Sample Poems by Janet Smith
What I Learned
Mount Conness flared with ice.
A single cloud traveled the sky. The creek
flashed with small mirrors. Columbine
and penstemon burned like candles.
Grass, spring snowbanks, winter-bent saplings,
clouds, willows, ouzels floated
toward me. The light grasped every-
thing, warmed sap, vein, roots, then divided
the ground—dark and bright.
In college they taught us the mountains
are dead. That’s when the sky begin to lose
pieces of itself. I sat in rooms.
I believed in books and long
educations; arguments squatted
at the center of the universe.
The old self died; I didn’t notice.
A dog snapped at the moonlight.
I shed my animal body, assumed another.
So, I had not expected this again:
a breathing soft and close, a wordless
reason. What I felt reached
into my brain, showed its true
disguise, made me its companion,
had me love it again.
I knew the theories, but the world walked
toward me anyway. “It’s beautiful.”
That is an argument.
I got down on my knees.
You Are Invited
This time you’ll get
the rubber-band gun your
mother claimed was dangerous.
There will be bakery cake
with a volcano and a hula dancer on top.
The punch will be red and sweet enough
to hurt your gums.
No one will care if you spill it on your dress.
Your parents won’t fight about money
in front of your friends.
The sun will stay out.
Everyone will be allowed to use the Slip ‘n’ Slide.
No one will break an arm.
Your best friend won’t have to go home early.
A man with a mustache and white gloves
will perform card tricks.
He won’t goof them up.
Your dad will barbeque hot dogs
without discussing nitrates.
He won’t call them wieners in front of your friends.
A piñata in the shape of a clipper ship
is hung where the chandelier used to be.
You will be allowed to swing at it with a baseball bat.
In the garage, the acrobats are practicing their leaps.
A small petting zoo is setting up.
Your mother has arranged games of skill and chance;
it’s just like the midway she wouldn’t let you enter.
Later, the fortune teller will read palms.
She has already told your parents
you’ll be a famous writer.
No one loses a tooth; no one cries.
A note that says I LOVE YOU will be
slipped into your hand.
There will be no pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.
Everyone is allowed to sleep over.
When you blow out the candles,
you’ll get one wish.
It will really come true.
You can have a quarter horse stabled
in the storage shed. Your parents
will stop hating each other.
You will learn to be a sword swallower.
The Unfixable
The empty spice rack on the kitchen
wall. For decoration. Moved from
house to apartment to house. Three
states. She only uses Mrs. Dash and salt.
Dad pokes his pork chop with his
fork. It has committed some offense.
Her eyes never rest on my face.
It is one more job undone, and she
is tired. Her hands glow with work
underpaid, cooling in her lap, swollen
and fixed. Except the thumbs, which spin
like hamsters on a wheel inside a cage.
Not knowing what we need from each
other, we send distress signals across the
front room. “Your father is going senile.”
“Why don’t you try reading again?” “Is that
a new mole on your neck?“ Dad complains
just out of hearing. The TV is on.
“No more roses,” she said, “I’m always
having to water them.“ Nothing I can
buy her. She dusts with dad’s old underwear.
She says again, “You never wanted to be
held.“ I recall my closet, the stiff bloom
of dresses, rick-racked, collared, bowed.
With the hankie tucked inside her sleeve,
she would improve me. Wipe the some-
thing off my face. “You want your children
to be perfect,“ she says. I agree, not having
had any. I fixed my teeth, my hair, my face.
Our loneliness is to improve each other.
The Stranger
My mother told me stories:
the man with candy or a puppy,
the car with no door handles,
the trunk, the locked closet.
I wanted my body to be made
of clouds or grass or branches,
unseen, unsexed, vanished
into daylight on command.
Instead, it bloomed in blood,
grew small, hard breasts,
clamped me into womanhood.
Men called me young lady.
Ten suns sank in me;
no one seemed surprised.
Cross your legs, close your
mouth, watch yourself.
I swam beneath the surface,
learned how to breathe
so slowly I scarcely made
a ripple or a bubble.
When the stranger’s car arrived
in the church parking lot,
innocent as the ice cream truck,
his glasses reflected the sky.
He smiled. He’d always known
me. He said the usual words,
as one hand writhed around the
cock. He pulled my hand toward him.
A small, sleepless fish
flopped over in my belly.
It was just as I’d been told:
the need, the fear, the hate together.
The earth cracked apart
I stood on one side, separate.
When he was finished,
he mumbled, thank you.
Here was a body, here a
brain and heart. That was
the problem. The stranger
dropped my hand, drove off.
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