Three Poems

Molly Power



THE VISIT

Our old friend, Will Norris, visits from Warren.
I open the door looking to the side, avoiding his beaten face.

Will follows his wife Marlene to the kitchen where she
throws her keys onto the table and is hardly sitting
before she recites his trial of sickness and treatments, hospital mistakes and misunderstandings  — 
Will  nods and nods,
entrusting his lurid story to her. He listens intently
as though she is talking about someone who isn't in the room.

I half-listen and start a list. Will's forty-five blueberry bushes,
his pickup truck home in the driveway, his carved birds,
his workshop, his strong heavy footsteps, his hand reaching for his cigarettes,
shaking one out of the pack.

He smiles and I see a front tooth is gone.

Meanwhile, Marlene can't stop. She is full of indignities, misdiagnoses,
of near-death moments. I want to give her all my attention because I see
that she stands in the glare of a mortal truth and I hope
the telling spreads the fear thinner.



REDRESS

Sixty days of the bluest sky,
the brightest sun, the warmest breeze
after the starriest nights.
That’s how it is
in paradise.

Waking to noises of water!
The view pallid, hills floating, the
red barn receding, turned gray.
I move quietly,
a nun in church.



MAY IN VERMONT

Is there a poet so bloodless
inside, writing, on this May day?
Missing the heart-squeezing blue dome.
The pervasive maples shake
new spiky leaves to the sun
with foresight.

Would this poet scratch at paper
while a pencil-sized snake uncurls
on warm gray wood at the barn door? And
white butterflies fidget from
clover to clover growing at
the field-side.

Neighbors, not poets, walk stir-crazy
dogs that bounce from dirt road to ditch.
And the spring babies are introduced.
Farmers churn manure over raw grass,
driving ever wider circles
long past dusk.

Inside, back to the window,
the poet is enthralled with work.
Wind fills the curtain balloon-like
to tickle her left shoulder.
She slaps the intrusion,
with eyes closed.