Poetry: Molly Sackler

Poetry:

Molly Sackler

PERSPECTIVE

From my roof I see the end of this island,
the blur between planet and pale air.
I rest on my white dinosaur,
glaring her geometric dignity for a fifth century.
Rising deliberate out of olive trees,
she presides in a cocoon of hills.
Old as bones.
My life is a phase she endures,
layer of whitewash crumbling in the wind.

But in today's steaming, slow blast
I too am ancient --
Greek statue with cracked feet and flailing hair.
Bougainvillea dances the wall, sweeps my toes crested with salt.
I suck my wrist.
My body is a sea-fruit,
skin darker where I nursed,
teethmarks in my pulp.

A beetle is imposing --
diminutive bowler hat perched on the pillar chimney.
I flinch at impending insects, like a
child
which I could be
now-here
I -- All -- the same now --
salty, damp newborn on this chalky shoulder
that seems to have always been there.  Still.
Unless I watch the far-away sailboat,
a triangle tracing the horizon
past landmarks of this jagged home,
hand of the clock reminding me.







"Tonight we put on the wedding shoes"

Tonight we put on the wedding shoes.
More serious than hats
are what we walk on,
Taking us from the safety of houses
on journeys, errands, fool's errands,
quests, and pilgrimages.
But these are not the shoes of a missionary.
Even though to wear them,
in a parody of selflessness,
I must lift myself high above the trivia of ease.
Like a courtier, I effervesce on hobbled toes.

These are the shoes I wear to dance for my beloved.

Yours match you more convincingly.
But they are props as well.
Laced, you are husband,
Steady and polished at my newly erected side.

For a moment the course of night
and of marriage
seems staid and expected.
We fill our house with music.
It blossoms in our halls and simmers in our hips.
Dancing with you alone in our loud house is rapture.

The formal decor of love can never hide this nakedness.






BATHERS

Here is a feast of physiology!
Under a throbbing July sky
a hundred or so
bare bodies sweat.
Forms concave to bursting
grind their niches in supple sand.
Waves-
interrupted by breasts and backs.
An occasional windsurfer
with a seared dingle-dangle
prompts sympathetic winces.
A bulldog chases a stick,
hurdling buttocks and bellies
as scattering sand
elicits "shit"s
in half a dozen languages.
A little blond boy,
with a crewcut and a man's face,
pees on his brother's sandcastle
"to make a moat."
His grandmother
with her skirted tank suit
about her waist
pats cocoanut oil
on enormous, reddening dugs
and smiles lovingly.
The smallest brother cries
against her thigh.
She tugs on her purple bathing cap,
hoists him to her hip,
and strides into the limp surf.
Jolly but determined,
she ploughs fluourescent
through slick bathers
like a spoon through steaming stew.







THREE WOMEN

Three women,
the Suicide,
the Suicide-Murderer,
and the Victim,
turned their grey eyes
to waves the colour of empty veins,
twisting around the shore,
under the raft.

The Suicide dropped from the tower
into an imperceptible slot between the ripples
that she called "home."
The sea never paused --
no splash betrayed her.
This was Dido,
embracing death for dead love.
Or Antigone,
dying for deathless honour.
A myth, or a human dot suddenly gone,
the tower vacant and shocking.

The Suicide-Murderer flashes her gaping mouth at the Victim
like a beacon.
Frantically she climbs the tower,
panic-cat bristling up a tree.
The Victim screams to stop this
distant unknown girl with the eyes of her own family
though she is not familiar.
She sends her husband,
a neutral tourist
with binoculars and breathmints,
for help,
and jitters on the trembling raft,
pulling anxious, canvas toes
from the sea's insidious seep.

In an agony,
the Victim clenches her crinkled, bluing thighs
as the young Suicide-Murderer, inspired,
whirls from the top,
disappearing with a wet clatter.

The middle-aged woman, desperate
for herself now,
spins in the middle of the raft,
searching the barren water.
No bodies, no boats.
The only sound is the raft lurching against its rope.

A fierce hand erupts --
as if to claim King Arthur's sword,
grabs her ankle.
The girl will take her,
she will not die alone,
she will leave no witnesses.








POST SCRIPT

We go to church at twilight
to find you.
White walls and careful gardens
define and protect "El Camino del Silencio"
"El Calle de la Paz";
the neighborhood of the dead.

The gravestone declares you.
It marks the end of your body,
your feet --
your slot in the world.
It stands indelible;
a terracotta period on the last sentence
of the story of you.

These last words name you --
Writer.
These last words
not written by you.
We hope they satisfy you.
If not, the sea slurs comfort
as it continues beneath your hill.

Floating in its salty, indigo cradle
I look up
to the church's bleached dome
and further, to the sky,
that perpetual wave overhead.
The words you left
lie flat on a page
in a closed book.
We nod politely,
but pass each other's words
like stale hors d'ouevres.
I am pregnant
with words to to say to you.
They fester,
render me bloated, meaningless.

Mute, I succumb
to the undulating insistence of the current.
My face turns, sucked
into its soft surge,
with open eyes, open mouth.
I am rolled by blue-invisible
voluptuous tongue,
giving into it my voice,
my words in a screaming silver bubble.
It rises, quivering, serene,
to burst silent at your shore
in incoherent onslaught of foam.