Five Poems by Elisabeth Weiss

 

My Mother as Warrior for God

My mother leans into work the way she

would a lover. To ready for Sunday School

 

she dips dark hair into a bun. Rests with precise balance

bare and simple pearls on clavicle.

 

Her suit is the colour of nest stealing jays,

lips alive with crimson, hemmed skirt, long legs.

 

I watch her in the mirror, fingers wedged

around a cigarette and match flare.

 

She is ready to walk among men, ready

to refuse the looks they bring.

 

Her purpose is to draw out the children, the quiet ones.

Soon she will kneel before their sweet

 

and milky songs. Soon they will be laughing

and dancing. They will make a line and lift

 

their arms to each other’s shoulders

bluebirds in and out of windows.

 

Their curled fists are springtime

fiddleheads waiting to be chosen, newborn.

 

 

Saratoga Racetrack

In the middle of the night

my father pulls near Union Street

on Saratoga’s east side.

 

The back of our grey station wagon

holds a lumpy mattress

where my sisters and I,

 

all fists and limbs, entwine

and try to sleep but the odd feel

of still being in our clothes

 

and also on a busy road makes us too

exposed to the passing shadows of headlights

glaring and the thick low thump of tires.

 

We park alongside bars and nightclubs.

Footsteps outside our windows.

Who but grown-ups stay out so late

 

and why would our parents think this safe —

We watch nighthawks migrate, night shift workers

in Carhart’s emerge from factories.

 

We’re waiting to see horses train at 6 a.m.,

manes brushed bright with curry combs.

Imprinted foals in pasture will grow to love

 

the human voice that instructs. First halter breaking

then ground training then the discipline.

Our parents tell us to pull white mohair sweaters

 

over our yellow pedal pushers

then we tumble into the 24-hour diner.

Uncombed, dishevelled, barely awake

 

we late night children order

warm and sticky sweet buns, pancakes and eggs.

We touch everything, giddy, banging

 

on our booth’s polished, aluminum.

We run to spin the swivelling counter stools

of red Naugahyde. The waitress’s look

tells my father this is no place for children.

Before sunup with our Instamatics strapped

to our wrists, our long hair flying behind us

 

we balance on the fence’s lowest rung,

legs angled forward,

eyes ahead, on the starting gate.

 

 

My Mother on the Soccer Field

My mother sits down in the grass at half-time.

Next to her is my father and their neighbour, whose husband

walked out after crashing the Mercedes.

 

They eat whole avocados with large bites, ravenous.

They are not taking nibbles, not slicing off small bits

to put on crackers with a cheese knife, no.

 

My parents are chomping on avocados as if they are apples.

Just then the wind picks up. My mother brushes back her hair

The neighbour sighs and I am witness to shameless, delirious

 

happiness. It’s the 1960’s. The Bay of Pigs is over. Kennedy is dead.

Sputnik long ago orbited and crashed over Wisconsin,

and my picnicking bohemians wait

for the rest of the game to begin.

 

 

After Fifty

After fifty, dinner parties are easy.

Nothing burns, meat gets braised,

Your hands know to gently whisk

swirls of Dijon into mayonnaise.

After fifty you know your oven well.

There’s no need to adjust the racks.

You don’t need a timer; you’re relaxed.

 

After fifty, all that could go wrong already did.

The silver comes out, it goes back in.

Platters might shatter but all is short-lived.

When stiff or sore or scorched

you can sit back and take a drink

slowly mixing and breathing

in the raspberry, rhubarb cream.

 

After fifty, you know what’s important

and what to say and that it’s all right

for silence to descend like a king

demanding loyalty of his subjects

who know the sweetness of a shared bitterness.

What once seemed too much no longer is.

After fifty, you raise your glass to all that’s good

 

for all the brokenness of the past

and transmutations of your various selves.

You know your spouse is just your spouse.

You can add a little pepper or a little salt

to the wounds but all their faults are also yours.

There is forgiveness and dessert and a world

within the world and a place to rest far from

the distant glimmer that endures.

 

 

Lost FootagE

 

Weekends found our neighbour Elaine

in her parent’s living room

 

where none of her parochial

charges could reach her

 

with their untied oxfords

and smells of chalk and glue.

 

While perched in an easy chair

afternoons slipped into worn grooves.

 

She watched black and white movies,

frame by granular frame,

 

the soundtrack crackling.

Sometimes there was popcorn,

 

an extra pillow or a bathrobe

and compulsory slippers.

 

She snorted when endings were obvious

smirked at DAR-like actresses,

 

ignorant ingénues, who puckered

and trilled over Bakelite phones.

 

She abandoned herself to the obsolete

as if she still loved the world

 

outside her window even if she never looked.

It was the height of the 60’s.

 

We still ate fish on Fridays

and her brother hadn’t yet tripped

 

into the merciless jungles of Vietnam.

Unmarried, where else was there to be

 

but in the interval, the commercial —

switching channels.

 

Here she was queen, critic, goddess

to all she knew and all she cared to know

 

of that odd, bluish light-glow

to which we were all obedient.

Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing at Salem State University in Salem, MA. She’s taught poetry in preschools, prisons, and nursing homes, as well as to the intellectually disabled. She’s worked in the editorial department at Harper & Row in New York and has an MFA from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Porch, Crazyhorse, the Birmingham Poetry Review, the Paterson Literary Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016 and was a runner up in the 2013 Boston Review poetry contest.