Sample Poems by Deborah Ager
The Problem with Describing Men
If I said lacerated light
In an unusually warm November.
If I said ice-cold palm on my inner thigh
And the way a tree opens its branches
When sun finally heats the garden.
If I said the power of a ‘67 Charger
Mixed with a detective’s mystery.
If I said love, sometimes, yes, love
And jumping-from-a-moving-car anger.
Said the whir of a sander, the scent
Of birch, and tablespoons of sawdust.
What if I said night or a wave
Rocking into shore? If I said their names
One by one to the red sky? Said empty armchair?
Luck, dusky words, fight, torn photo.
What if I said moon? What if I said
White light dividing a lake in two?
The Space Coast
An Airedale rolling through green frost,
cabbage palms pointing their accusing leaves
at whom, petulant waves breaking at my feet.
I ran from them. Nights, yellow lights
scoured sand. What was ever found
but women in skirts folded around the men
they loved that Friday? No one found me.
And how could that have been, here, where
even botanical names were recorded
and small roads mapped in red?
Night, the sky is black paper pecked with pinholes.
Tortoises push eggs into warm sand.
Was it too late to have come here?
Everything’s discovered. Everything’s spoken for.
The air smells of salt. My lover’s body.
Perhaps it is too late. I want to run
the beach’s length, because it never ends.
The barren beach. Airedales grow
fins on their hard heads, drowned surfers
resurface, and those little girls
who would not be called back to safety are found.
The Atlantic
Vacationers are determined to see something.
Someone says ships on the horizon intend to map
a sunken vessel. The sea whispers in polysyllables;
its sand looks taut, the color of sheepskin,
save for where waves have incised canyons
and filled them with translucent fish.
This lost city should have been found
by now. Steamer trunks, filled with years
of photographs, letters, and crinoline skirts,
are inked with hundred-year-old names.
Seaweed laces through baluster sleeves,
its tendrils in fanciful green torsades.
Of these passengers, we know they tried
to surface and swam deeper instead,
that waves pushed their salt-encrusted
bodies ashore where malaria sickened them.
This sky is the two-hundred-year-old sky,
bandaged with cirrus clouds, its storm today’s storm.
Vacationers, worn towels to the wind,
wait for what the ocean might yield.