Your Sunday Poem

This by a wonderful poet, Erin Belieu, from her 2006 collection, "Black Box."

"Last Trip to the Island"

You're mad that I can't love the ocean,

but I've come to this world landlocked
and some bodies feel permanently strange.
Like any foreign language, study it too late and
it never sticks.  Anyway,

we're here aren't we? --
trudging up the sand, the water churning
its constant horny noise, an openmouthed heavy

breathing made more unnerving by
the presence of all these families, the toddlers

with their chapped bottoms, the fathers
in gigantic trunks spreading out their dopey
circus-colored gear.

How can anyone relax
near something so worked up all the time?

I know the ocean is glamorous,
but the hypnosis, the dilated pull of it, feels
impossible to resist.  And what better reason to
resist?  I'm most comfortable in

a field, a yellow-eared patch
of cereal, whose quiet rustling argues for
the underrated valor of discretion.

And above this, I admire a certain quality of
sky, like an older woman who wears her jewels with
an air of distance, that is, lightly,
with the right attitude.  Unlike your ocean,

there's nothing sneaky about a field.  I like their
ugly-girl frankness.  I like that, sitting in the dirt,

I can hear what's coming between the stalks.

Your Sunday Poem

This from the newest work, "Black Box," by Erin Belieu.  It's out in very affordable paperback, published by Copper Canyon Press and you can pick up a copy at your nearest independent or dependent bookstore.  Support a poet today; buy their books!

After Reading That the Milky Way 
Is Devouring the Galaxy of Sagittarius 

              at the Dorthy B. Oven Park  

I'm certain Mrs. Oven
meant to be nice
when she bequeathed that everything
in her garden should be nice
forever.  This explains

one version of paradise:
the tiny gazebo with fluted
piecrust for a roof, the footbridge
spanning a tinkly stream
small enough to step over.
Even this snail drags

an irridescent skid mark
around the fountain's marble
lip.  His shell is an enormous
earring like the ones my mother
wore to prom in 1957,
that large, that optimistic.
And because we're never alone
in paradise, my son is here.
He's stolen a silver balloon from
the wedding party posing for
photos before a copse of live oaks,
the trees shawled in moss like
hand-tatted mantillas.  Secretly,

I applaud his thievery.  And
the bride as well, looking five months
gone, I guess, wearing Mouseketeer
ears with her stupendous gown.
Good for her.  Best to keep

two hands on your sense of humor.
Best to ignore those other worlds
exploding, how violently, how
quietly, they come and go.

                         for Andrew Epstein