In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Prairie Schooner 77.3 (2003) 84-86



[Access article in PDF]

Three Poems

Richard Frost


Moon and Stars

On the high lawn above our house
my wife and her best friend have remade Stonehenge -
of smaller stones, of course, but remarkably true
to the one built by the Druids or someone before them.

If you lie on the grass and sight through an arch
across to the stones on the other side of the circle,
you can imagine what must happen when the moon
is full on a clear night over the Otsdawa Valley.

I'm absolutely certain that the field mice,
with their white bibs and bright jeweled eyes,
use New Stonehenge for ceremonies
that spare them from our cats and the swooping owls.

If Carol and Margot will steal softly
up the path to that lawn at the proper hour,
those mice will be waving birch leaves at the stars.
But in fact the women won't see them. They'll have run away.

Grandfather

At six I was given a job: to lead
my blind grandpa, whose wife was dead, between
his chair in one room and his other chair
at the table, his wife then dead one year. [End Page 84]
With small scraping steps and a rattling cane,
he followed, saying, "Helen, Helen's dead."

The year before, when she was down in bed
(a "spell," they called it), he was not yet blind
and read to me the Sunday Katzenjammers
and told me what to call the garden flowers.
She died. He lost his sight, would call her name,
was led from room to room, and disappeared.

I must admit that I was very glad
to lose my task, but since then I have seen
what comes of living. Home and everyone there
were changed to dust or smoke or breaths of air.
Sometimes when alone I talk to them
about my life as if I might be heard.

By reason or good luck, nothing's answered
outside my head, each memorable scene
reenacted, though nobody hears
it as it grows more fluent with my years.
My past has staged itself within my brain,
a little game I've learned to raise the dead.

Old myself, I have an older friend,
an orphan, who saves portraits she has found
in antique malls. Sepia prints of daughters,
sons and husbands, sisters, wives and brothers
cover a wall, and she has married them
and named them family, and seems contented. [End Page 85]

Virtual Reality

You ride a digital horse
into a video meadow, your ears
plugged with tiny speakers, wires
taped to your toes, fingers and torso.

You can do anything you dream.
You whip the computerized bridle -
solenoids and servos jiggle the saddle.
Your horse jumps a haystack or a stream.

Where are you riding? The dark forest?
Death and back? Maybe that is the beauty,
the good of it: for little time, little money,
you have what is more than fear and surpasses risk.

In the black wood the horse staggers
and changes to bone. You slide to the cold floor
of leaves and bury your face. Nothing else, nothing more
until you rise to your feet, the game over,

except that now you would tell of it,
how you were deep inside the shadow
and walked again, and know.
Would someone, having seen nothing, believe?



 

Richard Frost is the author of Neighbor Blood (Sarabande Books, 1996). He has had poems in Southern Review, Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, and Poetry. His first appearance in Prairie Schooner was in 1963.

...

pdf

Share