Second Place Winner, August 2002 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, August 2002

SCENE AT ITHACA
T. Birch
(The Critical Poet)

i.
Alone at the loom,
she has no helpful attendants
dressed in bright colored fabrics,

no voices chirping
sweet, utter nonsense.

Only a loom, battered and shining
with the oil from her hands,
and the smell of raw wool
that is constantly present.

ii.
Each day, she weaves the threads,
her beautiful reds, the rib ache of her blues
and her purples, gold, silver, and ochre,
and the rust brown that comes
from small cuts on her fingers.

iii.
Each night, as colors fade in the torchlight,
she devastates her handiwork

with meticulous care, reassembles the wool
into skeins for her morning’s work.

iv.
She prays to the gods at sunrise
to stop the weaving,
shatter the loom, burn its wood,
send the room up in the flames,

allow her to dance circling the heat
of its yellows and oranges
and the gray ashes before her,

feeding the fire’s insatiable appetite,
burning her reason,
pungent as incense.

v.
At sunset she pleads again
for the sweet paralysis of apathy,
to let her creation evolve out of its misery.
To say: I am finished. To say: It is done.

To shout to the hangers on,
the myriad drunken men:

Here’s the damned tapestry!

vi.
The gods do not answer (when have they ever?)
and she is compelled to follow their litany,
a slave to a plot
to make her their sacrifice.

vii.
She imagines the poet’s voice,

the tale teller’s eyes looking at empty space,
wonders why he takes delight
in her monotony?
Over and under,

under and through, day
after night after day
the same light,
the same pinpricks of stars
in the night mocking her.

viii.
It is not the husband she wants --
husbands are failures.

And she cannot remember him
even to fantasize, even in the poet’s mind
he is dead to her, dead as the dried husk of her sex,
her menopausal seizures,

dead as leaves on the olive trees
in winter’s cold atmosphere,

dead as her breasts
that point to her stone floor.

ix.
In her deepest thought, discovered over and over,
she dreams
of her son as her savior.
The warmth of a boy’s skin,
the curve of his hips in her hands,
his face hairless and smooth without razors,
the sweet odor of breath when he speaks, his eyes, the pout
of his lips, his kiss on her shoulder.
These are her treasures.

x.
A son is all to a mother,
dependent and rescuer.

She wants him beside her
naked and pure,
to bruise his flesh into hers,
drench herself in his lather.

Wants to raise up a new king for the throne,
depose her absent deceiver;

escape the shame of her nightly dementia.

xi.
But this is impossible,
she knows her son
is no monster,

it isn’t the woman he wants,
only the myth of a mother.

Merest boy, passively loyal, not the wolf
she desires,

and she is their savior,
she barters for time, barters
with suitors,
to save her own bastards.

xii.
The poet is another man
to bargain with, another man
with a future

where she is a stage prop,
a mere part of the chorus of praise for masculine sagas.

xiii.
She would
be a killer, plot murders, hatch schemes
that billow in scarlet, dry into rust
in the dirt at her feet,

coagulate as her choices.
Instead,
she waits to hear

xiv.
The birds sing the same songs each day,
the old dog moans in his sleep
each night the same,

teeth stained and weak
unable to chew bones, unable to rest peacefully.

xv.
It is madness, this
weaving, unweaving her tapestry.

She curses her son, her name,
the old dog as it sleeps.

Curses her odyssey.

Judge Christine Reed’s comment: “This poem uses many colors to weave a loom within a loom... each layer delving deeper into the story. There are many levels here, sense-popping emotion and dangerous truth that is not afraid to be told. The length keeps you lingering in the weaver’s world, the short lines bring you through it cohesively.”