Susan Terris: Four Poems
BALACHINE
BALLERINA | BONES | MERMAIDS
| WICCAN SUMMER
Susan
Terris lives in San Francisco where she is a writer and a
teacher of writing. Her most recent books are CURVED SPACE
(La Jolla Poets Press, 1998) and NELL'S QUILT (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1996). In 1999, she will have two new poetry
books published: EYE OF THE HOLOCAUST (Arctos Press)
and ANGELS OF BATAAN (Pudding House Publications).
Her many journal publications include The Antioch Review, The
Midwest Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Southern California
Anthology, Nimrod, and The Southern Poetry Review.
On-line she has had work in Recursive Angel, The Blue Penny
Quarterly, In Vivo, Switched-on Gutenberg, Kudzu, Conspire, Zuzu's
Petals, Zero City.
BALACHINE
BALLERINA
We
were on a bare stage somewhere,
hot
under blue gels, and Balanchine wanted
to
make sure I was strong.
Instead
of admitting ankle-sprain,
I
retied ribbons on my practice shoes
and
stretched hamstrings at the barre.
Balanchine
told me to do a plié; then
pressing
his hand in the small of my back,
another.
No arch, he said, flatten it.
Not
nineteen or any linear age,
I
could feel skin-color tights webbing at
the
crotch, pleating below the knee
as
I remembered how he loathed im-
perfection.
Reaching to smooth my tights,
he
touched my thigh, said, You're
getting
fat. Silent, I turned from the barre,
stuck
a pin in him once, then again until
he
began to shrivel, until he popped.
Limping
past pools of hot blue light,
I
found a girl-child hunkered
in
the wings, arranging animals from
Noah's
Ark. She was hanging them
from
a broomstick two by two, suspending
each
pair by their necks with silver wire.
A
frayed tutu jutted below her belly,
and
her laddered tights sagged at the knee.
Looking
up, she arched her back
and
picking a scab from her elbow
asked
why I had popped my balloon.
BONES
They
are beautiful, she tells him. Elemental,
stripped
down, pure. He'd just watched her
crawl
from an Incan rock tomb
where
she'd dug up
a
single gray-white knuckle,
to
tuck in the pack that holds beak and
legbone
of an albatross.
At
home, she has sea lion scapulae
from
Baja, ribs of deer and boar,
camel
vertebrae from Petra.
She
tells him of immigration in Amman
when
she was held until agents
found
them in her bag and,
laughing
maniacally, waved her through.
She
describes watching bones roil
in
the La Brea Tar Pits,
of
seeing them entombed in blue-white
glacial
ice, of how - after the accident -
she
touched the uncanny whiteness
of
her son's skull.
First,
as storyteller, she relates these things.
Then
looking away, she says,
They
are props for my ghost dance.
They
exorcise images of
our
flesh deserting our bones.
MERMAIDS
They
dive and fluke their way down
where
coral burgeons
and
a moray eel jabs his head
toward
caverns that phosphoresce
blinking
crevices to unreality.
And
water undulates
without
intent until its currents
draw
them through stippled tunnels, mazes
where
angelfish and Moorish idol nudge them
as
they plunge, swerve, tangled ribbons of hair fanning,
never
pausing, pulling, thrusting,
a
mystery of the unrehearsed,
their
scales: stars in pooled darkness
dimming
as they descend,
their
hands seining water,
breasts
canting outward as they stroke
exhaling
bubbled strands,
singing
to dolphin and humpback.
Oh,
don't forget us,
best
beloveds, for we can still breathe songs
and,
though sheathed, can love
with
eyes, hands, lips, tongues, for
freedom
and betrayal are in the mind,
and
we may be myths men fashioned,
but
the eel will snap his jaw,
acknowledge
our sway.
His
force knows force and makes no other claims,
aware
we've left our abalone mirrors and combs
within
reach of the rising tide.
WICCAN
SUMMER
On
a Perseid night in mid-August,
spines
of liquid silver, ancient dust, a comet trail,
air
steeped in fumes of white azalea,
a
rustle of footsteps: vole and fox, rabbit and bobcat.
Leaf-wrapped,
mud-daubed, our raven hair
loose
and crackling, we unleash voices into the air.
Lend
us hot blood.
Lend
us the sweet-gold of bees and a hint of sting.
Lend
us rills of darkness and rivers of light.
Give
us the gift of weightless song.
Then
we circle a maypole of dew-blossomed vines,
dig
soles into forest duff, and weave
furious
spells to staunch the summer's flow.
Copyright
© by Susan Terris. All rights reserved.
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