Sample Poems by Linda Casebeer
A Season of Mirabelles
In the shadows of summer
so many Pariesiennes
hurried past fruit stalls
looking instead for cheese
baguettes or roast chickens.
But for a handful of coins
you could purchase
and hold in your hands
the plump flesh of radiance.
Bursts of gold and rose
the reflections of August
when everything
still seemed possible.
Like silk the fruit spilled
onto outdoor counters
in the Rue de Mouffetard,
tumbles of small mirabelles
scooped in the rhythm of a waltz.
To taste their sweetness
in the juice that would run
down your chin is to believe
again in the harvest
and the small price of grace.
Translation
O douce quand tu dors
La nuit se mele au jour…Eluard
In this city where they write Amour
in white script at the top of the stairs
leading down to the subway,
what other language could we speak
in these rented rooms where the night
mixes with the day as we sleep
until long after dawn, sheets and our feet
tossed over each other, our bodies mingled
with the faraway sounds of bells chiming.
What other language could render
the split heads of Picasso’s women,
could speak of love in sun splintered
through the shade of almond trees.
The fragments of what we translate
only begin to reveal their meanings
as we walk along the Rue de Lille
where a man crosses in front of us
carrying between both of his hands
one flesh-colored hip-to-toe
unattached anonymous mannequin’s leg.
Looking for Gauguin
When we went looking
for Gauguin we found a place
where roosters and casurina trees
took days into each other’s colors,
placing the reds next to the blues
Gauguin himself described
as the way unimagined fragments
came together in the dance.
In the fragrance of tiare
and the essence of coconut oil
rubbed into dark hair.
At the center of the tableau
the island queens, goddesses
whose reigns began
the way the story always begins.
Explosions at the center
and mountains falling into terrible
freedom beyond pleasure
where a bather dangles her feet
in the sacred pools of color
disguised as original sin.
Again
For days I felt a vague unease
in the power of fragrance to be again
foreign, as strange as a book of old
secrets refusing to reveal its origins.
In the warm August afternoons,
the pungence of curry would carry
upwards through the Paris courtyard
and the open apartment windows
drawing us towards a sensuous meal
in the narrow mirrored and lacquered
restaurant in the Rue de Verneuil.
At first what was pungent came to me
in indefinite waves, an absence
of the familiar. And then slowly,
it was as simple as its origins.
Ovary or womb, the words my father
refused to utter to his small audience,
the four of us filling up
two living room couch cushions,
feet dangling. We swayed a little
as my father pictured a surgeon
cutting open our mother’s belly
to look for something unwanted,
growing wild. That Sunday
turned more serious than a sermon
when he said she might never
come home again. That year,
even after we were given benign
a word we would never forget,
the sky seemed heavier, the air
cooler than sweater weather.
The leaves fell earlier around the place
my mother scattered stale bread
torn into cubes as food for the cardinals
and sparrows and jays that had given up
any hope of being fed in her absence.
When she returned, a hobbling shrunken
woman holding her side in pain,
she looked only something like our mother.
Confined to the second floor and far
from the kitchen, her slippers shuffled
with each small painful step.
Downstairs the women of the church
circles rang the doorbell daily.
In their short wool coats and headscarves
they brought bread and Mason jars,
one with the fat of homemade vegetable
soup congealed on top of its cold jar,
and another with the pungence of curry
escaping even the jar’s red rubber ring,
sealing forever in memory absence
as fragrant as it was foreign.
Matisse Picasso
Fountains silent in a year
too far gone for the rushing
water of summer pools,
the Paris sky heavy
with drizzle and mist
on our expectant faces.
We wait in a queue
on the steps of the palace
with the others to find
what passed between them.
To find myth revealed
in the line of a rosy nude,
in blue on blue. How easy
to love the graceful curve
of hip or breast. To love
the way works are hung
in pairs, patterns that repeat.
The way they give up
their essence until slats
of shutters become
the metal strings of a guitar.