- Tangents
I, vi
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses.
—Macbeth, I.vi
Duncan and Banquo, trotting in, halt to admire the castle’s site, the tender air where nesting martins ride the dusk before alighting five stories up under the battlements.
Hautboys, torches, barking, shouting herald the entry of the king; the pock-jawed groom comes grinning out; such amenities, and making such a good impression on the senses:
summer, nestlings—and the downy raven already fledged out in the spreading dark. Drop the curtain; leave them there—believing, witless, and eternally arriving among the pretty deer in the castle park. [End Page 51]
Christening in Andover
Mary Margaret won’t remember the trickle over the fontanelles, the daub of oil: what sticks is the name. Soon the fluid bones will close; give her twenty years—she (still the same
Mary Margaret) won’t resemble this small froth of lace and gauze; men will daub her with their eyes, and this same flesh will be enamelled into someone else when the varnish dries.
Analysis
Seurat atomized an afternoon where bright dots infinitesimal fuse into a summer Sunday, sun, shade, water, parasol.
Shrink from it. On close examination any grand design turns into small bodies bobbing loose in space—
beings that don’t have any point at all. [End Page 52]
Intersection
A girl pulled up in the lane beside me, smiling, in a luminous private sphere, playing across her lips some scrap of thought—
a joke on the radio, a memory, some plan or fantasy—and passed inches away, her profile perfectly clear, but sealed inside a membrane of safety glass, and every inch between our cars a light year, her invisible itinerary one moment tangent to my own, and caught glancing off into another galaxy.
Readout
The nurses watch the sets of blinking numbers, each gauge with its particular high and low—
respiration rate, oxygen flow, blood pressure, temperature, the ekgs
graphing the heart’s dynamics, rhythm, tempo;
but wheel the monitors away before the digits pulse the patient’s way to zero. Shift your gaze to him, and let him blur into a continuum, a legato so smooth the nurses at the bedside see
his passage as a slow diminuendo: Let him vanish by degrees; let the dying body fade and go transparent; finally there will be only the nurses around an empty bed. [End Page 53]
Deborah Warren’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Poetry, and the Yale Review. Her most recent book is Dream with Flowers and Bowl of Fruit.