Today is Peggy’s birthday. She died in 2021 at the age of 100 years, 100 days. I thought to celebrate her today with some poems she wrote in her last few years. She was still in her prime.
She published three books of poetry in her last four years.
The first are love poems expressing the immensity of our love. The poem set in
Prague is her imagining from a simple postcard I had found. The final poem is taken
from her book about movies.
I had intended to go through each book picking out lines
here and there. I never got past page two.
Excerpts from Two Is A Sacred Number (age 96)
In the flourish of each day’s evolution
nights shine, illumined, to welcome this enormity
even as we sleep.
Our love lives in a cup
of double yesterday
in diamond disbelief.
Your hand on the open book
Its intimate otherness
rouse lingonberry mornings
and scaloppini nights.
From Exact Approximation (age 97)
Almost Vermeer, Prague
In the half-light of a window
she scrapes potatoes.
A bucket and a bowl
bear testament.
Silence hovers, black and white.
Longing pulls, a quivering
String without a name.
She wants what can’t fall off the edge,
What rises from the bone.
If it should rain, the view
refuses to be music.
Pass your plate, she says
As desire turns to grace.
This Work
…. She tells him now in the kitchen light
How the cellar bulges its walls with dried roots,
How her tangled hair in bed at night
wires her to his dreams, his father’s ax
against the juniper, where she can’t reach,
where he can’t bleed
it into sound.
The stripped-down sacrifice of
trees.
Better In The Dark
(age 97)
Justine
,,,,, Hot, the world is hot
and everything appears disguised. Wooden boxes
lettered sewing machines, hold automatic rifles.
Holiness hangs, a dry rag in the desert. The young man
surrenders to the married woman, ignores
the shattered glass, four oval mirrors
A masquerade. a bacchanal in velvet red.
The woman, once dressed in white, now shifts to black.
This may be what it seems. Would the camera lie?
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