues toward the primitive feast 
of fat, muscle, gristle, tendon,
bone. To peer down
into a tone-deaf odalisque
 
and see how altruism 
on behalf of the one
equals sacrifice of the many, 
if only for the sake of waging war.