Poetry |

“Misery” and “Cat’s Paws”

Misery

 

Undramatic demonstration

the cops the clergy the professors having consulted together beforehand

so when we’d held up traffic long enough

the police politely handcuffed

the designated front-row dissidents

 

who politely stepped into the van. Motorcycles slowly blinking blue

pushed the rest of us up curbs; newsworthy it wasn’t.

 

I had been late for everything all day.

Right before the demo I took my amazing

step-mother-of-the-bride dress

to the Hong Kong tailor.

“These are way tight,” she remarked with perfect neutrality

when I got it on.

She was referring to the armholes.  I’ve known her for years.

Between her place and Harvard Square

I half-sprinted past a filthy, matted man

 

bent and gesturing

like a grotesque on a cathedral, high up.

“There they are,” he screamed, waving towards the Square.

“The ding-bats.  What do the ding-bats want now?”

I had just passed the fine Old Burial Ground

with its plain slate scallop-shouldered headstones.

 

“Aqui. Estamos. Y No. Nos. Vamos,” we chanted

in the late September light.  We took wide-format photos of each other

standing firm; but I’ve never looked at mine again

and never will.  Somewhere between the tiny graveyard from the past

and the gleaming CVS, I was stunned

 

by someone’s screaming misery.

His hatred was the headline of the day.

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Cat’s Paws

 

1.

 

Patterns on the water; little lines

the wind might get some purchase on

or not

 

slight sensations

in the flesh

 

that might or might not build

into coming or sneezing.

 

Ceci n’est pas une pipe

wrote Magritte

beneath a pipe

 

and, one does feel, writing,

sometimes,

this is not a poem

 

just some fleeing little thing

you might or might not some day wish

you could remember where

you put.

 

 

2.

 

Then sometimes the wind persists

enough to raise the cat’s paws into waves;

nothing you’d see on TV

 

but still

real waves, with measurable peaks and troughs.

No one sucks

 

on the pipe’s brown stem

but the cut leaves in its bowl glow

red; and smoke spirals up.

 

It doesn’t matter if the poem pleases

others.  Take a bow

as after three or four successful sneezes.

Contributor
Linda Bamber

Linda Bamber is a fiction writer, poet, essayist, and Professor of English at Tufts University. Her recent fiction collection, Taking What I Like and her poetry collection, Metropolitan Tang were published by David R. Godine, Publisher. Widely reprinted and anthologized, her critical book on Shakespeare, Comic Women, Tragic Men: Gender and Genre in Shakespeare, was published by Stanford University Press. She is currently writing a novella based on the cross-country expedition of Lewis and Clark.

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