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2004 PUSHCART NOMINATIONS
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April Ossmann
April Ossmann has published her
poetry in numerous journals including Harvard Review and
Colorado Review, and in the anthologies Contemporary Poetry
of New
England, and The Maine Poets: An Anthology of Verse.
She won the Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award for ten
poems published in the Summer 2000 issue. She is Director of
Alice James Books, and has taught creative writing and
literature courses at Lebanon College and at the University of Maine
at Farmington.
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Stupid
Injuries are, mostly. There's that
moment, lucid and still
as a Sunday in June, when you know—
but do it anyway, like running
in rain down steep trails whose
paths are a jumble of roots and rocks—
like grabbing the wire just
now getting caught in the mower's
whirling blade. Later, nursing your
cut, break or sprain, you'll
remember it and curse yourself.
Or consider lust: my body's got
no more sense than a bitch in heat.
She'd just as soon roll over for a bookie
as a banker--or a good-sized mongrel.
And how about decisions?
Based on some imaginary future
which neither you nor I
have the wisdom to imagine
correctly. And then more decisions
based on decisions based
on false imaginary futures.
And intelligence? Dimmest bulb
in the building—I mean, it thinks it's smart,
thinks it can decide who to love and
whether or not to bed the ex
boyfriend. The truth is, intelligence
thought lust made the decision
which caused the injuries,
but it was stupid all the time.
Beau Geste
A prayer answered, it's the kind of gesture calculated
to sweep a woman off her feet—the gallantry
of scooping me up to carry over last winter's misplaced snowbank.
All my life I've waited for Prince Charming, so what's the fly
in this ointment? You've achieved a suave seen only in films:
climbing down your favorite perpendicular slope, you do it, you said,
for the challenge, the reverence—and the reward—punctuating "reward"
with a lingering kiss on my knee, the beauty of the gesture so subtle
I didn't realize it till we'd hiked another mile down the mountain.
And now this grand gesture: flying me to Switzerland to stay
in your family chalet. This feeling I've fallen into a fairy tale
I hope I never wake from—what's left to happen but a marriage
proposal or an affair to set heaven afire? We sleep together
for a week without touching, and I begin to wish you'd revere me
a little less. This morning outside Zurich, I rise alone
in the dim calm of three a.m. to shower, and returning, catch
you in the gold glow of the bedroom lamp doing shirtless push-ups
you interrupt for a bare-chested hug. Watching myself caught
in one of those new-age ads for women's perfume, where the woman
is clothed and the man half-nude, I could have died
happy with anticipation then, and maybe should have.
Of course, we couldn't hold that frame or stop
the action: you drove me to the Zurich airport, like Casablanca,
while the pitch-dark morning pressed against the windows.
If we had children, you said, they'd have large hands. You kissed mine
while I nodded, while our small talk made a little fog in the car.
At the
Northern Star Cafe
"To-go-for-here,"
one of the two
attendants asks,
a proposition almost
entirely of prepositions,
lacking any action save intent.
For him it's a matter
purely mechanical, for her,
a psychological study—
or mind-preserving game
as her fingers hover
over the keyboard:
"To go?" "For here?"
"To go, or for here?"
A clipped, contemporary
call and response
backed by the beat
of the slamming drawer.
She reads each
voice, each tense
or consciously
patient posture,
determining each
level of impatience,
the shifting or stillness
of weight, near
or distant focus, or disfocus.
An indecisive "to go"
scans the cafe as if
there were no time
or space—as if
time and space weren't all
we have, while the snow
melts in dirty puddles
around every boot:
black squares highlight
puddled, dried salt,
the white squares, sand—
even "for heres"
are impatient with the line,
they too have to go
even if it's only to a brief
seat in this cafe. Sun blazons
through the wide windows,
slicing my faux black
marble table edge;
lighting half my page
so I must maneuver continually
the unread blinding half
into shadow, where I hope
to make some sense of it
under the sharp clatter
of cutlery, cups and plates,
the espresso maker's
high-pitched, hollow eruptions,
shouted conversations'
competing, atonal symphony—
confidences leaned deeply
into, the numbing
"white noise" inviting
all our mild intimations,
our crossed legs'
prevarications—no,
I'm not the only actor here—
and not one of us
is not feigning leisure.
Poems © April Ossmann 2004. All
rights reserved, |
