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Susanne Dubroff
Lost Birds
No wonder we're afraid
seeing we're both up here
circling in blinding air
our full-breasted humming
You say you use every available means
of communication I've noticed that all right
doesn't it interfere with the trance-like state?
Doesn't it interfere with the chances we take
to find the right color syllable?
and is it all a question of
your botany your ornithology?
What about the ordinary? How we fear
the part of the Mass
that remains unchanged from day to day
stemming from the state, condition
or disposition of a thing
You ask me not to use your words
lyrical as opposed to dark
believe me I've noticed
your painterly braveries
I wouldn't take your words
lightly they scratch at the air
Just Now Crossing the Connecticut
The train is speeding south,
the river turning sensuous,
less boned in biting ice.
I'm chasing after a lost year,
brooding over the cost
of my careening,
when a guitarist interrupts.
The spontaneous moments are
always the hardest to regain,
He tells his tired wife and child,
reminiscing, playing fitfully,
as fits the wistfulness
of Amtrak holding out,
announcing on its garbled air waves,
No cell phones unless in French.
Later, the jovial conductor explains,
'Sounds good..Besides,
not many can speak it.
Sometimes we even throw in
a little Italian.
Schumann's Piano Quintet
I.
Three a.m., a rented room,
I'm lonely, sleepless
when my hand pulls a notebook
off the "dream bar"
of the digital radio—
Schumman's in the small, mean room with me.
I had been reading about Robert,
Brahms and Clara,
the poem's thick forbidding fog
a private story, not exactly
for my ears. The music is more
democratic. And there are
other good people involved—
sound engineers,
makers of digital radios.
II.
Driving alone in August dusk,
this dirt road, its ferns and stones,
its pines do heal; the music
tells me I'm no tree,
no parched brown weed,
to be content with rivers,
summer cornfields.
In the Cafeteria
In the cafeteria
of the National Gallery
a young man's leaden eyes,
next to him, holding seats
for family, a girl's
frightened sideward stare;
a woman looks comfortable
reading the papers,
her feet propped on a chair.
I down my food hastily
as if it's stolen.
Sweetpotatobird
I feel it in the center of my palm
where the lifeline is, where,
minuscule it might have coursed
under some vengeful stern,
and the fatherly fold that rises
from the back of its neck seems molded
by the smoothing power of water.
Then I remember: Earth too
can smooth and mold, and a rock or some
great, abandoned tree root
forced its duck's head upward.
But who framed that crazed, asymmetrical eye,
gashed groove blinded with knowing?
And what made it grow that coney beak?
I'm ashamed I'm surprised
Earth sculpted it, not some human hand.
Sweetpotatobird!
you won't mind if we don't eat you,
get used to your lush curves,
watch you shrivel lovingly,
an aging wife.
| Susanne Dubroff's work has been published
recently in Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, International
Poetry Review, Poetry and North American Review. In 2004
This Smoke That Carried Us: Selected Poems of Rene
Char was published bilingually in her translation
from the French by White PIne Press and this June a second
collection of her own poems will be out from Word Tech
Editions. This selection of poems will appear in her upcoming
book, The One Remaining Star. |
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