Verdad Magazine Volume 23
Spring 2018, Volume 24
Poetry by Robert Rothman
Wisp
Food won’t stick to my bones
she says, the woman’s figure
whittled down to girlish stick;
eighty-nine year old eyes
bright shine, tell it like a joke.
Only the Kentucky drawl,
smoky thick, tastes of aging.
She has spread out her hair
flat across her head: dried hay
not covering the ground
gone gray, given sun color
each week. I never gave her
that bottle of bourbon. I won’t
see her again next month.
Die Hard!
Like a flame buffeted by
cold wind from all sides, each
shot of air striking
at the narrow flickering
William Inglis hit by
four-pound grapeshot through
the neck into shoulder
into back bleeding a fountain
of red, staggering, refusing
to withdraw, retreat, through clenched teeth
repeated “die hard, fifty-seventh
die hard,” held against the French
in a war long forgotten; only
those words survive, mouthed by you
lifting up a body worn down
in long campaign against
an overwhelming unrelenting
foe inside that sweet sac
where so much pleasure was
where I was shot into being
where the darkness covered you.
Diptych
Like a man who has heard everything to come out
of his mouth before drags himself to the ocean into
the forty-eight-degree water, his skin burning with
the cold, heart jumping out of chest as dragged under
by the waves, pinned in the swirl of sand and foam
stumbling to shore, teeth chattering in the air
salt-flecked face and body whetted full of new words.
•
Like a woman finished with birthing mothering wifeing
her beauty burnished to magenta-indigo-garnet of
western sky before dusk falls, what purpose these
legs fingers lips belly mind soil rich root deep not
yet through bearing progeny a goddess, self
impregnated swelling in the Indian summer, ripe
fruit as sweet and bitter as the jeweled pomegranate.
In the Abundance
You will have them all: those, shiny jagged,
others strangely rectangular, though nothing
of pure geometry exists here; piecing
into the moment, into the jigsaw, out of
your mouth as if giving birth, harbinger, like
an arrow pointing, tensed from pink wetness
of throat, notched on tongue, let loose
in the exhalation of breath, eyes following
into the future, birds at dusk winging toward
west. They will come almost unbidden, as if
longtime waiting, as if nested in the thatch
of slender branches, swaying in the humid
air, worded to occasion. Juvenescence
when the skipping and hopscotch of
laughter at the meadows green to blinding
thigh deep, sprigged with dandelions
stitched like yellow thread, a garland a carol
of singing at such day. Wherefrom and how
given, like mother’s milk into the hungry mouth
to nourish, sustain and contain through the flood
and drought. Madness never far away, hovering
like a bird of prey, waiting for the word to not come
and circuits all stop into the deadening. Given for
all circumstance and becomings. Calamity, the word
almost archaic, descending upon, biblical in the uprooting
and scattering, you a field of devastation, the charred remains as
after a forest fire when nothing left except the heat, the crack of
dead branches and bared expanse. A calm inside the
calamity, a still point of new, surveying what is now. And
then the strangest, an amity: a peacemaking, an accord, the
anger and blame at what had befallen, gone into the pained
new green first sprouting that comes after the rains falling
and falling. Search into the crevices of brain, the resilient
muscle of ventricles and atriums for that word; only mercy will do.
BIO: Robert Rothman lives in Northern California. His work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, The Alembic, Existere, the Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Westview, Willow Review. http:// www.robertrothmanpoet.com.