.................................
Iceland
.................................

When he told me I was cruel
and that he felt isolated,
     I misheard him.
I thought he said he felt Iceland

and in the moment of confusion,
     I understood him.

I felt Iceland,
     though I knew little of the country
     besides half-remembered stories
     my mother, who once lived there, told me.
My father was stationed in Keflavik one winter.
My parents arrived when the snow was white
     and absolute,
     except around the houses where soot drifted
     down from chimneys.
All night long, as my mother turned
     in her strange new bed,
     workers outside repaired the empty roads
     and the light was cold and pale through the blinds
     because the sun never set, only lingered
     just above the horizon
     before eventually climbing.

And today, as he calls me cruel again,
     I feel all of this--
     I know it to be true.
Already, I rise to leave him
and his hands trail after me
but I am cold and white and absolute,
and the heart of me is isolated,
     is Iceland.

 
.................................
The Purple Ache of Plums
.................................

I'm thinking of the plums, unripe,
their skins black-purple, flesh hard
with growing, and how the leaves
of the tree wore caterpillar droppings
like poppy seeds, and how I struggled
to ride the rough limbs, their skin
tenderly pinching me pink.

Dizzy with stolen fruit,
I yearned to scratch myself silly,
to live raw. My jaws
ached with tartness. I wanted to bend

myself backwards like a plum wand,
to break in two, to bleed and flood
the whole of my neighbor's backyard
with my presence, purple, rich as a thief.

.................................
Jenniffer Lesh
.................................

 
Copyright © Jennifer Lesh
September 1996

...two poems in this room by kristine hayes...
the coffee you poured on my words
Return to Agnieszka's Dowry Welcoming Room