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Anna Evans
four poems
My Father, The Icon
You, the wizard,
gave me Tolkien
when I was eight.
I read it through.
You, the sage,
quoted Catullus in Latin,
and Molière in French.
I learned to speak
those tongues for you,
spoke them with you.
You, the king,
sang Greensleeves
in your clear baritone.
I wanted to be your princess,
your counterpoint.
You, the legend,
spoke in the voices
of Kipling and Keats,
Eliot and Tennyson.
Some people call me a poet.
Daddy, are you listening?
Can I read you something?
Are you proud of me yet?
Anger
Your eyes slide away
from my gutter-glass skin.
It cannot cut you - I have annealed
my sharp edges with chemicals,
but you fear your face
reflected among the used syringes.
Your proper-looking wife
has resentment stuck in her throat:
the reason she eats only soy
and gagged at the suggestion
I know you made to her
before you came searching for me.
Now in this alleyway
you unzip your righteousness
so I can gaze upon your rage
and swallow it whole.
How Not to Drown
She entered his skin
clean as a high diver.
Ripples spread invisibly beneath
the smooth surface.
But she was always moving
toward him underwater
while her mouth garbled
words into bubbles.
When her feet touched bottom
her knees creased beneath her
and she sprang back up,
aiming for air.
She left his life
scrabbling for the bank,
her crab fingers grabbing at her chest,
strapped for breath.
And the last thing she said
was the first he heard clearly:
We were always
out of our depth.
On Sending Her Younger Child
To Kindergarten
Her eyes travel down the schoolhouse road
the way her husband’s gaze swivels
toward Dunleavy’s on Route 38. Her dry mouth
has emptied itself of her five-year-old’s name.
The weekday afternoons are a hundred
dusty boxes she must sort through alone.
One of them holds the clothes
she packed flat eight years ago.
The dated suits and dresses smell
of mothballs; she cannot imagine
this wardrobe working.
She puts them back, tapes the flap shut
and stacks the carton alongside
those stuffed with crib toys and picture books.
Others slide sideways so easily
they must contain nothing. She refuses
to fill them by re-seeding her womb.
In the silent house, she clears a space
for herself, and begins to write.
©Anna Evans 2005
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