Two Poems

Abstract

background photo : www . etsy . com / people / marqueton . author photo : patrick mullen 30 World Literature Today Two Crows in a Sandbox One at first, using the pincer of his beak to break apart the grains and dismiss them. He struts, but gingerly. What confidence flight gives is tempered by these increments. Ah, the danger of an audience. His progress is plotting, by degrees, watched by the likes of me. He turns over a skinny gold disk, he cries his phlegmy cry. Quiet for days, I know that sound and its reason. His friend steps in, prismatic, flips the foiled thing. Once, my husband twisted off his wedding ring and threw it into weeds. Same stance, same defeat, dry-eyed, like this we rummaged. Large Gray Dog for Elizabeth Bishop To break the tick-tock of sleep/ read/sleep, sick with myself, I walked to the Opéra Garnier to sit in the high cheap seats of Swan Lake. Going out was the victory. Crossing the bridge etched with, “the silence of the sea,” I waited awhile on that wave for the wind to wake me. In one direction, the sky was brooding; in the opposite: Impressionistic, magnificent. Rose bands floating between blues. On the bridge was another. Beside her, a huge poodle (or mostly poodle, with a dash of something shaggier, Labradorish). Raincloud-colored beneath sunset, his front paws perched on the bridge’s curved edge. Tall as a man then, and glad to watch the pleasure boats and tugboats, the police in their bouncing speedboat. He got me smiling and laughing again. The woman laughed and smiled with me, beneath that hourglass of a sky, the fruit and spoil of it; the bride and groom of it; the bloom and death of it. I was able to continue, rescued by their human gestures. Restored and fit to sit in an audience, my hands resting on the balcony’s edge, above the dancers. Paula Bohince is the author of The Children (2012) and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (2008). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, TLS, the Nation, Granta, and elsewhere. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. She lives in Pennsylvania. Two Poems Paula Bohince ...