Poems by Elizabeth Raby
A Unity
When Mother taught me
to keep my knees together,
my dress down,
she only remembered
it was the way things were done.
She had forgotten a woman’s
best hope is to keep herself
hidden.
When the hurt hawk was shot
in his poem, Mr. Jeffers
pretended the great male spirit
soared unsheathed
after an appropriate fall
of feminine feathers.
I’m the woman Kazantzakis
wrote out of his novels.
He cut off my head, or slit
my throat. Nevertheless
I believe in this body, all bodies,
and in the disintegration
of the body, even the bodies
of men. Oh men, love my flesh
and yours. The desire to fly away
from it does not make it possible.
Poem Found on the Bus
The woman speaks
to her window
(or is it to her husband
who sits
in red-capped silence
on the aisle?)
It’s a white birch—
that’s what it is—
the more I look at it—
it’s a white birch tree.
I’m going to shoot him—
I’m going to borrow a gun—
I’m going to borrow a shotgun and shoot him.
I don’t blame her. I knew what it was—
I can tell—
it’s not fair to me.
That’s my weakness—
I know it is—
I know—
members only—
they didn’t let me in, I still want to join—
thirty years, I want to go there and have lunch—
I still want to join, go there for lunch—
I draw a parallel, think about the joke we share:
I/she finite and conscious. The struggle to find
a fit with time in our time.
There’s a cemetery, My Lord—
big mausoleum things—
I wonder who pays for it—
it’s any price you can afford—
that’s a church—
Shop, she’s going shopping—
that’s what she is, spend all she makes—
she’s going shopping—
these trees are doing real good.
I haven’t been to Leh’s either, not yet—
it’s a furniture store, that’s what it is—
shop, there’re certain things I’m interested in
Did she drive him to silence?
Did he drive her to speech?
What do you call it?—
what do you call it, I’m asking?
what do you call it, I’m asking you?
What do you call it?
Short Term Residency
I stand up here in front of you
wearing reassuring granny glasses,
my knife-pleated flannel skirt.
Behind me someone struggles
to peer over my right shoulder
from her smoky mound of old skins,
lifetime of beads and skulls.
She considers her blackened pot,
the broth your bones would make.
She whispers in my ear.
I feel winds, the pull of endless blue.
A sudden cackle unnerves me.
I step back. Her teeth, worn
to sharp points, bite the meaty part
of my neck. I am used to this,
am able to smile. Perhaps
you haven’t noticed.
“Shall we write some poems?”
At the Museum
See those, my darling? They’re called books.
See the one that’s open? A reader had to turn
the paper pages one by one. Words were printed
on both the front and back of each. We still
had some books when I was a little girl like you.
I remember their faint scent, perhaps
from the printer’s ink, perhaps from the paper itself.
I miss them sometimes.
There was a time, an ancient time, when books
were made mostly by monks. They wrote in ink
on stretched animal skin called parchment,
one perfect page after another. They drew
tiny pictures, colored them and the big letter
that began each section, filled them in with twirls,
specks of gold. Not many people ever got to see them,
fewer still held them in their hands. I suppose
when books began to be printed on a press, those
people thought something good was gone.