FOUR POEMS: JACQUELINE POWERS

City in the Park A bagpiper plays Amazing Grace. Pigeons ride wooden benches. Street church in a downtown park. Quiet, uncertain, people stand and sing. On my bench an old woman mumbles ceaselessly, prayer or incantation. Occasionally a staccato burst, rapid as gunfire and as startling. Each blade of grass more green. On the opposite corner a man shouts and jumps, a cruel, spasmodic dance. This solitary gymnast shouts bitch, you bitch at every passing cloud –– spirit or shade. Those nearby walk away. Each breeze a message, sure as the line for free food –– apples, oranges, a brick of yellow cheese, pungent. Lost love and a lost dog. I join the congregation, or dream. Whatever is missing can be found here but when it empties at night this park is just a vacant lot.

Winter Squirrels hang upside down like fur muffs, scrabble for suet on bare vine. Blackbirds big as tires, shadows on snow. The toad in the basement died. Maybe a draft or broken heart. Flu season extended six more weeks. It’s a question of balance: I fall scraping the car, slide into the street. Dust bunnies big as hippos ride the oak floor. I clean cupboards, closets, sweep, mop –– try to find whatever I’ve lost. How a mouse crawled into the dryer to sleep on my coat. Two cardinals kamikaze the window. A crow plays taps on the stop sign down the street. Weather report from the Midwest: I'm in lurve, she says coyly. Just drops it into the ether like a butterfly, or a stone. Tell me, I say. And try not to think about rain.

Cloud Cover I wore a red leather coat and a string of lies. Small children gamboled across a verdant lawn. A large yellow dog, a small blue ball. You caught a glimpse through a partly open door as I sat naked on his lap, wrapped in the long red coat. Slick with ambiguity, with regret. Clouds in the offing –– a storm overdue. I feared the electricity would raise the hairs on my damp skin, on my neck. I want to believe the sheets were wet  with someone else’s miscalculations, but my children have grown and it wasn’t my dog, not really –– not then, not now.

When a Woman Dances Naked in a Mink Coat I am wearing a blackgama mink and nothing else. In the mirror the face is cracked, the belly sags like an overripe melon but still she pirouettes. What else is there to do? The problem was always how to let go. Your camera hungry not for truth or words. It’s not what you see, it’s the after image that refuses to let go. It stretched between us the first time we met –– the golden orb-weaver’s dragline silk, all tensile strength. We never sought immunity.