Three Poems
Joan I. Siegel
Night School
In a classroom like this one where
her children once sat fidgeting for the bell
to ring so they could grab their jackets
and shout out loud to the cold air and sun
shining on Broadway two blocks from home
where two flights up she had set out bread
and milk on the kitchen table because
she was down the street at the tailor's shop
turning a shirt collar or mending a man's coat
and nights she got down on her hands and knees
to wash floors in an office building on Second Avenue
things she had learned as a girl in Poland
and brought with her a boat ride away to Ellis Island
to the man she married and soon enough
their four children (one dead one)
and after he died of influenza
to the new husband and his five children (one dead one)
and in time to the new daughters-in-law
and sons-in-law in their uptown apartments
and the babies one at a time:
she sat practicing her Palmer letters
connecting the fine threads of ink
each graceful curve looping to the next
like crocheting a pair of ladies gloves
making words where silence used to be. [End Page 85]
Mother & Daughter
for my sister
Maybe it is not the words
you have waited all your life
for her to speak or
your own words knotted
under your tongue.
What matters after all
is comforting the body
bathing her
oiling the dried skin
anointing
face
arms and hands
scars on the belly
feet
an act of devotion
for both of you
which she may have forgotten already
which you will never forget:
how it was
after anger had burned itself out
and there was only
the wash cloth in your hand
warm water
the pale sick skeleton
of an old woman lying on the sheets. [End Page 86]
Trompe l'oeil
From the beginning the eyes trick:
a burst of blinding light
the moonstone of your mother's face
objects afloat in the air above your crib.
It seems you could float up
to reach them, roll off your bed
into the sky.
Separate, you never see yourself
seeing - only someone else's eyes
looking back at you, someone's
eyes looking away.
Your range is limited as the pinhole
of a camera obscura, shadows waving
like black drapery at the edges. If you
do not turn your head, there is
nothing there. You see only parts
of yourself: hands playing the piano,
buttoning a jacket; the belly curving
away from you; a bent knee; feet
walking on a country road by
themselves. You are disembodied
as your shadow.
Eyes sit at their windows alone.
In the mirror
your face swallows itself
like the new moon.
Joan I. Siegel's poetry appears recently or is forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, Commonweal, Yankee, The American Scholar, The Amicus Journal, and the anthologies Poetry Comes Up Where It Can, Beyond Lament, and Essential Love. She has won the New Letters Poetry Prize (1999) and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award (1998).
