Peggy’s Poetry

To celebrate May 2^nd, the birthday of my late wife, Peggy, I thought I'd offer some excerpts from her poetry onto this page. She wrote from her own singular perch. Her language startles with its disparate leaps over a vast inscape. Well into her nineties, she was writing a poem every day with over 150 published in literary journals. Peggy's poetry was an extension of her irrepressible appetite for life, how she met each day with exuberance, gratitude and love.

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He sees her face half shadowed tilted upward / in the curve of promise, smooth as an early apricot. / He will marry her and plant skyscrapers in their backyard. 

If there is champagne enough / let's give another hoist to the boy / who laughs at the tired shadows on the wall / and paints his reckless masterpiece / with no further expectations.

The sound of blues, not my own / but the low-down songs of women. Love stirs my coffee / the velvet of Yes / A white horse gallops. 

Her fingers trace highways along his arm / In a moment there will be wings, a blue heron / He moves in her direction / as though singing were a map.

Arithmetic leads to ultimate divisions / land mass under water / Yet a boy paddles a bark canoe / confident of the current.

This hiding in the tunnel of myself / denies the chairs their rightful place. Light through the window creates a momentary event / shadows in a drift toward after.

The man I meet on page 125 is now in pieces. / The mirror slants but will not lie / I would prefer to wander the streets of Paris with the artist /despite the chill.

In the hum of murmurations / every bird adjusts astonished air / Clouds contort, these mindless wheels / in the world without allegiance / Horses, round-rumped, dare me to look away.

Women survived in the dark, like feet in pinching shoes until / they turn from Molly Barnacle’s, yes to / Bartleby’s, I prefer not.

The sky bends with the hawk / you answer, your words like water … / and then, the ocean, the wedge / partial like us. / Your look rests on the curve of my cheek.

Can these days really be winter / with your words that match / the fingers as you touch / what you know of me / and even what you don’t?

Everyone looks out the window / wondering if the headlines / move the earth or what / brings hot lentils to the table.

Death has no et cetera / I borrow a motley palette from myself / The canvas will not stretch. / Still-life does not hold still. / Blue oranges turn to mauve, turn to gray. / Unfamiliar music enters the room. (A Mother’s Lament)

As the self pledges its allegiance / to a tidiness of napkins on the table / we stir the gibbous moon into our cups.

The flap of disappearing wings through the open window / This day was for sleep, the accuracy of dreams / closer to words on the notebook’s page / the loss of love.   (for Elizabeth Bishop).

The woman at the piano wears a hat. / His black trousers hold his impatience. / It is 1891, a coachman with tired horses knocks. / At the opera, singers will break the air. / She thinks of his mouth, the taste of wildwood cherries / yet, returning, knives hang in the clock.

Breakfast on the balcony / unlike the insistent birds I wouldn’t interrupt / your timbered voice carrying its sex / filling me with all I know and cannot know of you.

I watched them talk at Sunday supper / My uncle had lost his thunder into buttered toast / waiting for events that already happened / My eyes fixed on the enameled porcelain table / its corner nicked to black. (After the market crash, 1929)

My knees need grease / but the mellow sax delivers me from evil. / Growing old is a privilege, faith / its own vehicle, even as the cab keeps its motor running / and the eucalyptus tree bends lower every year.

Inspiration is drawn to pushy tides / away from headlines and oratory / she hears instead an empty glass on wood / shivers her to what lies below/ Images find their words in the telling, / A cold stone appears in her hand.

I wear the enamel pendant for the shy unsaid / A woman in Japan looks through a rim of tears / He has not gone far, but away / still, she will not say to him / “These days remove me from myself” / her mouth, thick with silence.

For me, a bite of crusty bread / its center soft, a little sour. / Just yesterday you told me / that my love of pan rests in the middle of companion / break bread indeed with the taste of your touch.

Words proclaim the sacred in the unlit candle, / a chipped cup in the sink / This holiness isn't waiting for Godot.

In the airport fog, under his slouched hat, there is Rick / deciding for teary Ilsa, that for them / the slings and arrows might only amount to a hill of beans / and Paradise lost was just as good as Paris regained.