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Elizabeth Tibbetts
Elizabeth Tibbetts' book In the Well won
the 2002 Bluestem Poetry Award and was published in 2003 by Bluestem
Press (Emporia State University, Kansas). Her chapbook Perfect
Selves, was published by Oyster River Press as part of the Walking
to Windward series of New England poets in 2001.
Her awards include: a 2003 Maine Arts Commission Award in poetry,
The Penobscot Poetry Prize, Martin Dibner Fellowship, St. Botolph
Club Foundation Fellowship, Paumanok Prize (runner-up), and
residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Ragdale, and Escape to Create.
Her work has been nominated three times for Pushcart.
Her work has appeared in journals, which include: The American
Scholar, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, Prairie
Schooner, and The Spoon River Poetry Review. Her poems
have also appeared in The Art of Maine in Winter (Down East
Books), and The Maine Poets (Down East Books).
Elizabeth lives in Maine, where her family has been settled for
generations. She works as a nurse.
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Near Dark
At the bread baker's party the forty
and fifty-year olds boogie and wag
their butts, the piano and drums pulling
them on until everyone's wet and grinning
like dogs eating bees. Never mind how much
trouble tequila has coupled in the past--
tonight, it lays its glimmer and greases
stiff knees and hips, bringing a slow, sweet
drunkenness that suddenly thickens
like pudding over a flame. We remain just
shy of falling down. Downstairs there are
pockets of earnest conversation:
the Bosnian woman who stopped shaking
thanks to acupuncture, how our bodies
soften around our burning core,
the weight of long marriage. There are a few
newcomers with the old crowd, eased into
the scene with Margaritas or a smoke.
It's raining (just dusk at nine--still summer)
but the smokers sit outside beneath a tarp
with cigarettes flickering like insects
in the fading light. In the space beneath
music and talk the sound of rain fills
the woods until the ferns and underbrush
shine, illuminated in the near-dark
with what seems an impossible green.
Caught Shopping
It happens every year at this time.
I turn from the cash register
with my purchases, and the windows
are resplendent with sky, and when I
step outside the December air, not yet
freezing, but teasing the thermometer
down, kisses my cheeks.
Oh, the sky
is so bloody with sunset I should drop
to my knees and ask to be forgiven
again because I’ve been shopping,
caught by the seduction of fabric
slipping between my fingers, light
refracting in a wine glass, wicker boxes
(oh, so natural) that promise organization,
the illusion that everything’s in its place
and all’s right with the world.
Though,
of course, it’s not, as the western sky
attests. As I well know standing on this
asphalt board game: a monopoly
of box stores and crayon-colored cars,
this hilltop which was once a high field,
before that, forest. Hard to imagine
what comes next.
And yet glory
fills my imperfect self and others who stop
and look up. Because the sky is huge,
smeared with eggplant and pomegranate,
persimmons, and, of course, dark
venous and bright arterial blood,
and is changing so quickly it seems
to ripple like the embroidered gown
of a striding, Godly, burning being,
I’d follow anywhere.
What do I have
to give You? For I’m just a woman
with a bag of white, 250-count,
cotton sheets I thought I needed, who is
writing this same poem for You, year
after year as you deepen, as lights
blink on in the small city below us.
Poems © Elizabeth Tibbetts 2004. All
rights reserved. |
