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Prairie Schooner 78.1 (2004) 19-21



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Two Poems

Judith Ortiz Cofer


Rice

Her calling is to carve all the truth
she finds on single grains of rice. She spends her days
gleaning through piles of Grade A long grain
Mahatma, butterflying fingers feeling
for the perfect one, pearly as a baby's tooth, a planed
oval on which she will script with a nearly invisible
needle in vertical lines,
like Buddhist text:
The Preamble to the Constitution
The chorus of John Lennon's Revolution
The Collected Dickinson
The First Amendment
She is now working on fitting the Lord's Prayer
upon the face a single grain, but has failed
beyond "deliver us from evil."
She will attempt it again
on an anomalous grain she found
nearly three times larger
than nature usually allows. She vows
to persevere until the kingdom, until the power
and the glory, until the amen.
Her dream is to buy a silo full of rice
from all over the world,
to dive into the dry sea of plenty,
and of finding that perfect grain,
blank as the future,
where she will preserve: [End Page 19]
Don Quixote's windmill scene, also
on his first seeing Dulcinea
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Aretha Franklin's Respect
Parts of To the Lighthouse
Some of the Psalms
All of the Songs of Solomon
Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones.

Riches


She is little more
than strangeness arranged
over the yawning gape,
cage of bones
over a woman shape,
only desire
now gives her form.
Not much more
left to surrender,
she denies
herself
even the smell of food,
keeps only papers and books
in the spaces
of her nearly vacant home.
A hint of pleasure
she may allow
at the end of a day
when she comes closer [End Page 21]
to the emptiness she craves-
memory of warm bread
dipped in olive oil
and of a shared bottle of wine,
hands tracing
her curves, cupping
full and heavy breasts,
now a concavity of angles
intersecting with her will.
To remember the days
of flesh and food
fills her with a sweet ache,
so good, so good
to have known such wealth,
to know precisely
what she's given up.




Judith Ortiz Cofer's latest books are Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer, from The University of Georgia Press and An Island Like You from Penguin. Her novel, The Meaning of Consuelo, was released in November of 2003.

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