Sample Poems by Dori Appel
Fragments
Today I see Mrs. St. Clair,
lit once more by the streetlight
on that steamy August night.
She is tiny, hardly taller than
I am, and embarrassed to be
seen weeping by my mother and myself.
As we pass, she buries her face
against her thin bare arm.
She is running from the basement
apartment she shares with her husband
and her four bad boys. Right there
the picture scatters, as though
reflected in a broken mirror
in which a single, unalterable image
has been assigned to every piece.
Mrs. St. Clair runs crying,
and I can see the faces of
three sons, even though they were
behind the basement door.
But her husband and the other son
are gone, kicked under the
ugly davenport with the mirror’s
lost shards. All day
hodge-podge memories flash by with
missing parts, and I look and look
at hands still held in laps and
sad, reproachful eyes,
wondering, Whose are these?
What happened next?
Alter Ego
She walks where I walk,
this nun with her great
bird headdress,
white wings fluttering,
black robes whispering at my back.
Skimming the wintry pavement,
she plants her tranquil step
where mine has been,
a ghostly echo closing in.
Hurrying, I feel the cold air shift
as her calm contralto stirs it,
her voice the same
as mine if I could sing.
Amnesia
1. Case History
This woman’s husband
bailed out years ago. One day
he was there and the next
he was gone, leaving her
to pace the floor with
hollow-sounding steps
and open closet doors a dozen
times a day, searching
for his suits. Now
he’s divorced their shared past
in an accident—
it’s gone without a trace.
When she visits him
for old times’ sake, his bland
unrecognizing smile
cuts her to the quick.
2. The Genre
I thought it was a fiction
invented for the movies of my youth.
The victim is always a man
we suspect of the worst,
and the woman who believes in him
seems headed for a fall. She is
a girl he met in a shop
or a psychiatrist assigned to his case,
and she fills the void with love
so that each day
he is born into a new world
beautiful as pearls.
This is a flower, it is called a rose,
this is called a kiss.
Still,the pieces of his lost world
haunt him. He dreams of
doors leading nowhere,
of faces hiding behind trees
in a tangled wood. He wakes
in a sweat beside this
lover, interpreter, savior,
and together they dive to his mind’s
dark depths, snagging memories
like wriggling fish.
The clues accumulate:
a woman’s glove, a child’s doll,
an overturned car with
silent, spinning wheels.
The danger is that in
finding the truth they will
lose each other,
but in the final reel
the rediscovered wife reveals
her faithless heart
and the child’s death is proved
a blameless accident.
Retrieved, the past is done.
3. Autobiography
A man once left my closets
and bookshelves filled with objects
we had shared, but carefully removed
the imprint of himself.
For weeks I could not respond
when called by name,
could not stay seated in a chair
or read a book. When he returned
with a few odd items taken by mistake,
they no longer seemed like mine.
There were six little knives
with flowered china handles
and harmless blades, arranged
in a lacquered case. I took one out
and held it in my hand,
unable to remember where
it came from or
what I’d used it for.
A Dream of Flying
Sometimes there are reversals.
Still, it’s odd to find myself
a tourist among my own
possessions, sailing over
squatting chairs and scarfaced
table tops. Being a spy
in these surroundings
makes me giddy—I mean
the ease of it. Below,
everything goes on as usual,
mealtime conversation
clink of knives and forks.
My shadow on the ceiling
is enormous, but no one
even glances up to see me
stranded like a shipwreck’s
last survivor,
hopelessly afloat.
Rituals for Two Fathers
In my parents’ house
tradition didn’t stand a chance
if safety was at stake.
Instead of a candle, my mother kept
her father’s yahrzeit with
a light bulb in her closet,
forty watts left burning while
the sun and moon kept watch
and the clock’s hands circled twice.
If she said a prayer I never heard it,
so knowing none
I light my father’s candle
silently, thinking of his ashes
scattered in the Arizona mountains,
and also of my mother,
pinning a note to her closet door,
Do not turn off this light