Sample Poems by S. Beth Bishop
Orientation
No map, you understand. Where water seeps, it isn't
blue. Imagine Morning drags her feet, leaves a gilded
trail. Her dress is wet. Her tongue swells. Make the best
of what she says, for she is short of phrase, without gesture,
and resigned. There may be a sense of land, but it is only
a sense, an as if, as though ground were just what kept us
from falling further. Imagining a map won't set the curve,
won't turn sand to grass, brown to green, or sprout sweet bean
flowers out of sour alfalfa. Words run down from earth to holes
in earth and freeze there. Yes, no way from here to here. Even
where water might be blue, it never is. We have to guess where
never waits, and whether there is any always left after our light
gestures burn away like dew. Morning drags her tail, turning
animal, just as we become land again, ourselves. No maps. You
understand. Wet guesses. Guilt in our steps. It's best to imagine.
Zero Wife
From a Hand-Painted Roadside Sign
I Need
Employment
16 Years Same Job
Phone # 555-8794
3 Kids
2 Dogs
0 Wife
Great References
he keeps
bitter books b/c
16 tons & what did he get but
lost in these #'s + symbols
4 what might what's owed
some 1 solid who's left
2 shoulder: all
this world or nothing
she trades
them down, circle for circle
sixteen generations wide
like the rings of a tree slipping
wasted hours around her neck
haloes of tarnished light
metal falls with the echo
that devours the vowels of our names
Caretaker
I do the outside first. These hours
of daylight are precious with the season,
and the grotto birds need so much seed.
Smog-darkened, cracking statuaries
seem to melt in rain like sugar skulls.
The fig wasps buzz and mate, making sticky
threats of home up under the eaves.
My list of chores gets written over, every morning.
I interrupt sometimes. I confess I'm no better
than the rest at wanting some attention. Maybe, yes,
there's wine enough for one more mass,
and the broom has an inch of good straw left.
But He is always on His knees, or worse--still-struck,
bent over at the waist, His candle smoking, long past its wick.
He'd pass entire days in here revising plans, the iron
gate in rusty handfuls thinning away. Red clay mud
would take the sidewalks. Just think of the delicate lace,
the white gloves ruined, all those confirmations soiled,
and yards of dead grass stumping up around the graves,
while whole worlds of ants, termites, and centipedes wait
just to slip through the gaps in these drafty doorframes.
Someone has to keep it clean, get prepared. But who
has the time? I spin thread for hours to stitch a single hem,
cut a rick of wood before supper. My small kind
of work is of less consequence every day, no real food
for a revolution. Forward-eyed and smart as stones, the future
marches back in one long row. And it's not for succor
they come anymore, the hungry young, their disappointed dead.