Ed Foster poet
  • Poetry
    • The Marriage of True Minds
    • Saturn
    • The Way We Live Now
    • The Fractal Lie
    • There Are No Accidents
    • Portia's Complaint
    • A Lean and Hungry Look
    • Angelic Concerns for the Rosy Swan, A Bar
    • After the Fact
  • Prose
    • Gnostic Poetics
    • William Bronk
    • The New England Poet
    • Gluttony
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Portia’s Complaint

 

I.

Looking through the window

at the boys walking home,

she magically could call the daylight

back, remembered climes and sound.

It’s winter now. (I know her mind.)

Feel this: the icicles that will not

melt. Remember then this time.

Lay your fingers on her chair. She

cannot age. In this, she cannot be.

That icicle divides the boys

from that old time when some

believed she had the right to rule.

Try to touch her through the icy glass.

Remember time. Break in and

run your fingers in her frost.

One winter’s day, you had a

friend, not her (her role was then

to teach). You ask for warmth.

Go back: decide. Hear the stories

made for ears that now

no longer hear.

 

II.

Think only sound. Don’t look outside

the frost or glass today. Only hear.

In her snow, the children have their day.

You would not hurt. They freeze,

made into ice. Hear their icy fingers

crack. Close your eyes, imagining

their heads now make the sound of glass.

Remember time. Hear them shout, and let

that part be in your mind. The dogs can’t

bark, and icicles reclaim the world.

The mothers search and cannot find.

The fathers search and cannot find.

The family is a thing we all forget.

And then we know the word

because of sound. We do not see.

The children cannot slide along

the snow. Listen to the fingers

crack. The cracking only

says you can.

 

III.

I cannot reason what she wants.

As if to hear it said would make it care.

We grant that she is clever and denotes

herself as capable and kind. We recall

her sitting in a lounge chair late in June,

waiting for the sound. She was a fascination

to her child. Her husband liked her, too.

Now she feels herself along, waiting

for the time. But what will matter if

it’s not the thing she was?

Smiles never tell you what you need

to know. We come to her because of

ease, the way our shoulders languish

next to hers. Since people didn’t seem

to come again, or want to come,

she manufactured how she felt, with toys.

 

IV.

This one thought clothes make the man.

Just one day the mirror showed

him what he was and liked. Looking out

the window all he saw was overcast.

He watched the animals outside his bedroom.

In his mind, he ran across the snow

like squirrels and cats he saw.

Squirrels, he knew, can tell what’s

deeply underneath the snow.

Just one day he saw him, too, the way he was.

The sky was overcast. No one saw,

guessing what he saw. He saw the dark, black

snow, but in his mind, he looked into the mirror

and found the parts to hide.

Thus the world was right:

clothes really make the man.

 

V.

Trying to be solemn, to elevate the

self into a Christian mind,

where each one counts, and,

knowing just the same, "respects"

the selves of others. What a

dream! How to be a sparrow in the

snow! — the snow as white as every

church he’d ever known. Conflict over all:

Armageddon as an angry name. How good

it might have been to be the goodly man,

the father of us all.

How good it might have been to be

the one his child might want.

Or so he saw.

As for the child himself,

he’s doing fine.

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