Four Poems
Barbara Helfgott Hyett
At the Pond
I want the geese to stand beside me,
softly speaking, stroking my hair.
One might lay his blazoned head
on my lap. I'd pet the wild thing
and he would let me, the others
cooing ungoosably in their joy.
We of kindly natures would stay
there, the water bounding in
the narrowest of wavelets, every
small stone seeming smooth, and all
the world - the dirt I sit in, the dust
insinuating itself into the leather laces
of my shoes, would be preening, graceful
and open: the many males, the females
in their pale brown abstraction, the goslings
swimming simply on their own. [End Page 26]
Last Vacation
1
In the shower I take pleasure in washing
my hair: luxuriant, burly, thickly nested
in the comb of my fingers. I think of his toes,
their perfect roundness. I think of the power
in his hands.
2
You don't worship me, he says,
eyes on the marsh, arms stretched
on the table before him. I love you,
I answer behind him, my palm brushing
his hair. I want to be adored, he says.
I kiss the top of his head lightly.
I love you, and now I am stroking
his shoulder. This very shoulder. This hair.
It is late afternoon. The beach still clings
to my thighs. I am smiling. The tide in
its fragrance continues to turn. [End Page 27]
Leaf-Tremble
I was sleeping in blue seersucker pajamas,
and that sleep was a deep forgetting. Waking
was thunder, a policeman pounding the door.
The sea came in to the shore outside the window.
As it always did. As it never did. I trembled,
frail as the blue body of leaf-vein, a girl torn
like a plum from the branches, barely ready.
My father is dead. I pressed sweet hunger
to juice with my thumbnail and left myself
there. The face of fear was a human face,
a deep organic surprise. No one could
take me now.
What Happened
1
A cloud came. A moon rose
across my cornea. And set there.
The cells of my eyeball resisted.
I believed in the enterprise,
part and parcel. They were smart.
It was I who couldn't see. [End Page 28]
2
There were men I clothed
in the pleasures of my body.
Their yearnings smooth, nascent,
their foreheads, their hands,
the cups of their rough chins.
My breasts, my hips consistently
working unseen. I was a puppet
of my body, a fuselage, a pretty
compendium of working parts.
3
Clot. Don't clot. Beneath my skin
patches of bruise were blooming.
At the slightest insistence. Even
the press of a white cotton sock
could turn my delicate, my serviceable,
my unsuspecting ankle blue.
4
I breathed my hands, I breathed
especially my arms, the fine blonde
hairs that grow there. Scent.
How it occurs to the body. I was
burned into being, hardened
as amber, hardened as a teat
into meaning. Eat and be made
of eating. Scent of vineyard.
Scent of dewlap and dung.
Barbara Helfgott Hyett is the author of Natural Law (Summerland P, 1989), In Evidence (U Pittsburgh P, 1997), The Double Reckoning of Christopher Columbus (U Illinois P, 1992), and The Tracks We Leave (U Illinois P, 1996). Recent work appears in New Republic, The Hudson Review, Partisan Review, and elsewhere.
