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Prairie Schooner 78.1 (2004) 23-26



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Three Poems

Joanna Goodman


Landing Skid

Oh... nonsense. I've had enough
of your cravings. Loss comes in more
than two sizes - big and bigger, old and-
isn't it time to churn your wings a bit,
add some essence to the threnody?
Along with more daylight
and warmer temps, the season finds you
snoozing again, stuffed with anecdotes practiced
by rote. Honor! honor! you cry from your sheets,
all for naught. You should have paid more mind
to the deuces. The heart's a hollow muscle. [End Page 23]

Poem Beginning with a Line by Purina, Ending with a Line by Balanchine

In no way complete
but dumbstruck, bittersweet

for starters: two of a world of
potentially hazardous living things

to shield the small mouths
you house from. My girl

grabs her tongue, spouts
as much of dance as she

whose body, come ankle
by elbow back from oblivion,

is able: L, that's us in the mirror
again and always for the next

last time before becoming turns
against itself. Down among azalea

and weeping fig, buckeye
and hibiscus, let sound taste

not dangerous. Held in here
and now she pounds

her chest, shouts me which is at least
in part to her a word to catch silence

I throw her way, singing you
and me, me, me, rhyme's morning [End Page 24]

glory: snow and go, bird
and word, be

and off she swaggers,
lean on the air.

Restorative

Bleat, bleat. False-alarm. I'm onto
the fixed pattern of your faults
and folds and fractures, your gently folded

causalities - the lover you farewelled, all smoky,
on the Quarternary flats, and a New Britainer
who quit you, crouched in Cambridge halls-

and - oh! - still others - S. Plevka's father,
if I may be so bold, smashed to smithereens
by the very spruce he had been blading.

My buttercup, my fussy fuss-
matter's speeding up, the stars
dim back into Black Dwarves-

the universe cares not a whit
for how you've run amuck;
it hankers after terser stuff, a belly [End Page 25]

laugh. Granny left you her Shakespeare-
a better way to pass the hours than nicking
anagogic tidbits

from your stopped-up eyes.
It's all you have beside you
as your square of light goes dim, 9:33 P.M.,

the sheepheart in you crying wolf again.





Joanna Goodman's first book of poetry, Trace of One, was winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. She won a "Discovery"/The Nation Prize in 2001, and her work has appeared in Fence, Phoebe, and New Letters.

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