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  • Parade of Possibles, and: Late Love, and: He Brings Wood
  • Ellen Doré Watson (bio)

Parade of Possibles

The Broker adored Hildegard of Bingen— but was a pussycat like my ex before the X. Flannel Shirt was into conspiracy theories and Sportswriter wanted a wife bad— and found one a couple weeks after I passed [End Page 39] on the job. Bob #2 had some cockamamie ideas about harnessing sexual energy. I knew he was right, but he so wasn’t. Head of Hair had a retainer and wore funny underwear. Either three ex-wives or permanently single, none of them could be called Que Será or had, to my knowledge, a tattoo. One had a performance problem and ate alone (neither of which was the problem). Baby Poet had a head of hair, too, but O so much blather. I am not a bitch and yes have many flaws, but the old friend is way too old a friend and the high school geek, while handsome now, is still one. The whole lot of them were too damned eager. That anti–death penalty activist, though, he saw through me in a way I don’t yet get. This has me considering invisibility. OK, a counter-intuitive and possibly counter- productive strategy, but perhaps a good cover as I scan the crowd for a tattooed, bald widower not named Bob, reluctant, loose- limbed, and wearing linen, who gives good talk.

Late Love

The fourth month flowers waxy and small. Grief is like sleeping in water, he thinks. Like throwing light onto the smallest stone. It is like scolding a doorjamb for crushing a finger in third grade. Her finger. Now in the ground. The same one she fractured flying off a treadmill the day her first husband walked away. Why [End Page 40] these bits of her, that long preceded him, now, his ninety-first day without her? Long week after week in a world now narrow. A runner instead of a proper rug. If he could stand her there, across the disbelieving room, he’d ask, all sheepish, how she was doing without hunger. He could hear her smile: “Look at the lake. Tell me I can’t have it.”

He Brings Wood

He brings wood, soup, family photos, dear nearness—and I remain friendly but strange, waiting out dormancy, wishing for swoon. Once upon a time was a woman, spreading but longing, set in her ways: proud and unsure whether to take reluctance for weakness or wisdom. The stars in night sky say what? On one hand, intensity is distant; on the other, the Pleiades are a smudge only without my glasses. Bird, good faithful bird, voluntarily, wooingly, in hand, am I not grateful? Once upon a time was a loneliness— hypothetical or real? Warm arm fallen to thigh, fingers drawn along the nape, can they be welcomed? She could reveal her sins: love of surface, betrayals of the body, fears of the bodily, an inventory of fault-lines

and hearth-quakes. Face to face with palpable, does she mean to deter or solidify capture? Words open doors this woman I am seems ready for, but to translate the mouth back to wordless, to flesh: must there be rapture? [End Page 41]

Ellen Doré Watson

Ellen Doré Watson serves as director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review, and a member of the editorial board of Alice James Books. Her most recent book is This Sharpening, from Tupelo Press. Individual poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including the American Poetry Review, Tin House, and the New Yorker.

“In the 70’s & 80’s, when I was immortal, being a Boomer meant having way too much fun to write seriously or well. Now, with the big scythe looming around whichever corner, serious fun is shirking inferior must-dos whenever possible in order to write like a maniac.”

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