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AN OLD MARRIED COUPLE DANCING
She, with her titian Auntie Emm curls,
in her Sunday blue dress,
a prissy-miss, fussy-frilled frock.
And he, scarecrow rake-thin,
more at ease with the cows and corn,
poured loose into his polyester suit,
knows her face by memory,
the curve of her ample back against his palm,
the weight of her step as she leans into him.
I watch them dip and twirl on the crowded floor,
a perfect unison of footed grace.
As strings of Strauss wing and weave,
he twirls her laughing round
and round, and in that moment,
when dimpled cheeks light with joy,
there is none more beautiful than she.
Debbie Ouellet (Douellet)
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WHAT APRIL IN NEW YORK IS
You take your bony awkwardness into the April day –
too warm for May – and yet the nearly naked trees are
barely March: well, that’s what April in New York is.
Gold scrabbles here and there: forsythia: frail runty yellow
feathers sprout from scanty soil – buttering a toss of corners
in the side-walked town: you stumble down the pavement
like a scarecrow with a tooth ache: pretty close to true.
(Another poem snatches pain from you and turns it
into point of view.) If you are to love this city you suppose
it can’t be only when the two of you are pretty, which
Lord knows, right now, my dear, you aren’t. Currents lurch:
bipolar – hot/cold – devil-zephyrs from the river twiddle with
the ordinariness of people – tourists: bodies are a weight
and bother, something may be flourishing but it is not sweet
human pulchritude. The sun’s too rude, and flesh too
blank and pale and bulbous and mistaken to be taken
seriously. Mysteriously, though, you’ve got to have a taste
of it: you take your aches uptown to Central Park –
decide to walk up to the Metropolitan Museum’s art. All
the geologic outcrops! – rocks and runners! – gray
and unused to the light: squiggly growing green shoots
make it impolite to stare: they’d clearly rather not be there,
all embryonic in the glare. Damn the chronic pain of
everything! – and yet it paints a sort of wash of interest:
splinters of a prickly sensibility that keep you walking and alert
and almost happy with discomfort. Grandeur of the Met
begets its usual surreal imperial effrontery: columns,
steps and quandaries of what to look at first: but
you are on a mission to do two things: see if your sore
mouth can eat a sandwich in the cafeteria, then walk into
the Pompeii bedroom painted gold and blue and red
you caught a glimpse of on your television set that morning
from your bed. The sandwich is a bust: leaves you scowling
(the ghosts of both your wisdom teeth are howling):
but oh! – the room. Roman glory turns the page
and places you in habitable plot. Let the April day resume.
Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett)
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