Wednesday 9 August 2023

Five Poems by Sharon Whitehill

 



Hiraeth* 

           

How to store—is there some, is there any such somewhere

To punch or push, to pulse or pluck sinew, no spark, sap, or spur

To shape the mind, store the past, to keep it from fading away?              

Oh is there no slowing, no seal or staunch, for that dwindling

Down? No way to escape the slow fading or banish the elves of erasure—

Zealous elves, elves bold and eroding, bleaching all colour away?

No, no one and nothing to keep the feel fresh,

Recover the daily, the doing, the detail,

Stamp a visage or voice, fix a feature in mind.

No way of undoing the dimming, retaining the fever and force

Of a lost leitmotif, the tickle of snicker and cackle.

No hope of mooring the memories,

Of halting the ravelling moments,

Of stopping the ball of nostalgia from unspooling

So as to swaddle and stifle each delicate image

Within oblivion’s gluey cocoon. 

No, nothing, nothing to slow down the dearth,

The dull disappearance, the final unwinding:  

Forgetting, forgotten, foregone.

 

*Hiraeth, pronounced heerithe: Welsh term for nostalgia, deep yearning, or grief; a pull on the heart, a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost.

 

 

LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS

            from “Camille,” oil painting by Laurent Dareau

 

fallen woman Camille

auburn-haired breaker of hearts

in a pale wood frame

as thin as a thumb

posed on a bone-white divan

behind a bouquet of camellias

gold bullion stamens and stigmas aglow

each flower’s heart reprising yours

anti-angel with hints of a halo

wing bones feathered

in eiderdown fluff

 

there you sit,

pinioned deep in your divan,

blooms massed at your flank

captured

it seems

if you stood

you would stumble and fall

 

no angel, you

nor archangel ungendered

unfleshed

no maiden warrior-queen

who outran the wind

who battled the Romans

one breast exposed

to unbridle her bow arm

 

you

draped in blue

are no virgin

nipple tickled by bolster

beneath the one breast we see

you, mon ange,

might be anyone’s fallen angel

 

who was it that angled

that empty frame in the corner

to tilt toward your blue-shadowed leg

some aged painter with port-wine stigmata

to garnish his baldness?

what patron?

what narrator out of Dumas

or the Chopin ballet?

 

you, lovely Camille

are displaced forever

beyond the pale

of your portrait

 

 

Burning Mouth Syndrome

 

Lips that prickle and sting

to the point that it’s painful to speak:

sore, chapped, and peeling

along their vermillion border.

Perhaps an allergic reaction

to tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers,

staple foods in my usual diet,

all of them nightshades

and all now forbidden.

 

Atropa belladonna, deadly nightshade,

named for the beautiful lady, Atropos,

who cuts the life-thread with her shears.

 

My own destiny, too,

seems doomed to be severed—

not from my physical life,

but from those moments each night

when I long to savour my favourite cuisine

as I listlessly swallow steamed chicken and rice

 

and yield to the fantasy

that I’ve unwittingly slighted the Family Nightshade

by plucking their cousin, the mandrake,

while weeding my garden,

a fatal act that according to folklore

condemns me to hell.

 

This as likely a reason for the inferno

raging around the contours of my lips

as that my own body would turn against me,

sentencing me to a flavourless fate.

 

 

ACCIDENTAL EXPRESSIONISM

 

My artist friend finished the painting,

she said, with no meaning in mind,

her attention focused only on textures, colours, and shapes.

 

Whereas I see a sunrise

over a purple-capped mountain,

gold splashing the dark sea below.

 

I see the first day of creation:

the primordial mound of the earth

heaved up, just a moment ago, from the deep.

 

I see the sun god Ra in the act of emergence,

his newborn glory reflected in gold

on the waters of chaos from which he emerged.  

 

That is, until a shift of perspective

(rather like closing one eye at a time

and changing the parallax angle)

 

changes the globe of the sun

into the cheek and blond head of a baby asleep

on the mountain surface, aslant,

 

belly down on its slope, an arm

and a leg hanging over the side

as if hugging an up-tilted mattress.

 

A work of art with a life of its own

despite what the artist intended

or the viewer expected to see.

 

 

Sixteen

 

Once we made contact again,

my former lover and I,

we outdistanced old age and arthritis:

caught up in a microburst of emotional winds

that mobbed us from every direction,

propelled him cross country

and hurtled me backward through time

to the age of sixteen.

 

Long-dormant sensations unfurled

like the fronds of a Jericho rose

balled up for years in the desert,

spun us into a hormonal swoon

of physical touch and deep personal talk.

Left me moved and amazed

at the rush of sensations I’d long believed dead.

I felt so young again.

 

Passion sustained, when he left in the fall,

by overheated exchanges

that gave the illusion of substance

as air molecules in whipped egg whites

both add to their volume

and stiffen them into peaks.

High-pressure emotions that filled me to bursting

as his next visit approached.

 

Yet when he stepped out of the taxi,

I felt my attraction deflate

like the fall of a cooling souffle,

as if Newton’s Third Law

had reversed my enchantment,

caused me to fall out of love

with the splat of a wet paper wad. 

 

And see clearly how much I regressed

into flirting and trying to please,

sending away for an eyelash-growth serum,

excusing his foibles while hiding my own,

and feigning an interest in his long stories.

Most of all how I’d settled for scraps

that were never enough.

 

Today I am filled with relief

at not feeling compelled

to bolster my witty and charming persona.

 

But, oh, I miss feeling sixteen. 

 

Sharon Whitehill - is a retired English professor from West Michigan now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. In addition to poems published in various literary magazines, her publications include two scholarly biographies, two memoirs, two poetry chapbooks, and a full collection of poems. Sharon's chapbook, THIS SAD AND TENDER TIME, is due out winter 2024.

 

 

 

 


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