Four Poems by Patricia Nelson

 

Igor Contemplates his Master

 

Do I love my master when I carry

to him what is grey and dead?

My master with his small and twisting lights,

his jars that bubble blue and red in the dark.

 

My master goes away—when he returns

he bears the bright smell of the air.

A violence as dense as insects.

Words that thrum and sting.

 

I have words as well—butterflies

that ride the light and shade so easily

I can’t say if they are white or yellow.

Wings alight in sky and upside-down on water.

 

My master says the darkness doesn’t know

it’s dark—dark creatures cannot find the light.

But I see many things: things that have died

and not elided upward. They are so bright to me.

 

The Centaur Chiron

 

This one’s rare. The monster

who forbore enough of what he was

to teach the art of being human.

 

The humans nudged his laughter,

a loudness in his heart that galloped

as he made each hero good.

 

He followed what was difficult

like white stones in a garden.

A path that lay close to wildness.

 

When he disobeyed the gods and had to die,

even they said they were sorry

as they tied him to the starry sky.

 

The Uncertainty of Omens

 

I can sigh his story out, implying

with a shadow and a hesitation.

With words or creatures from the sky.

 

But are they blot or mirror

to the light, those uncertain birds

I say the gods have sent?

 

Must visions always point to heroes?

Soldiers glorious as poppies

folded in a brief, red hour.

 

It's dreadful to envision war. Worse still

to paint it brightly for this man

who waits so quietly in its way.

A Sybil's Wish

 

As a leaf casts one shape upon

the sky and many blowing shadows, 

so, too, I have a shadow wish apart

from what I say of death and monsters.

 

That somewhere there’s a door—

a frame of light that anyone might open,

in which all are disinterred

from their sins and the weather.

 

Where all can be as that bird

glowing by with its wing

in the seams of the wind.

Patricia Nelson has worked for many years with the "Activist" group of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is working on a book of poetic monologues by monsters and seers.