Two Poems

Ellen Dudley



THE GENITIVE CASE

Valete discipuli! Imperative!  she cries,
swinging her arm like an orator. First period
Latin and she's on one knee and now 
a senior has to help her up because
it's nine o'clock and she's been into the vodka already.
She keeps it in the teacher's room, in the closets
of her one bedroom. She's sixty and her gray
curls are tight from yesterday's appointment.
She's retiring next year.

                                    But the lesson for today
is the genitive case and on her feet she recites
whole passages of Virgil, passages heavy with
the case in question: the field of the farmer,
the wife of the farmer, the daughter of the farmer,
slave of. And in one word.
Now, in this cold April, in Vermont, the stranger
has returned from a walk past the graveyard
and he's entranced by the stones. 1863, so old.
He relates inscriptions, reading from a lined note pad:

   Brown
   Sarah, wife of Asa
   Lucy, daughter of

So brief, he says, so brief.

SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA

Say the moon lay in Taurus, sign of earth and sweat, as you went over the mountains where rain and altitude dropped the temperature fifteen degrees, a minute's respite till you drove down into the valley, back to humid world where, as you moved your head, the hand resting on the headrest touched your scalp and a charge arced so hard you put both hands on the wheel.

Consider how your body rose off the seat, slow and steamy in the heat, letting the wind hit your back as those fingers found your neck, thigh, the wet thick of you. Blood pooled in your belly, skin sang and every truck became a hazard and a joy. Leaning into that hand, hair rising from the car window like a scarf, roar of a truck's slipstream and the blood in your ears like surf, you cut a swath through the end of the valley, the sun low behind the trees turning your thigh a color from the crayon box: burnt umber, raw siena — and on the stereo Robert Johnson sang That's all Right Mama, but what you heard was the body next to you, moving with breath, hairs rising on the arm and neck. 

And with the windows open, crossing a few state lines, the moon heavy and red up ahead, you drove steady, your hips rising off the seat in time to delta blues, mouth open, lips dry, heading into the shortening day, passing semis at 75, doing what you needed to do, driving into the dark into this life which is our penance and our grace.

Remember the dollar you saved out from the pooling of your money from that night's meal? Tucked in your wallet between the passport and a quote from Feynman, you kept it as a talisman of the beloved body: from the lover's pocket to yours, imagined scent still clinging from a time you knew you'd never forget, until some Saturday morning downtown, going for pastry or a part for the lawnmower,  you pull out the two one dollar bills you have and pay.

Or now, cleaning the house, you throw away a box of junk, the tile from July 1969 with Neil Armstrong's boot print on it, a tiny chunk of history, tossed with photos, pennies, the broken umbrella from the weekend twenty years ago, a thing you kept as a memento of a name and face you can't remember now, the only flash remaining a shine of shoulder in the  morning drizzle.