Three Poems
by Angele Ellis
Grand Canyon
I stand at the lip of my life
as I once stood at the rim
of the Grand Canyon.
Battered beauty of erosion,
bands of descending color
forced by wind and water.
From this distance, the fierce
author-river is a stream—
something I might admire
in a Japanese garden, purling
under an arched footbridge.
Doing nothing is doing something,
you said when grief had broken.
I need a ropewalker’s view
of this monument, a wire stringing
tense ether, the illusion that I
could go on forever, walking on air.
Feast of the Epiphany
With a shot silk sun yellow Indian scarf,
I draw my bedroom curtain for the cat.
The porch roof dazzles, a sheet of opal,
glinting fireblue and gold.
Chimneys like black chess rooks
push against the white horizon.
(so much depends
upon
a red bird
feeder
glazed with ice
beside the gray
wrens.)
In a stripe of brightness, the cat dozes,
the insides of his ears glowing like conch shells,
his crossed pink paws twitching for benediction.
Greetings from West Virginia
When you were a toddler in Glendale,
fixing snowflakes with your dark myopic stare,
I was a wedding guest in St. Joseph's Cathedral,
watching bridesmaids sashay in tartan taffeta.
Each clutched one poinsettia, a poisonous taper.
The Wheeling groom had cut his hair, stopped
slipping spices from Kroger's into anarchic pockets,
gone to law school. He wasn’t the one snorting coke
at Pitt’s Barristers Ball, as a cheap band stuttered
its way through Muzak Devo—
Try to detect it. It’s not too late. To whip it.
When you were nine, past the age of reasoning
that the world was evil, I was taking hairpin turns
to Hillsboro, blessing Senator Byrd for paving,
cursing my weak stomach. Below dense trees,
tin roofs glowed like drive-in movie screens.
My husband and I stayed at a farmhouse B & B
guarded by six pampered strays and a swirl of photographs
of the Rainbow Family, Hippie Renaissance Faire.
He insisted on hiking sunken railroad tracks to Denmar,
the old Colored Tuberculosis Sanitarium, destined
to become another prison. I admitted the fall foliage
was glorious—flaming torches in the fearsome night.
When you were twenty, you wrote: Any schmoozer
can light a candle. We have left West Virginia behind.
But in dream states, my wayward son, the white lines
cross and blur. Last summer on Roup Avenue,
we fired logs in a steel dish in your lost yard
with rag bag shirts, splintered twigs, crumpled poems.
Sounding our yawp above our half-tamed world,
we stamped out errant sparks in tough city grass,
watching as shadows changed our faces.
© 2010 Angele Ellis
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