At The Symphony
You invite me to sit with you, turning
on me a smile that can’t sit still. Your eyes
say the same thing: “Marry Me.” When I
struggle with my coat, you reach to glide it,
maestro-like, down my arms. I could be
a princess and you a prince with such
gestures, but when the symphony starts,
and our hands fold into our own laps,
as carefully as we listen to it, we hear
nothing of each other. The symphony
over, you rise first, afraid I don’t want you.
Standing, I am also polite. As you flee the room,
snapping the hurt of your shoulders straight,
I hear the spit of a mumbled spite, “I detest you.”
Oh, Eros
I admire men who lose their wives
without apparent grief; hardly an
hour passes, before another bauble
dangles from the skipping wrist; and lucky
the wife who digests lost love without
apparent sorrow; I also sue for
her tutorial, for my husband’s loss
has brought me such pain, I find it hard
to live again. At every step I
stumble, bumbling into other lovers’
secret bowers, surprising them late hours,
busy to rub the red-hot cheek of love.
Oh, Eros, take out this arrow or hurl
another better, that I might love again.
After Joanna Wins the Macbeth Prize,
She Invites Me To See The Play
My crown of thorns hung low when she won, for
I wanted that Shakespeare Prize badly, more
than Caesar wanted Rome, but the next thing
I knew we were spreading our gray wool blankets
out and girding ourselves for that darkest of plays
where witches run screaming across the stage
and gory Macbeth kills an innocent King
and his Lady, mad with grief, hurls herself
from the castle walls to die, and as we watched,
darkness fell like a cape about our shoulders
and we galloped to a land where there was neither
murder nor mayhem nor the wringing of
hands, where there was only the morning of
the first day and afternoons free for making love.
As I Age
Having reached a certain age, I find myself
diminished. Indeed, I might be finished.
Instead of walking, I crawl on all fours.
Instead of talking, I bark with my dog.
I do not need much. A cup of soup or tea.
Unlimited sight of the sea. Or, if not
the sea, a patch of grass will do. Poking
through it now, I bustle a busy wordless way,
beside my glittering ant kin. Do not disturb
us; we are busy. We are headed for the great
Nirvana. We have nothing left of import
to do and one goal only---unimpeded view---
through curtains glazed with grass and dew,
of the eternal landscape, with gods in it, and you.
An Encounter
His shirt’s a filthy rag and his shorts
are spotted and stained, hung at the waist
with a brace of clanging keys. Even
the tall blue cone flowers that usually
swing willy-nilly in the wind, turn
their faces when he passes, as if to
ward off the offal of that otherworldly
smell. His bike glides easily on this path
and he tips his cap to say hello,
but one hundred yards on in that wake,
it dawns on me, he might be death, for
a fly has begun to bother me,
diving at my arm excitedly, as if
I were its destiny, recently named.
Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Cleveland Review, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Phoebe, American Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, and Tusculum Review.